MCIVERS — It may still be a good idea to be conservative about water use, but the hydrological woes of McIvers seem to have ebbed.
It has been a week now since the town has had to conduct scheduled shutoffs because its water supply had essentially run bone dry.
The water supply, located about 1.5 kilometres from the town, sits on Feeder Brook and had a new dam and reservoir constructed last summer.
The newfangled infrastructure was not much help, though, when the hot, dry summer conditions dried up Feeder Brook and its smaller tributaries earlier this summer.
In mid-July, a crew of volunteers checked out some of those smaller streams and cleared debris and sediment that had built up and was preventing water from flowing towards the reservoir. That measure worked for a couple of weeks until even that supply of water turned into a mere trickle again.
The town then resorted to shutting off water to residents and businesses for several hours at a time, allowing the reservoir to fill up. The water would then be turned back on until water pressure dropped to the point the system had to be shut down again.
A few rain showers last week was the first sign of relief and the heavier rains that fell overnight Sunday and into Monday were welcome sights for Mayor Warren Blanchard the rest of the folks in McIvers.
"Things have improved a whole lot since we started getting that rainfall," Blanchard said Tuesday afternoon. "Hopefully, we should be good for a long time."
The town did find a minor leak in a flushing line along the main line last week and repaired it, but Blanchard doesn't think it contributed to the low reservoir levels. The municipality also plans to give its new intake infrastructure another checking over to ensure there is no problem with that.
