While fire bans and dry weather have been a theme for southeast Saskatchewan to start off the spring, you can still walk outside and find people watering their lawns, kids having water gun fights, and people pulling out the pressure washer to give their car a rinse. While some places have had to start following their water conservation bylaws, Estevan is far from it.

"We get our source from Boundary Dam and there's plenty of water there right now," says Shane Buscis, the new Water Treatment Plant Manager in Estevan since late December. "In terms of the quality of water coming into the plant, there hasn't been anything to cause us to have an upset, to have to slow down."

Even though the warm temperatures have brought on an expected spike of water usage in the last while, there has been no trouble keeping up at the Treatment Plant.

"Rafferty was a little bit low but in terms of Boundary, they haven't said anything to me about it being even close to an issue."

While the water is still going to be flowing on lawns and backyards alike, many may be wondering about the quality of the water we have in Estevan. It was announced early on this year that a new water intake from Rafferty Dam is in the works to add an additional intake to the city. Right now, plans to move forward with the construction in the fall are still on schedule.

"We're putting out a request for a proposal coming in and we're hoping to start construction in September for the new well water intake."

Buscis went on to say that the construction of the new intake shouldn't affect the citizens of Estevan negatively at all.

"The nice thing about a new well water intake is it can be built without any destruction to our current system, because we're on a gravity feed from Boundary, that's going to be in place until literally we flip a switch and open the valve to a different water source."

Once that valve has been flipped, it should take about a month for the new clean water to cycle its way into the taps in your home. 

While the new intake from Rafferty is sure to help water quality, there's a few changes coming to the water tower in Estevan that's going to help with the same thing in our emergency supply.

"We will be putting in a new mixer into the water tower and into the reservoir, so we're hoping with it being so warm and putting mixers in that we can improve our water quality so we don't really get that water sitting for so long."

"We just got the new mixers in so I'm hoping within the next month we'll have them up and going depending on what happens, climbing up the water tower you have to make sure it's not too windy or raining or anything like that."