Water Storage

The City of Camrose maintains three water reservoirs with a total storage capacity of approximately 25 million litres to meet the City's water requirements. The City stores water for three reasons:

1. Service storage is used to compensate for the normal fluctuations in water demand attributed to the daily operation of the water system. The Water Treatment Plant produces treated water at a constant rate, day and night. The reservoir levels rise at night when the city demand is low, and the levels go down during the day when demand is high. The City of Camrose requires approximately 25% of the maximum day flow (or 2.4 million litres) to be stored as service storage to compensate for this fluctuation.
2. Because fighting large fires consumes water much faster than the Water Treatment Plant can treat it, fire storage is required. Camrose needs a minimum of 4.5 million litres of fire storage. This is enough water to combat a shopping mall fire, which is the 'worst case' scenario for the City.
3. Emergency storage is required during situations when the water supply is interrupted due to power failures, machine breakdowns, pipeline failure or natural disasters. Camrose maintains 11 million litres of emergency storage, (approximately two days supply of water) as backup, should the treatment or supply system fail. Emergency plans are in place in the event of such a disaster to install temporary pumping to re-establish flow.

The smaller of the two reservoir sites is located on 50 Street and 37 Avenue, adjacent to the Water Treatment Plant. This site has one, 3.6 million-litre reservoir, which was constructed in 1966. It is an above ground concrete reservoir that drains by gravity into the adjoining pump station. It is primarily used as a backup facility. This facility will likely reach the end of its useful life, and will need to be replaced with a larger structure by 2010.

The primary reservoir site is located on 55 Street and 44 Avenue. At this site there are two underground storage tanks. The North tank (under the skateboard and basketball area) was constructed in 1983 and contains 9 million litres. The South tank (under the tennis courts) was constructed in 1992 and can hold 12.3 million litres.

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