Editorial: Four Months and $772.50 for an Explanation That Should Have Been Offered
No contamination was confirmed in March. That's great news, but it isn't a plan. The plant ran short two units into spring run-off — and nothing says we'd be told any sooner next time.
EDITORIAL OPINION
Nothing in the record suggests Owen Sound’s drinking water made anyone sick during the boil water advisory in March.
That is the most important sentence in this editorial, so let’s be clear on that. There was no confirmed contamination. The City has maintained throughout that disinfection remained adequate, and nothing we have seen contradicts it.
But there is a difference between a good outcome and a good system.
On the evening of Saturday, March 14, the City issued a precautionary boil water advisory for everyone on the Owen Sound municipal water system — roughly 24,000 people, including parts of Meaford and Georgian Bluffs connected to the city’s supply. Elevated turbidity, or cloudiness, had been detected at the water treatment plant. Turbidity can interfere with disinfection.
It lasted until Monday afternoon.
For two and a half days, residents were told to boil their water before drinking it, brushing their teeth, making ice, washing produce or preparing food. Infants were to be sponge-bathed. Formula could not be made with tap water straight from the tap.
Restaurants and cafés made decisions on the fly with no timeline to plan against. Some closed and took the hit. Some stayed open and cut their menus, pulling coffee, fountain drinks and ice. Grocery stores sold out of bottled water as fast as it arrived. Social service agencies and volunteers moved water to shelters, apartment buildings and people who couldn’t easily get it themselves.
It happened over a weekend, in winter weather, while parts of the region were without power. That meant some households were being told to boil water they had no way to boil.
Some people didn’t know it was happening at all.
We reported at the time that restaurant owners were serving municipal water eighteen hours into the advisory, unaware an advisory had been issued.
During the advisory, the City acknowledged it has no system of its own to reach every resident directly, and pointed people to its website, social media and an email subscription list.
That was what we knew in March.
It seemed like something worth talking about as a community. Not because anyone was harmed (thankfully, no one was), but because of what was at stake if things had gone differently, and because of how much faith people are asked to place in a system they cannot see.
You turn the tap and assume it’s fine. That assumption is the whole product.
Yet we can see there were obvious gaps. Some people got the message in minutes. Others found out from a sign taped to a door, or a neighbour, or not at all until it was over.
And the explanation didn’t explain much.
The City said the plant was constrained by “infrastructure upgrades to redundant equipment” and by changing weather affecting raw water from Georgian Bay. Both of those things were true. Neither of them was surprising — and neither tells the whole story, either.
We have spring run-off every year. It’s a bay; we get ice. The plant sits on Georgian Bay and has since the 1960s. If the arrival of spring can put the city’s water supply under enough strain to trigger a boil water advisory, then the interesting question isn’t the weather. It’s what was different at the plant this time.
The word doing the most work in that public explanation was “redundant.” It suggests spare capacity — a backup, something the plant could comfortably do without.
The City’s own 2023 staff report says otherwise. It says the plant has only partial redundancy. It says that during spring thaw, when raw water carries more suspended sediment, the plant “requires its total capacity,” and that “the loss of one or more flocculators will impact the plant’s functionality.” It calls the risk of “a critical loss of redundancy, if not total filtration functionality” significant.
That report was written in 2023. It was addressed to the Operations Committee and approved by the City Manager. Whatever happened in March, none of it should have come as a surprise.
None of that adds up to a scandal.
But it doesn’t add up to an explanation that inspires blind faith, either.
It was enough to make us want the records.
We filed a freedom-of-information request on March 16 — the day the advisory was lifted — seeking the water treatment plant’s turbidity readings, operator logs, regulatory notifications and internal communications.
We received the records this week. Four months later, after paying $772.50 in fees to the City of Owen Sound.
They arrive redacted, and the release is incomplete. A third party has appealed the City's decision to disclose, and that appeal remains before Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner. We do not yet know what is still being withheld, or for how long.
We will spend the coming weeks reading all 613 pages we did receive, and we will report what they show.
Why this still matters
Two pieces of treatment equipment were out of service when the advisory was issued. A flocculator had failed on December 23, nearly three months earlier. And on February 4, six weeks after that failure, the City took one of the plant’s four filters offline for scheduled refurbishment. It was still offline in March.
So the plant went into spring run-off short two units. Neither of those facts was disclosed while residents were boiling their water.
The flocculator is not expected to be replaced until late 2026 or early 2027. And the plant's second original walking beam flocculator (the one that didn't fail) remains in service. The 2023 report described it as identical in vintage and condition to the one that failed, with “a high probability that a similar failure could occur in the short term.”
That was three years ago. Staff have since told council's Operations Committee it is still running, and could fail.
Spring run-off will come again before that equipment is replaced. That is not a prediction. It is a calendar.
We asked the City on July 5 what it weighed in taking that filter offline while the flocculator was already down and run-off was approaching. We asked whether the flocculator is still out of service today. We asked what the City will do if the plant faces the same conditions before the replacement arrives.
We asked again yesterday, with further questions. We’ll let you know if we hear anything back.
Trust is not a substitute for accountability
We are not looking for a villain. Nothing we have seen suggests anyone at the water plant was cavalier about public safety. In fact, staff worked through nights and a weekend on this, and the water was never deemed unsafe.
But a public water system cannot run on trust alone, and it should not have to. Trust is what you get when a system is transparent. It is not something a system earns by asking for it, or by staying quiet and hoping the outcome holds.
Residents are being asked, right now, to have faith that a plant running short on capacity and equipment will get through the next run-off season without incident. That may well be true. But we cannot verify it, because the City has not explained it — not to us, not to Council in public, and not to the people who drink the water and pay for it through their water bills.
It should not take four months and $772.50 to get a straight account of what happened at our water plant.
An open invitation
If ever there were a moment for the City to ask residents how they found out about the advisory, what they needed, and what would have helped, it was in the weeks after it was lifted. A survey. A debrief. Anything.
Instead, the public conversation ended when the advisory did.
So this is an invitation. We will spend the coming weeks reading these records and reporting what they show. If the City would like to be part of that conversation — to answer our questions, to explain the decisions it made, to tell residents what it will do differently next time — we are all ears.
Our questions have been sitting in the City Manager, Mayor, and Council’s inboxes since July 5.
Some of the equipment won't be replaced until 2027. Spring will come again. This is a conversation the City should want to lead and be a part of.
The Owen Sound Current filed the aforementioned request under the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act on March 16, 2026, and paid $772.50 in fees. Our reporting is funded entirely by readers.
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