The Village of Ashcroft will be doing two water infrastructure projects with grant money left over from a water treatment plant project that came in under budget.

Mayor Barbara Roden says one of those projects is worth about $800,000 to buy gear to pull water pumps out of the Thompson River, if ever needed.

“If one of them fails, we have a backup. But the only way to go down there and fix it is to have a diver go into the river. And that’s not always possible because of the water levels,” she says. “A lot of the time, especially during the freshet, it’s just way too dangerous to send a diver down there. So if we have these sleeves, we can just physically pull the pump out of the river onto the bank and it can be accessed from there.”

Roden says the other project will be worth about $100,000 to buy a backup generator for one of its three reservoirs, to use if there’s a power outage.

“Two years ago, during the Elephant Hill wildfire when we lost power for 36 hours, even though we did go to stage-four water restrictions, the reservoir which services the Mesa subdivision – up above town – ran out of water, which is obviously a huge issue for residents but it’s even more of a concern for firefighting purposes. We need to have the reservoirs full.”

The grant dollars are left over from an $8.2-million-dollar new water treatment plant that is now finished, which was the largest capital project in the village’s history.

Roden says the grant money has to be used or else those dollars would have to be returned to government.