According to the municipality’s Director General Lisa Dagenais, the project, which has closed a portion of rue l’Eglise for the past month, involves the structural rehabilitation of clean drinking water distribution by jacketing the interior of the town’s pipes.

She explained that the town hired a company to add a durable liner inside the drinking water pipes on rue l’Eglise, which will most likely prevent any busted pipes and releases anytime soon.

Undertaken by Quebec based environmental services company Sanexen, the project’s manager Samuel Trudeau said that the new system is guaranteed to prolong the water system’s lifespan by another 50 years.

Funded through the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing’s gas tax from 2014-2018, Dagenais noted that the project received a $440,000 subsidy from the federal and Quebec governments.

She added that Portage du Fort is one of the first municipalities in the region to implement the modernized aqueduct system known as Aqua-Pipe.

Dagenais explained that an upgrade to its water distribution system was imminent because the town’s pipes were getting too old, which lead to a lot of broken, frozen pipes and shortages of clean drinking water in the winter.

“We shouldn’t have any problems this winter or any breaks on the aqueduct system on rue l’Eglise because of this,” she said.

Along with a free-flow of clean drinking water at all times of the year, Dagenais also said the Aqua-Pipe system will help the municipality minimize its costs on repairs and replacements.

“When you have to dig in the winter and there’s a foot of ice on the ground, it costs a lot to the municipality,” she said.

Trudeau said that using Aqua-Pipe prevented them from demolishing a large portion of rue l’Eglise, which ended up saving overall cost as well.

“We’re really minimizing the impact on citizens and the users of the road,” he said.

By digging six access wells, workers used a small robot to enter the town’s aqueduct system and operate from inside the water pipes.

“We’re doing a pipe within a pipe,” he said. “We install a sheath inside the aqueduct’s pipes.”

The project is completed in two stages: blocking off the system’s service entrances and installing a sheath inside the pipes; piercing open the entry points. The final product will be 405 metres of rigid sheath protecting the interior of the town’s water pipes on rue l’Église.

The six-week project began on Sept. 15 and is expected to be completed by the end of this week, according to Dagenais.

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