Turn on a tap and the water just appears – but how does it get to your home?
Part of Ottawa’s water network is a 150-year-old water pumping station, located downtown.
The Fleet Street Pumping station is Ottawa’s oldest water facility. Up to two-thirds of the city’s water supply can move through it,
“Today, the facility pumps approximately 200 million litres a day of treated drinking water. The drinking water comes from the Lemieux Island water purification plant and flows by gravity to here,” said the City of Ottawa’s plant manager Paul Montgomery.
If you used city water downtown today, chances are it came through this facility first.
It’s part of an intricate network of two water treatment plants, 3,000 kilometres of water mains and more than a dozen pumping stations. But what makes Fleet Street so unique is the pumping is done without electricity,
“No electric motors here. It’s purely just the power of that elevated water moving through and driving the pumps,” said Montgomery.
A sign inside the Fleet Street Pumping Station. (Peter Szperling/CTV News Ottawa)Water from the Ottawa River is taken upstream of the Chaudière Ring Dam to drive the facility’s turbines. A 500-metre-long covered aqueduct runs under the former Ottawa Street road alignment and directs the power water from Nepean Bay to the forebay of the pumping station.
There are five large pumps. Each is driven by a water turbine, for a total of five turbines. The total pumping capacity is 200 million litres per day and the total power of the five turbines is approximately 2,400 horsepower, according to the city.
The pumping station was originally built to supply water for firefighters,
“It was put in place 150 years ago, and it’s really stood the test of time,” says Gen Nielson, the city’s director of water facilities and treatment services.
It is now used to meet the demands of everyday water use in the city. The demand is about 300,000,000 litres of water per day. And in the summer, it can go up to about 450,000,000 litres of water per day.
Inside the Fleet Street Pumping Station in Ottawa. (Peter Szperling/CTV News Ottawa)
The original facility’s designing engineer was Thomas Coltrin Keefer, a prominent Canadian engineer. The original facility began operation on October 24, 1874 (at 11:35 a.m. the pumps were first started, reportedly).
The facility’s footprint was expanded a total of three times since its initial construction in 1874. The first expansion was completed in 1888 and then again by 1901.
In 1874, there were two triple acting piston pumps installed at Fleet, with a total pumping capacity of 27 million litres per day. By 1915, there were a total of ten pumps installed, with a combination of double acting piston, triple acting piston and centrifugal pump designs.
At that time, eight of the ten pumps were water turbine powered, and two pumps were powered by electric motors.