Quesnel Lake is not your ordinary colour anymore, according to local residents.
Hubert Bunce with the Ministry of Environment shares why the lake now has a greenish blue hue to it.
“That’s due to increasing turbidity levels that are the result of the lake thermocline breaking down, the turn-over of the lakes,” he says. “Those sediments were in the lake and now they’ve risen to the surface, due to the change in the temperature regime of the lake.”
Bunce says with the increased murkiness of the Lake, there will be increased concentrations of contaminants including iron, manganese, and aluminum.
Steve Robertson, Vice President of Corporate Affairs with Imperial Metals, meanwhile says the company will be delivering drinking water to residents who source their water from the lake.
“When we tested those filter systems, they did not perform the way we thought they were going to perform,” he says.
“It appears though the sediment in the water is finer than what we were expecting. so, we’ve started to test other filters, but in the meantime, we’re going to actually get a water-delivery system going and we’re going to be delivering water to the residents that are taking water directly from the lake.”
Murky levels of Quesnel Lake are expected to remain high for some time, according to recent modeling results.
Interior Health was unavailable to comment if the increased cloudiness poses an issue to drinking water.