It will now be a little easier to breathe at City-owned facilities in Williams Lake when skies are smoky.
A total of 10 air purifiers units are now located in the City Hall, Complex, Works Yard, Airport, and Fire Hall buildings following an emergency poll by Council for their purchase.
“We ordered them when the smoke was really, really bad,” Mayor Walt Cobb explained.
“Because it was so bad there for a while and people in here were coughing, people in different facilities were coughing, the decision was made to do a poll of Council and ask if we could order ten of these.”
Cobb adds that the decision to purchase the purifiers was because it cost $1,200 per unit to rent for a month compared to $1,400 per unit to purchase.
“We’re going to be able to use them again but also there’s the ability if we aren’t having any fires or the smoke visibility to rent them out too,” he said.
“It was a good decision. Our concern was that we were going to have to put a couple of them in the Gibraltar Room so that people with respiratory problems would have a clean place to go, we thought maybe we could rent the upper level of the mall if we had to purify that because the smoke was pretty bad for a while.”
“This will give us the opportunity to make sure if people have breathing issues in the future we’ll be able to have some clean air for them.”
The $14,500 for the purifier units in which no local suppliers were able to provide rentals or units for purchase will be expended from the Emergency Planning Funds.