The simple answer is yes. But it’s a question that many people have asked following our story last month about the burst of new construction in Knowlton. 

“When the developers approached us, the first thing we did was to stop and say, ‘we need to check the water situation.’ Not only the water but it’s the waste water also,” says Gilbert Arel in an interview at the Town Hall. 

“If we go ahead with four to five hundred new houses or residences the study showed that we are okay. The capacity of our wells actually right now is at 3610 cubic meters a day and our consumption in 2021 was 2005 cubic meters a day so you can see that we have a good margin to work with.” 

The town is bringing on new water capacity which will raise the capacity to more than 4,000 cubic meters of water a day. This is a far cry from recent years when there was so little water the town had to put restrictions on us. But Mr. Arel says we shouldn’t be profligate in our water use. 

“There won’t be restrictions but people shouldn’t use water as they did in the 1980s. Washing your driveway is not proper, nor is washing your car every day.” 

Then there is the issue of brown water. Alas, that is not going away. The older pipes mean they retain dirt, in particular when there is a big demand on the water system, such as when water is needed for a fire. 

“Brown water is not only here, it is all over Quebec. We are going to do a cleaning of all of our aqueduct systems. We are going to start next week. But brown water will not be solved anytime soon.”