Water woes continue to plague tourist hotspot of Alma, N.B.

Alma, N.B., under boil water advisory A New Brunswick community known for tourism and seafood continues to deal with water quality issues.

Saturday was day four of a boil water advisory for one of the main tourist hot spots in the province of New Brunswick, but it's nothing new to the people who live there.

Alma, which is now part of the new Village of Fundy Albert, sees an influx of tens of thousands of tourists every summer who come to visit Fundy National Park.

When those guests eat at the restaurants or stay for the night at a hotel, cabin or Airbnb, it places a strain on the current water supply that was built years ago for a village of a few hundred.

Fundy Albert Mayor Robert Rochon said the supply is being outstripped by the demand and it will be at least another week until the boil order is lifted.

“It's unfortunate that we have to go on boil water advisories,” said Rochon. “I feel the pain for the business owners. I feel the pain for the residents because this is not what we expect as a community in the province of New Brunswick, to be on consistent boil water advisories, but unfortunately the current system we have does not have the reservoir capacity to meet the demands that are being placed on it.”

The strain on the current system causes turbidity, or cloudiness in the water and has been a huge inconvenience for those in the hospitality industry for years.

Andrew Casey, co-owner of the Parkland Village Inn and Tides Restaurant, said it's a tremendous disadvantage to the family-run business.

"It's super frustrating. We have to go to town to pick up water on a daily basis. It gives the village a bad name on different social sites. We can't use our fountain pop. We can't use our ice for our drinking glasses," said Casey.

Jane West Chrysostom is the owner of Cleveland Place, an artisan shop and book store.

She’s impressed with how Alma’s business community has grown, but is just as frustrated as Casey.

“We have felt that successful growth both in accommodations and destinations in entrepreneurial businesses, but the water conservation warnings and the boil order advisories are detrimental to the success of the continued growth,” said West Chrysostom.

A solution is on the way, but it'll take time.

Rochon said a water exploration project for a second source is underway.

“We're just getting to the point of completing phase one, which will assess the viability of the wells that have been drilled,” said Rochon. “Once that's done and we're confirmed what we think will be in place, then we'll be able to go on to phase two, which will be the actual construction of the system itself.”

Once that's done, Rochon is confident the new system will have the capacity to accommodate all the residents, businesses and tourists, but it takes time to get the provincial and federal funding lined up.

“We're in a place now where the phase one project is just being finalized and unfortunately it takes time to get the financing in place to proceed even with phase two. So, we don't have that in place right now, but we're fairly confident that the other two levels of government will step up and help us fund the project,” said Rochon.

Rochon said it will probably be 2025 or 2026 before there's a viable system in place.

"It's unfortunate that it's taking this long,” said Rochon.

Phase one was funded with three levels of government and the hope is they will receive the same amount of funding for the next phase.

"Phase two will start once we've confirmed that the phase one has resulted in a viable water source,” said Rochon. “So there's some testing yet to be done in phase one, but that should happen this summer.”