Unsafe tap water is common in Newfoundland. This town just overcame a 1989 boil order

Drinking water is poured into a glass from a faucet in North Vancouver, Tuesday, July, 30, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward (JONATHAN HAYWARD/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

A boil-water advisory in place since 1989 has been lifted in one Newfoundland fishing community, but dozens of other rural towns in the province are still struggling with long-standing government orders to avoid drinking tap water.

The official letter last month announcing the end of the boil-water advisory in Branch, N.L., said the order had been in effect for 36 years, but Mayor Kelly Power said it’s been much longer since it was safe to drink the community’s water, or even use it for laundry.

“This is the first time any resident of Branch can remember being off a boil water (advisory),” Power said in an interview. “It (looked) like apple juice … we couldn’t wash white clothes because it would stain them.”

When she got that letter saying the order had finally been lifted, she grabbed her phone and texted her colleagues on council — four women, all volunteers — to show them.

“To give clean, safe drinking water to our town? We all said it was our biggest accomplishment as a council,” Power said.

There are 274 municipalities in Newfoundland and Labrador, three-quarters of which have fewer than 1,000 people, according to the organization representing municipalities in the province. As of Wednesday, there were 181 active boil-water advisories for public water across the province, some covering entire communities, others covering parts of towns where the water wasn’t safe to drink. One hundred and fifty-four of those advisories were at least a year old, and 113 were more than a decade old.

The longest-standing advisory on the list was imposed in 1987 in Pollards Point, a community of about 300 people on Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. “Water supply has no disinfection system,” reads the government’s explanation for the advisory.

Branch is about 120 kilometres southwest of St. John’s, and at the time of the 2021 census it was home to about 177 people. Its water used to come from a local pond, and it would travel, unchlorinated, through cast iron pipes that were laid in the ground in the 1940s and ’50s, “by pick and shovel, by local people,” Power said.

To access clean water, the town had to drill two wells, install a wellhouse and replace all of those old pipes, which weren’t strong enough to carry the water from the new wells. The work began 16 years ago, and it was largely funded through repeated applications to a federal capital works program, Power said.

Once the new water was running clear, provincial officials had to visit the town every three weeks to test it, Power said. The water had to pass the tests every three weeks for three months before the province would lift the boil-water order.

The letter ending the order is dated Feb. 28. In total, it cost about $1.8 million to get there, but it was worth every cent, Power said.

“People are saying, ‘When I look at my toilet, I don’t know if there’s water in it anymore, it’s so clear,’” Power said. “And to pour it in your glass and just see it, it’s amazing.”

Deatra Walsh, director of advocacy and communications with Municipalities Newfoundland and Labrador, agreed the clear water in Branch is a “monumental achievement.”

Many Newfoundland and Labrador towns are centuries old. Maintaining aging water infrastructure, planning for its maintenance and then applying over and over for government grants to pay for upgrades is a massive undertaking for small volunteer councils, Walsh said in an interview.

“It’s a huge administrative burden, and it’s a huge governance burden,” she said.

Power had a message for small councils like hers trying to fix their water problems: “Be dedicated. Stick to what you’re doing to move forward. And you will move forward. You will get there.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 13, 2025