Slave River Spring Water Quality Sampling

In response to industrial wastewater leakage at the Kearl Oil Sands Mine in Alberta, GNWT-ECC in collaboration with the Fort Smith Métis Council, Town of Fort Smith, and Smith’s Landing First Nation initiated a precautionary water quality sampling program for the Slave River at Fort Smith in the spring of 2023.

Citation

Government of the Northwest Territories, Environment and Climate Change, Water Management and Monitoring Division (WMMD). 2023-05-08. "Slave River Spring Water Quality Sampling" (dataset). 1.0.0. DataStream. https://doi.org/10.25976/y4s6-oc52.

Funding Sources

GNWT - Department of Environment and Climate Change

Data Collection Information

Weekly water quality grab samples are being taken at the Town of Fort Smith water treatment plant and directly from the river near the town boat launch. Samples are being analyzed for general water quality, total and dissolved metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and naphthenic acids. Polyethylene membrane devices (PMDs) for PAHs and multiparameter water quality sensors (YSI EXO2s) in the Town of Fort Smith water intake building have also been deployed to measure some water quality parameters continuously.

Data Collection Processing

In addition to lab quality control evaluations, the data was screened against data quality objectives through several automated validation procedures. These included detection limit screening, detectable levels in field and travel blanks, relative percent differences for replicates and for total / dissolved metal ratios. Spring values were also compared against long term water quality data sets at these locations and evaluated for outliers.

Open Government Licence (OGL)

See disclaimer for details. https://www.gov.nt.ca/en/open-government-licence-northwest-territories

API Access

curl -G https://api.datastream.org/v1/odata/v4/Records --data-urlencode "\\$filter=DOI eq '10.25976/y4s6-oc52'" -H "x-api-key: PRIVATE-API-KEY"

Changelog