6 | City of Winkler
house by Botha and his team.
Of course, this isn’t the first time Botha
came to the fiscal rescue. Some years ago,
Winkler needed to resolve the refurbishing
of an elevated water storage tank. It was de-
termined that costs to refurbish the storage
tank would cost upwards of $500,000. Bo-
tha ultimately took the elevated tank offline,
installed variable frequency pumps, and the
system has been working just fine since 2009
(for a prudent cost of only $25,000). The
storage capacity lost by removing the tank
was replaced by a balancing tank at the new
water treatment plant. But again, Botha is
not so interested in talking about his profes-
sional expertise, rather prefers to focus on
how advances in infrastructure are now ben-
efitting residents of Winkler.
To put that perspective, he explains that
as much as 60 percent of the local water
supply comes from a resource known as the
Winkler Acquifer (the rest provided by an
enterprise known as the Pembina Valley Wa-
ter Co.). The city’s former water treatment
plant was reaching the end of its lifecycle,
but otherwise, protocols relating to the ex-
traction of water found Winkler tapping
into that known as the brackish zone. Botha
Winkler City Engineer Johan Botha and staff
