Some good news for residents of High River, the water is safe.

The federal government has lowered the acceptable level of lead in water pipes and the Towns Director of Engineering, Planning and Operations, Riley McKerracher says all their tests have come back with levels lower than allowed.

He says the town was going to ask for residents to volunteer their homes to be tested in the spring but because of COVID-19 and associated restrictions, that had to be put on hold.

"We haven't done that yet, we would like to continue with that, but it probably won't happen until the spring," he says. "There's quite a bit of restrictions around entering homes and there's questions around how comfortable people are with COVID and having people entering their homes and so we're going to probably wait until spring."

McKerracher says because of the restrictions they used a cross section of town staff to do the tests so they didn't have to enter anyone's home.

"We did target staff so we had a good cross section of the town as well as making sure we were targeting some of the older homes in older areas, if we have a worst case scenario where would that be, and we made sure we had a test in that area.

That included testing a home built in 1919 which also came back clean.

He says they have done 25 per cent of their testing and it has come back well below the allowable limits so they're not really concerned about lead at this point.

Questions, comments or story ideas? e-mail news@okotoksonline.com