Fleet Street Pumping: Take a look inside downtown Ottawa’s 150-year-old water station [Video]

Turn on a tap and the water just appears – but how does it get to your home?

Part of Ottawa’s water network is a 150-year-old water pumping station, located downtown.

The Fleet Street Pumping station is Ottawa’s oldest water facility. Up to two-thirds of the city’s water supply can move through it,

• IN PICTURES: Ottawa’s 150-year-old pumping station

“Today, the facility pumps approximately 200 million litres a day of treated drinking water. The drinking water comes from the Lemieux Island water purification plant and flows by gravity to here,” said the City of Ottawa’s plant manager Paul Montgomery.

If you used city water downtown today, chances are it came through this facility first.

It’s part of an intricate network of two water treatment plants, 3,000 kilometres of water mains and more than a dozen pumping stations. But what makes Fleet Street so unique is the pumping is done without electricity,

“No electric motors here. It’s …