Current sewage lagoon poisoning Koojessee Inlet

IQALUIT — Wise clam-diggers in Iqaluit always steer clear of the far end of Koojessee Inlet, where the Town’s sewage lagoon is located.

Any shellfish gathered there could be contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria and other toxins that can cause sickness or long-term health problems.

After waste effluent sits in the sewage lagoon, water that rises to the top is regularly siphoned off into the inlet.

Over the past few years the sewage lagoon has also overflowed, and there have been dike breaches and seepages that have sent streams of raw, untreated waste sewage directly into the sea.

To minimize the chance of overflows and to reduce stress on the dike, Town officials have lowered the level of the sewage lagoon.

Iqaluit residents are hefty water users. They consume about 400 litres of water per person, and send around 2000 cubic metres of waste effluent into the sewage plant every day.

The Town’s new sewage treatment plant, now under construction, is expected to take over this daily flow of waste within months.

“Our priority is to get the existing system to meet the demands of the municipality for 20 years,” said Iqaluit’s chief engineer, Denis Bedard.

The new facility’s technology is new and presumably more reliable and environmentally safe than the current sewage lagoon.

The new system relies on a series of membranes that filter and treat the waste water. Leftover cakes of sludge are then placed under a tarp where they are broken down and sanitized by a process of self-generated heating, or composting.

The Town plans to use the resulting product as a fertilizer around Town to create green areas. Rich in a variety of nutrients, human waste has been used for thousands of years in such countries as China as the main fertilizer in agriculture.

But this new plant’s capacity, as well as its new technology and composting process, raised concerns at last week’s meeting of the Nunavut Water Board.

Speakers at the public hearings worried about the plant’s ability to meet Iqaluit’s ever-increasing needs. Others questioned the reliability of its technology and wanted to make sure that the present sewage lagoon system would be maintained as a back-up system.

They were also concerned with the Town’s record of accidents and poor compliance with safety procedures and deadlines.

Many were disturbed that Iqaluit had gone ahead with the new plant’s construction before the renewal of its license application by the Nunavut Water Board.

“You’re all set to go and then the board decides the site is not an acceptable site,” lawyer Paul Crowley said, speaking as a concerned resident of Iqaluit.

“You can conceiveably build, construct, and be ready to go, and want to discharge waste and not get approval from the board.”

Although the process leading to the new plant’s construction was criticized, the $6.24 million facility was viewed as an improvement.

Until 1978, Iqaluit’s sewage was simply discharged onto the shoreline near the Northern store, while honey bags were deposited on the hill between the West 40 and Koojessee Inlet.