Major repairs needed for sewage plant, engineer’s report shows

DENISE RIDEOUT

It’s going to cost the City of Iqaluit $550,000 to finish repairs to its sewage treatment plant, which was supposed to be up and running two years ago, and another $3.3 million to increase its capacity to handle all the city’s waste.

The plant, which is intended to replace Iqaluit’s sewage lagoon, has been flawed from the beginning.

In 2000 when the plant was built, engineers discovered leaks in the walls of the concrete tanks. Following that, work on the sewage treatment plant stopped cold.

Since then, city council has been struggling to find a way to get the plant, which comes with a $7-million price tag, finally working.

This January, council commissioned engineers from Earth Tech Inc. of B.C. to inspect the sewage treatment plant to spell out how much work is left to complete it — and how much it will cost the city every year to run it.

The engineer’s report, released this week, shows there are some defects in the plant’s design, major improvements are needed and it doesn’t meet all the safety requirements.

The floor of the electrical room is sagging and may cause drainage problems, some of the electrical systems don’t meet Canadian electrical codes and better ventilation should be installed, the engineers say.

But the flaws come as no surprise to Iqaluit’s mayor. “I think, from council’s perspective, those defects are not that important because we knew it wasn’t working,” John Matthews said.

On top of that, it turns out that running the facility will cost more than council anticipated.

“Six hundred thousand dollars is just too onerous on the city,” Matthews said.

But the key, the mayor says, is the significant discovery that the plant might not have the capacity to treat all of the sewage that is generated in Iqaluit.

“The plant wasn’t designed to meet the needs of Iqaluit at its peak times, especially given its rapid growth over the past few years,” Matthews explained.

The plant was built to handle 1,800 cubic metres of waste a day, but the current population is producing about 2,100 cubic metres of waste daily.

To get the plant up to par, the city would have to put another $3.3 million worth of work into it.

Council will have to vote on whether to go with the engineer’s recommendations. The mayor said no date for the vote has been set.

In 1997, after determining the sewage lagoon wouldn’t have the capacity to deal with waste produced by the growing city, council hired Hill Murray and Associates to build a treatment plant.

But the company’s work on the plant was flawed, causing leaks in the concrete tanks. The city stopped construction and spent eight months repairing the damage.

Council then undertook this major review of the plant, wanting to see if there was any way to breathe life back into the failed project.

“I think the reality is that we’ll be using the sewage lagoon for another season,” the mayor said.

But he’s confident that Iqaluit residents will see the sewage plant up and running, possibly sometime next year.

“It’s right and proper to treat the sewage with a way other than the sewage lagoon,” Matthews said. “It’s definitely a priority, so we’re going to have to come up with the money somehow to make it happen.”