Where the sludge goes

JOHN THOMPSON

You could forgive one speaker at last week’s Nunavut Water Board hearing for describing Iqaluit not as a city, but, with a slip of the tongue, “shitty.”

After all, the dirty details of the city’s application for a new water license often came down to a smelly subject: waste — including the muck we flush down the toilet — and where it all ends up.

It’s a timely subject, given that only two weeks ago engineers turned on the taps inside the city’s new sewage treatment plant, which was built at a cost of $4 million. Sewage now spills through filters inside the plant, separating waste water from sludge.

But even when the plant is fine-tuned in three months, the waste water pouring into Koojjessee Inlet will still be toxic enough to poison fish, in violation of the federal Fisheries act.

That, and the fact that the city has no plans to move on to secondary sewage treatment, which would cost another $10 million, concerned regulators and residents who attended the meeting.

“There’s certainly no regulation in existence that would allow this,” said Tanya Gordaneer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans last Thursday, who recommended the city commit to a plan for adding secondary treatment — a suggestion city officials dismissed as “impractical.”

Even if the city did upgrade to secondary treatment, Ken Johnson, an engineer with Earth Tech, the company hired to design the new plant, has doubts the waste water would meet federal standards. “It still might not pass the toxicity issue,” Johnson said.

As for the sludge, that will be loaded into an open trailer that will cart the stinky stuff to the landfill, where city staff have recently begun their own composting experiment.

All this makes Iqaluit resident Sui-Ling Han wonder if she’ll be holding her nose as she walks along the beach during low tide this summer. She might not be alone, either, since many residents pass by the dump to go boating, camp, fish and snowmobile.

And, when the dump fills up in five years, Paul Crowley, who also lives in Iqaluit, wants to know if the sludge trailer will stink up city streets to reach the as-yet undecided new landfill site.

“I’ve travelled many a country road behind farmers,” said Crowley. “I imagine it won’t be pleasant.”

Crowley also wanted to know how the sludge trailer, which fills up every two to three days, will be emptied during a week-long blizzard. While the plant is capable of storing the sludge in a number of back-up containers and pipes, “there isn’t really a contingency in place,” said Geoff Baker, the city’s engineer.

For her part, Han also expressed concern that the city’s improved ditching around the dump won’t be dug until after the spring melt. “I guess we don’t know how long until the ditches are full and overflowing,” she said.

“We’ve been here long enough to witness a history of problems, and we’re very fearful of reliving that,” Han said.

At the top of most residents’ minds is the $7.1 million sewage treatment plant, built in 1999, that never worked.

Faced with criticism that the city has spent millions without offering any real improvement over its aging sewage lagoon, Earth Tech’s Johnson replied that the new plant will be able to handle a population of about 12,000, and won’t continue to degrade like the lagoon, which now discharges sewage after a week, rather than several months, as it should.

News of the city’s composting project surprised Jim Little, Iqaluit’s compost vigilante, who has collected rotting food from homes to compost in the landfill for several years. For months he’s urged the city to compost the sludge, but his criticism didn’t make him any friends at city hall. Instead, he was booted off the waste management committee and told to clear out of the dump this year to make room for more garbage.

The water board meetings touched on two other big issues: Iqaluit’s quickly-filling dump, and the safety of the city’s water supply.

By next year the city will run out of space at the dump and need to expand into a new site — likely an adjacent lot that’s already graded for use.

But two questions remain unanswered: who owns the site, which is a former U.S. military dump that’s known to be contaminated, and who’s liable for what’s buried beneath the surface?

These are questions that officials from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada appear to be in no hurry to answer — perhaps for fear of eventually being stuck spending millions of dollars cleaning the site up.

As for the water supply, this summer the city plans to raise the Lake Geraldine dam by two metres to increase the amount of fresh water available for a booming population. But the city has no emergency plan in case the dam bursts, which concerns Jim Rogers, manager of water services with Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, who points out the hospital and emergency services are all located in the path of a potential flood.

Rogers also criticized the organization of the city’s numerous water studies, which he says are a mess and need to be consolidated.

City officials took a bruising over three days of questioning, only to be told to come back for more — the board will reconvene next week to follow up on unfinished business.