Apr
3
By Ted Dew-Jones
This is an unusual submission for it asks the good people of James Bay to help stop the building of a land based sewage treatment plant (LBP) by writing your political representatives and sending them copies of this article. It also to suggest rather cheekily that you make ten photocopies and send them to friends or politicians outside James Bay and ask them to do the same.
First, only pay regard to those who are qualified and will not benefit from building an LBP. Note that if the engineers charge 2% of 750 million dollars (almost certainly an underestimate) that would be 15 million dollars, and that of course is peanuts compared with the profit the contractors will make. Every penny from the public's pocket will go into someone else's. I suspect our politicians and most media people were all good at English and social studies and no good at maths, physics, chemistry or biology; that doesn't cut it. I have a degree from Manchester University in municipal engineering, worked for 14 years designing sewage treatment plants and another 18 for the Province's Pollution Control Branch. I was the engineer given the task of assessing the permit application for the first long outfall and recommended it be granted. At the time of the referendum the CRD provided the public with no facts, so I wrote a book that you can read on the internet (members.shaw.ca/sewagecircus).The problem is that the CRD have never presented the facts to the public who still do not know them. Here they are.
Nobody bothers to explain how the sea works. It has been eroding whole mountain ranges for 3 billion years and is filled with heavy metals by the millions of tons but in tiny concentrations. Every discharge of a toxicant will be diluted as it disperses until it is no longer toxic. The distance to achieve that may be the area of a small sea off a Chinese river mouth or a few cubic feet, as off Victoria's shores. No harm has ever been shown to have been done by our long outfall discharges despite extensive monitoring; indeed the net effect of adding the nutrients into which our sewage turns probably benefits the sea. The bed of the sea is a moratorium of dead fish and mammals and rotting vegetation. The volume of the sea, to a depth of 30 feet is 1000 times that of the air above the world's land masses.
Long outfalls have been investigated and approved by both a British Royal Commission and a committee advising the US Congress.
The most important professional opinion is that of a medical health officer because the purpose of a treatment plant is above all to combat pathogens. Everything else in sewage is just the same as the waste from animals and vegetation and is looked after by the earth's magical recycling system. The problem is to avoid too much in one place at one time, and our long outfalls do that admirably. There have been six successive MHOs since the long outfalls began and not one believes we need a LBP. The latest is Shaun Peck who has been busy fighting the notion that we do need an LBP for several years.
The next professional opinions that matter are those of the biologists and oceanographers who have been monitoring the discharges since they began. Not one of them believes we need a LBP.
That situation alone is absolutely scandalous. The reason we are to have a LBP thrust down our tax-sore throats is that they have devised a regulation saying so.
But that situation is not alone - nowhere near. First the alternative benefits that the massive expenditure would bring have conveniently been ignored and are enormous. Second the pollution caused and energy used in manufacturing transporting and installing the materials for the contract have been ignored and are substantial. Next the health risks in operating the plant have been ignored. Last, and to me very critical, the injuries have been ignored. Work Safe BC advised me that of the several hundred people who suffered injury in 2012 under heading '7210 General Construction', which covers our sewage treatment contract, 1411 were "permanently impaired." So how many people are to finish the great treatment plant folly in a wheelchair or with no arm after spending 750 million dollars? Any politician out there give a damn?