by Clark Banks After nine years of service, I can no longer be involved in the City of Powell River’s liquid waste management plan process. I cannot be neutral when one of the options is to have open sewage storage and a sewage screening station in front of my neighbour’s house. This option is totally insane.
When I questioned Al Gibb, from Dayton and Knight (the city’s engineering consultants), about using another pump station at Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River mill, he said he had no knowledge of its existence. I was surprised. The following meeting, Sarah Barkowski, Catalyst’s environment manager for the Powell River division, said Catalyst had no interest in the city using station A and C.
I started to get a feeling that we may be being directed in a way that would be in Catalyst’s favour, to have the city acquire the old obsolete clarifier and be responsible for the area, previously a PCB storage facility which had on numerous occasions overflowed through the pump house, spilling raw wastewater. On one occasion, the clarifier was emptied onto the ground when it was so viscous the rakes could no longer move the contents.
The idea of using the mill’s obsolete clarifier—designed for pulp not city sewage—site for a grit and screening station is equally insane. The intent was to have our own stand-alone plant in 10 to 15 years. If a new plant is built on the site of the existing Townsite plant, we would end up pumping thousands of gallons of sewage uphill to the screening and grit removal station, only to have it run back downhill to the treatment plant at a pumping cost of $91,000 to $104,000 per year. The cost to pump the sewage to the Townsite plant or station A and C would be $13,000 to $16,000.
These figures are from Dayton and Knight at current BC Hydro rates. If you take the Catalyst rate of $500,000, pumping costs, and the labour to operate the system, we are back where we started at $1 million per year plus, and we still don’t own it.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the application for a $7-million grant that inferred our committee of stakeholders had chosen co-treatment with Catalyst as the option, which was an outright fabrication. When questioned, we discover none of the city councillors had read it. Staff who signed the application—one present and one absent—would not admit to not having read it. The motion by Councillor Chris McNaughton to disallow interested groups to have a table at the open house added insult to injury; needless to say it was defeated. Councillor Debbie Dee said Catalyst was investing millions of dollars in power generation when it is our tax money in the form of a grant.
Based on these thoughts I felt I had no choice but to resign. However, it has been an honour to serve with my fellow committee members.
Clark Banks has been a member of the City of Powell River’s liquid waste management plan joint local-technical advisory committee for nine years and operated the secondary treatment plant at the Powell River mill.
