Sludge Watch ==> BC - buried sewage lagoons haunt the West Coast

[Maureen Reilly]

Coping with toxic sludge on the West Shore


Sep 26 2007


Long before development and gentrification took hold on the West Shore, 
areas in Colwood and Highlands were blithely used as toxic waste dumps. 
Urban expansion and concern over safe drinking water is bringing that 
poisonous legacy back to the surface.

Department of National Defence land behind the Juan de Fuca sports fields 
holds a massive pit that stored oily bilge water and other toxic 
hydrocarbons from naval ships. DND considers it one of its worst 
contaminated sites in the country.

A few kilometres north on Millstream Road is Millstream Meadows, a 32-acre 
property with a name that suggests breezy fields of green rather than 
underground pits of sludge. What once was private land, and is now Capital 
Regional District property, was used as a septage and sewage disposal until 
1984, and has finally come back to haunt Highlands.

Hydrocarbons seeped into one of the meadow’s perimeter monitoring wells in 
April, spurring the CRD to fast-track a study to see if toxic waste is 
indeed finally trickling through the bedrock toward local groundwater 
sources. An initial contaminant analysis is expected this week.

Now only if the CRD and the province could act just as quickly to remediate 
the site.

In August federal Environment Minister John Baird toured the toxic pit in 
Colwood, promising millions of dollars to safely dispose of the contaminated 
soil and water. Before Baird arrived, more than 7,000 cubic metres of soil 
and rock had already been removed.

Millstream Meadows, by contrast, has remained a stagnant no-man’s-land for 
decades. The CRD owns it, the province lists it as a Crown Contaminated 
Site, but the road to remediation has been slow. Millstream Meadows falls 
under the provincial Brownfield Pilot Project program, a lower order of 
contaminated sites that hold potential for redevelopment.

With the likely migration of hydrocarbons away from the buried sewage 
lagoons, cleaning Millstream Meadows should take on new urgency.

The District of Highlands wants the land to aid its tax base with light 
industrial use, but according to its new official community plan, clean, 
safe drinking water comes first. Rightly so.

One can only hope the errant hydrocarbons are somehow an anomaly and not 
indicative of a larger threat to the groundwater and aquifer.

In any case, it should serve as a wake-up call to the hazards of letting old 
toxic dumps sit idle. Cleaning up the West Shore’s toxic legacy needs to 
happen sooner rather than later.

http://www.goldstreamgazette.com/portals-code/list.cgi?paper=12&cat=48&id=1072542&more=0