by Delores Broten
In 1986, nearly one quarter of the shellfish beaches in Puget Sound, a major portion of the great Salish Sea which separates Vancouver Island from Washington State and the BC mainland, were suddenly classified as contaminated with sewage pollution. That's a familiar story to residents of coastal Canada, whose cities and towns have an unpleasant habit of dumping raw or partially treated sewage into the ocean.
The next fifteen years of the Puget Sound sewage saga are a startling success story.
The Americans fought back, pouring time, money, public education and legal tools into the campaign to clean up.
Washington State monitors 140,000 acres of shellfish beds for fecal coliform. In its annual reports, it uses the state of the beaches as one of the indicators for the health of Puget Sound.
Puget Sound's Health 2002 from the Puget Sound Water Quality Action Team points the finger for problems at:
- storm water run off,
- sewage and septic discharges and
- livestock,
all continually aggravated by
- population growth.
"As the human population grows in the Puget Sound basin, the threats to shellfish become more pressing as more waste water is generated and the loss of open land leads to more storm water runoff. Increasingly, the co-ordinated efforts of local jurisdictions and the shellfish industry are counteracting threats to water quality and shellfish harvesting areas in Puget Sound."
Starting in the mid-1990s, the tide, so to speak, began slowly to turn in favour of clean water. Terry Hull, director of the On Site portion of the Action Team's work, credits three areas of action with improving the situation:
- A focus on discharge from on site treatment systems dealt with storm water control through proper landscaping, and the elimination of storm water overflows which flood sewage treatment plants, although most shellfish beaches near urban areas are still contaminated;
- A recognition of suburban septic systems as a legitimate and "permanent type of infrastructure," which needs to be maintained, leading to concerted public education and successful beach clean ups;
- State funding for local conservation districts to work with farmers.
That action was leveraged to effective levels by state-funded co-ordination and enabling grants for dozens and dozens of citizens' organizations with thousands of volunteers working on all aspects of stream and foreshore monitoring and protection.
The year 2000 report records the downgrading of seven shellfish areas, but major improvements in five, for a net gain of 691 acres. The figures don't reveal the entire success however, because no further ground has been lost in Puget Sound, despite years of population growth. Between 1991 and 2000, the region's population grew by 20%. There are now 7 million people in the Georgia Basin-Puget Sound Ecosystem, with another 2 million projected to move here by 2020, mostly into currently rural areas.
By contrast, not only is most of BC's near-urban coast closed, but even minimal sewage treatment is sometimes bitterly resisted by local rural residents, who see the treatment plant as the first step to enabling unsustainable development schemes and broken community plans. That was the impulse which led to bitter resistance of the Ganges treatment plant on Saltspring Island. Even though the plant was upgraded to a rare tertiary treatment level, the plant still pipes its effluent out to sea, carrying a load of antibiotics, birth control estrogens, household chemicals and cleaning products. "I wish they'd put in one of the alternative treatments in the first place," laments Sheila Harrington of the Land Trust Alliance of BC, noting that Saltspring's sewage problems are still not solved.
But, where there's a will, there's a way, and where there's a problem, there are people trying to solve it.
In this case, activists in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island were inspired by what was happening in Puget Sound and the need for action was underlined by the Baynes Sound Round Table, which included members of the shellfish industry. In the face of sewage closures of some of the most productive shellfish areas in BC, they started putting on "Septic Socials" to inform rural land-owners about the required daily diet and long term care for septic systems.
The Comox Valley Citizens Action for Recycling and the Environment (CVCARE) started up the septic socials in the mid-nineties, and success is hard to measure because of government cut-backs to monitoring. CVCARE hopes that Environment Canada will do some re-testing of closed beaches this year, but one indication of progress in public awareness is that about 100 people turned up to the most recent event this year.
The foreshore around Baynes Sound ought to be cleaner than before the work started. Two boat pump out stations have been installed by the Comox Harbour Authority with help from Environment Canada, so that boaters have somewhere to dispose of their waste. Odete Pinho, now Agriculture and Fish Stewardship co-ordinator for the Comox Farmers Institute, says that 80 sewage crossover connections to storm drains were found and corrected. "We knew they were cross connected," she says, "not just because of fecal coliform counts in excess of 6 million, but because you could see toilet paper and other things at the drains." These days, the pipes for sewer and storm drain connections are different sizes and colour coded, so such errors should not be repeated.
From public education about how to make current septic systems perform as they should, CVCARE has moved on to the search for alternatives that will provide long term sustainability. The organization works with a wide range of partners and funders. With Hornby Island's Greenhouse Organic Sewage Treatment Society (GOSTS), they are testing several alternative systems under the BC Ministry of Health's Innovative Technology Programme. The search is for treatment methods which will be in the public domain and "approvable." The Ministry controls permits for systems which handle under 5000 gallons a day of sewage, and recognizes three types of on site septic treatment: the traditional gravity fed septic field, packaged plants of various types, and "innovative" systems, which are still required to have a drain field with 12 inches of soil which percolates.
Ronna-Rae Leonard, the administrator for CVCARE, described the systems CVCARE is currently working on, all the while hosting the now-traditional "septic socials."
Three sites in the Comox area are being tested with grey water planter boxes designed to accommodate 200 imperial gallons a day, containing about 100 square feet of soil surface to purify wash water. The Ministry of Health classifies non-sewage grey water as a biohazard, because it can sometimes contain serious amounts of fecal coliform. The planter box tests only started in December, but they are going well, and Ronna-Rae hopes that eventually the Ministry of Health will agree that grey water planter boxes could be married with composting toilets to service rural homes. Composting toilets are not permitted at this time, so this is a very long term goal
A "constructed wetland" for all the waste water from a single family house is in its third year of tests on Hornby Island under typical conditions. The system, run by the Greenhouse Organic Sewage Treatment Society, needs some more tweaking to get exactly the design, but three more are now approved for further testing, when the funding is found. Ronna-Rae likes the idea of these systems because they clean more and have a smaller footprint than normal septic systems.
"The system is designed to include primary treatment with a septic tank, and a field will always be required for discharge," she says. "However if the constructed wetland does its job, the size of the field will be able to be substantially reduced, especially if we can solve the problem of on site management."
Some kind of insurance system or a mandatory maintenance fund will be required to ensure that these systems, like traditional septic systems, receive the maintenance they will need to work properly in the long run.
Ed Hoeppner of GOSTS hopes that the grey water planter box system will be finished testing by next spring. He has a vision of a combined system, with grey water planter boxes, composting toilets, and a centralized worm composting facility to ensure that the solids composting is completely finished and clean. Such a system would not only be clean, approved and legal for Ministry of Health mandates, it would also be sustainable.
On a larger scale, the villages of Cumberland and Union Bay are both in various stages of planning constructed wetlands to further treat effluent after secondary treatment. Union Bay will hook households up to the treatment plant with small pressurized collection pipes but there are hopes that the system will have no pipe dumping partially treated effluent into Georgia Strait.
Between the hundreds or thousands of volunteers, far-sighted civil servants and leading-edge politicians on both sides of the borders around the Salish Sea, something is happening. The waters are being cleaned, and our minds are opening to the possibilities of sustainable living for the area we call home.
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[From WS April/May 2002]