“When You Go To Victoria, Don’t Flush”

Mr. Floatie (PHOTO: Chad Hipolito)

Two years ago in these pages we heralded what we thought was the light at the end of Victoria’s sewer discharge pipe after the Canadian government, the province of British Columbia and the Capital Regional District put $782 million down for a long-awaited sewage treatment system. Alas, we were wrong. [“Victoria Sewage: Now Can We Flush?”]

Those who follow this never-ending story were perhaps not surprised when the regional district township of Esquimalt adamantly refused to house the planned sewage treatment plant, thereby driving planners back to new site acquisition and additional costs of hundreds of millions above the $782 million already committed. [“Victoria region's sewage bill could rise by $100 million”]

Now, enter Washington Governor Jay Inslee into the fray with a letter to BC Premier Christy Clark saying the sewage issue poses health and economic issues, threatens intergovernmental relations, and should not be pushed out to 2020. BC Environment Minister Mary Polak has responded that, “We have made it clear that sewage treatment will happen; this is not up for debate" and that regional district taxpayers could face up to $500 million more in costs if they can’t decide where a treatment plant will go. [“Victoria sewage fouls Washington-BC relationship”]

Resurgence of the Victoria sewage treatment issue has brought out many of the same arguments aired throughout Puget Sound in the ‘80s when local jurisdictions faced major capital costs to install secondary sewage treatment. [The Victoria regional district filters but does not treat its 34-million gallon-a-day discharge.] Like Victoria today, the arguments then against sewage treatment were based on the benign ‘flushing’ action of our estuarine waters and the unreasonable high cost of treatment to be passed on to resident and business rate payers. Same old, same old.

My Canadian colleagues and “Mr. Floatie” find the Victoria sewage issue deplorable but I’m not sure welcome the huffing-and-puffing self-righteousness from this side of the border. [Mr. Floatie retired two years ago when it seemed like a sewage treatment plant would be built but has reportedly come out of retirement for a “second movement.”] After all, those on this side of the Salish Sea have their hands full with stormwater, toxic bays and estuaries, toxic fish and shellfish, sewer overflows, closed shellfish beds, ocean acidification, oil and coal trains, and depleted salmon and forage fish habitats.

I’m sure every time the Victoria sewage treatment issue arises, our neighbors feel chagrin, that frustration followed by shame. No need to pile on. Twenty years is such a long time to suffer not only polluted shorelines but awful puns and being the butt of jokes. May you move smoothly forward.

July 10, 1994/ Seattle Times
VICTORIA, B.C. - A U.S. environmental group has some advice for tourists: If you go to Victoria, don't flush.

A brochure produced by the Seattle-based People for Puget Sound praises Victoria's "unique, old-world charm" but says the charm is dulled by the dumping of raw sewage into the Georgia and Juan de Fuca straits.

The 17,000-member group says that until the city has primary sewage treatment, it will remain the only West Coast city between Anchorage, Alaska, and Tijuana, Mexico, that dumps raw sewage into the ocean.

The group also notes Vancouver dumps and spills untreated sewage into the Fraser River and the Strait of Georgia and sewage is spilled every year by U.S. treatment plants into Puget Sound.

[“Victoria A Great Place To Visit, But Not To Flush?”]

‘Nuff said.

--Mike Sato

Have You Hugged Your Toilet Today?

November 19 is World Toilet Day, an annual event launched by Singaporean businessman Jack Sim who in 2001 founded the World Toilet Organization. Go ahead and snigger, then wake up: 2.5 billion people – that’s one in every three people worldwide – do not have access to a clean toilet. 

Unmanaged human waste carries diseases which makes people sick. It pollutes drinking water. It affects productivity, hampers economic development and shortens life expectancy.

Pre-industrial peoples like Romans and Egyptians and cities in India and Pakistan treated human waste by connecting toilets to flowing water sewage systems. According to Wikipedia, the  flushing toilet was invented by John Harrington in 1596. Joseph Bramah of Yorkshire patented the first practical water closet in England in 1778. George Jennings in 1852 also took out a patent for the flush-out toilet. No, Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet but did much to increase the popularity of the toilet in the 19th Century.

Here in the Northwest we take care of some household sewage on site by flushing waste into a septic tank which, if properly working, breaks down solids using bacteria in an anaerobic process and distributes liquid effluent to the ground via a drainfield. In large cities, the process of separating solids, disinfecting pathogens, removing metals and chemicals takes place on a larger scale before effluent is discharged into a water body like the Salish Sea.

Over the last 40 years, Washington’s Puget Sound jurisdictions have invested— both willingly and not so willingly-- in sewage treatment plants and technologies. The most recent example of this type of large-scale, water-based sewage system is the Brightwater sewage treatment plant, built at a cost of $2 billion, to handle the waste of King County and its municipalities. Brightwater people, hug your toilets today.

The out-of-sight, out-of-mind technology of our modern waste disposal system in the capital city of Victoria is still stuck in the mid-20th Century where human waste is not treated but simply screened to remove litter then flushed out into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. What seemed like a positive forward movement to take responsibility for disinfecting their own shit by building a primary treatment sewage facility for three-quarters of a million dollars has found local politicians and interest groups now in opposition.  Hug your toilets, Victoria— just don’t flush.  

As populations increase and potable water resources diminish, a technology of using clean water to flush away human waste so it can be disinfected in a costly process before returning the water to the environment comes to look more and more impractical and irrational. What next after the flush toilet?

In rural areas with high ground, outhouses and squat toilets and pit toilets work fine to protect human health. It’s in our towns and cities around the world where we need our best and brightest minds to engineer waterless toilets, businesses to market a new culture and installations, and activists and elected officials to push the regulatory envelope forward.

In the meantime, hug your toilet today.

--Mike Sato

Victoria Sewage: Now Can We Flush?

Mr. Floatie

Twenty years ago, Puget Sound was finally flushed with pride as many of its municipalities were on their way to upgrading to secondary sewage treatment. Victoria, the capital of "Beautiful, British Columbia” (as the province once brand itself in its advertisements) was simply filtering its sewage through a metal screen then piping its raw sewage about half a mile offshore smack into the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

They still do but earlier this week there finally appeared some light at the end of that discharge pipe when the federal, provincial and regional governments announced a deal to fund a proposed $782-million secondary sewage treatment plant in the capital region.  (“Three governments announce deal for Greater Victoria sewage plant”)  

Seattle PI.Com reporter Joel Connelly this week recalled the decades-long political refusal of British Columbia politicians to step up to the loo and remedy the festering issue in his column, “Victoria: A sewage treatment plant at last.”

Joel takes us down memory lane by recounting how Puget Sound yachting groups protested and boycotted the annual Victoria Swiftsure Yacht Race in the mid-’90s and by resurrecting the six-foot tall “Mr. Floatie” who ran for mayor of Victoria. Connelly also reminds us how the then-B.C. Environment Minister David Anderson adamantly defended the use of the Strait as a fine dumping ground because of its tidal action.

Well, Mr. Anderson remains an outspoken critic of secondary treatment and defender of dumping raw sewage into the Strait, jumping again into the effluent this week with a guest editorial, “Sewage-treatment plan serves no one well.”

For my part, I’ve always believed that my Canadian friends and Victoria businesses have long wanted to treatment their sewage and be good neighbors. Boycotting Victoria because of poor political leadership unfortunately would hurt the wrong people so in the mid-’90s our protest took the form of the “When you go to Victoria, don’t flush” campaign.

And we’ve held fast to that all these years. Now can we flush?

--Mike Sato
  

Thoughts on Sewage, Shellfish and the Partnership's Action Agenda

Geoduck farming (Protect Our Shoreline News)

Last week’s posting ‘Sewage is good for you’ prompted the following comment from Herb Curl:

"The shellfish industry would it both ways: removing pollutants & providing seafood. It's incredible that shellfish are being grown in Puget Sound estuaries with high levels of pollutants from failed septic tanks. The Big Bend at the southern end of Hood Canal is a major example. Maps of shellfish rearing areas in Puget Sound are available (here).

“Shellfish culture has many downsides including production of pseudofeces from rafts, polluting bottom sediments, hybridization between non-native Mytilus galloprovincialis and native Mytilus edulis, and smothering intertidal acreage with oyster bags and geoduck tubes."

Meanwhile, today’s news clip posting at Salish Sea News and Weather of Chris Dunagan’s story about the Puget Sound Partnership’s draft Action Agenda brought the following comments:

"Regarding Chris Dunagan column on the new draft of the Puget Sound Partnership Action Agenda:  I tried to read it to provide comments.  OMG!  Dense, foggy, huge long detailed tables, 41-page executive summary full of gobbeldy gook, almost impossible to actually find any "action" items/plans.  Woe is us .... "  --Rabbits’ Guy

"The Puget Sound Partnership talks about “restoring” decimated species.  But they say nothing about preventing the final destruction of Puget Sound.  Puget Sound’s death will be collateral damage to the final wave of development in the Basin.

"As we have discovered in Chesapeake Bay, restoration is probably not politically possible.  It requires scraping off most of the development in the watershed and replacing it with forest and LID.  (That is not going to happen any time soon).  Why is PSP focusing on “restoration” when we have an eternity to restore, but only months left to prevent driving the final nails in the coffin?

"The Carnegie Letter to the governor spells out the bare-bottom minimum action that PSP must insist upon if their mission is not to be a total failure.  (NPDES permits must insist on the 65/10/0 development standard.)  PSP has shown no indication that they will endorse the Carnegie action plan.  Is it because PSP’s boss, the governor, has dismissed the CG action plan?" -- Tom Holz

Thanks. It sure is interesting to read your comments.

--Mike Sato

'Sewage is good for you'

(Washington State Archives)

That's Washington Governor Dixy Lee Ray back in 1991 quoted in a 1991 Associated Press story, "Dixy Lee Ray lashes out at environmentalists"

Governor Dixy Lee came to mind with this week's flurry of news that the federal and state governments are putting $4.5 million into the local shellfish industry by cleaning up the poop going into Puget Sound.

Dr. Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, heralded the National Shellfish Initiative as bringing jobs, clean water and more "healthy, tasty food."

Gov. Chris Gregoire's messaging about our Washington Shellfish Initiative was how shellfish are the perfect all-natural environmental cleanup crew.

The juxtaposition of powerful shellfish cleaning up poop and yummy shellfish as "healthy, tasty food" isn't the brand the shellfish industry would market, I'm sure.

The Sierra Club. for one, isn't standing up and cheering for the Initiative.

Previously, some opponents of shellfish aquaculture like mussel rafts have contended that the filter-feeding mollusks make the water too clean and damage the ecosystem.

Which brings me back to Gov. Dixy Lee.

Reporter Hal Spencer ends his 1991 account of the governor's talk to the Pacific Coast Association of Port Authorities with:

"Ray cited an attempt by Los Angeles officials to eliminate al traces of human sewage in the city's harbor. They wiped out a "fine fishery" of anchovy, perch, herring and other species, she said.
     "What happened, she said, was that the sewage treatment system robbed the fish of their main food supply. 'Without something to eat, without organic material in the water, the fish cannot survive. You can draw any conclusion that you wish, including that sewage is good for you,' she said to appreciative chuckles from the crowd."
Oh, Dixy.

--Mike Sato