Why should voters be wary of the CVRD and the Sewer Commission’s proposals on sewerage infrastructure projects?
Because there’s a history of bad decisions. How do we know they were bad? In some cases, because citizens have sued the regional district over the effect of those decisions. In other cases, the CVRD has created a legacy of unnecessary ongoing costs for taxpayers.
Here’s some history.
1960s Sewage lagoon
In the mid-1960s, the City of Courtenay treated its sewage in a lagoon near the Courtenay Airpark. Design flaws miscalculated how high the Courtenay River might rise. Eventually, it rose over the lagoon and flooded raw sewage into the K’omoks estuary.
1980s current system
Two decades later, in the mid-1980s, the city of Courtenay and the Town of Comox, with the CVRD, constructed the present day system.
They had several options at the time about where to place the sewer pipe that would move effluent from the Courtenay pump station #1 to the treatment plant at the end of Brent Road, near Point Holmes. Along the way it would pick up sewage from the K’omocks First Nation and Comox.
One option placed the force-main sewer pipe on a completely overland route. Instead, the CVRD choose to run the pipe almost exclusively through our marine environment — because it cost less — even though many citizens and groups advised against it.
Almost immediately after the pipeline was constructed, the erosion of the Willemar Bluffs began to accelerate. Property owners on top of the bluff, fearful for their homes, filed a class action lawsuit. The regional district denied responsibility for the increased erosion and fought the residents for years.
But eventually the court ruled against the CVRD, saying its actions caused the added erosion. But the regional district refused to accept the ruling. The residents complained to the B.C. Ombudsman, who also ruled against the CVRD.
Caught by the B.C. judicial system and the provincial ombudsman, the CVRD was ordered to fix the problem. Their solution to halt the erosion: spend nearly $1 million to place rip-rap (large rocks) at the base of the bluffs.
Goose Spit
After the rip-rap slowed the bluffs’ erosion, the sand along Goose Spit began to disappear, eroding that shoreline. This is not a coincidence or an unrelated event.
The sand cliffs within the Strait of Georgia — Quadra Island, Savory Island, Willemar Bluffs, the Komas Bluff on Denman — were created by the glacial retreat some 22,000 years ago. They are all one oceanological feature, the Quadra Sands Formation, commonly referred to as feeder cliffs. They are always eroding.
Protecting Goose Spit from erosion
The Goose Spit is a sandbar created by shoreline drift, the natural erosion of the Willemar Bluffs, and it extends to Denman Island via what’s known as the Comox Bar. Once the Willemar Bluffs stopped feeding sand to Goose Spit, it began to wash away.
So now, the CVRD had to spend about $500,000 more to dig in large driftwood logs along the windward side of Goose Spit to protect it from diminishing. In addition to the capital cost, Valley taxpayers pay tens of thousands of dollars annually — probably forever — to reinforce and maintain these protections of Goose Spit Park.
Point Holmes
But after the construction of the sewer pipe and placement of rip-rap below the Willemar Bluffs, other beaches began to erode.
Homeowners to the north of the bluffs began to lose shoreline, too, and parts of their front yards in some cases. So residents installed rip-rap, at their own expense, to save their property.
And that moved the accelerated erosion action further up the shoreline. Parts of the popular tourist beach at Point Holmes started to wash away. Every year, large chunks of land disappear with the winter storms.
To fix that problem, the Town of Comox will spend another $1.6 million to add rip-rap from where the homeowners stopped to the Point Holmes boat launch.
There’s a pattern to all this, and it looks like one continuous chain reaction from the initial routing of a sewer pipe along the Willemar Bluffs. A routing people advised was wrong, but a warning the CVRD ignored.
The result has already cost Valley taxpayers millions of dollars, and thousands in ongoing annual maintenance expense.
But, wait, there’s more.
Based on experience, it’s probable the Point Holmes rip-rap project will shift erosion further up the beach, and may even accelerate the erosion of the bluffs at the end of the CFB Comox runway, which stand near the sewer outfall into the Strait of Georgia.
It’s also possible that increased winter storms will eventually threaten the sewer pipe buried beneath the Point Holmes beach from the treatment plant to the outfall, and that this pipe will also have to be abandoned.
2011 Sewerage Master Plan
An engineering firm in a early 2000s report recommended the CVRD abandon the pipe on the beach below the Willemar Bluffs. The report said the pipe had been exposed and was vulnerable to winter storms.
This is the same pipe that should have been placed overland, the pipe that caused accelerated erosion of the bluffs and the diminishing of Goose Spit. Still, the CVRD did not act until it adopted a Sewerage Master Plan in 2011.
Unfortunately, that plan only addresses the Willemar Bluffs section of sewer pipe. It doesn’t address pipe on the beach along Point Holmes to the outfall, which is equally vulnerable to winter storms. It does not address the pipe along Comox Bay or in the K’omoks estuary. It doesn’t deal with shoreline erosion and the loss of private property, and the continuing costs of fixing the next problem created by resolving the last one.
The plan has led to the South Sewer System referendum on June 18 that will add miles of new sewer pipe into Baynes Sound and the estuary. A proposal that the Project Watershed Estuary Working Group opposes.
Nor is the CVRD sewage commission following its plan. They have not engaged a coastal engineering specialist to determine the remaining life of the Willemar Bluffs pipe. It did not update its plan in 2014. It has not started an initiative to incorporate resource recovery — reclaimed water, energy reuse — into the master plan. It has not created a governance structure for areas outside of the existing mandate for the City of Courtenay and Town of Comox.
Old technology at the treatment plant
The CVRD also failed to equip the Brent Road treatment plant with the necessary technology to reduce odors to the degree required in a residential neighborhood. Angry nearby homeowners sued the CVRD and won.
As a result of the lawsuit, trucks now haul sewage solids multiple times every day from the Point Holmes area to Cumberland for composting. It could and should have been an odorless, carbon neutral operation.
The CVRD sewer commission proposes to spend millions of dollars more on projects that will lock the sewerage system into existing and new infrastructure in our estuary and other marine environments for years to come.
And taxpayers will bear the burden again when changing weather patterns inevitably force the CVRD to do what it’s refusing to do today: Go to an all overland route, as proposed by Project Watershed.