Three short-listed options for new conveyance routes for the Courtenay-Comox sewage system will go to public meetings later this summer
New Courtenay-Comox sewage master plan process to restart after virus lockdown delays
More than a year ago, the Comox-Courtenay Sewer Commission launched a major initiative to develop a new master plan for conveying sewage to the Brent Road treatment plant, as well as envisioning future demand for advanced levels of treatment and the ability to reuse the wastewater and other resources.
The new plan — officially termed a Liquid Waste Management Plan — was designed to address the immediate issue of preventing the failure of the large sewer pipes that run along the beach below the Willemar Bluffs, by moving the entire conveyance system onto an overland route.
Kris La Rose, the Comox Valley Regional District’s senior manager of water and wastewater services, who is leading the project, his staff and a joint Public and Technical Advisory Committee spent more than six months discussing how best to reconfigure the system. At its March 22, 2019 meeting, the committees settled on a recommended short-list of three options, which were then the basis of consultations with the K’omoks First Nation.
It was expected these options, among other recommendations in the new LWMP, would be finalized this summer. But this spring’s COVID-19 virus security measures prevented public consultations planned for May and June.
With the loosening of provincial lockdown requirements, La Rose will seek commission approval next month to resume public consultations during a six-week period starting in August.
And that will push the regional district staff’s final recommendations on conveyance routes and treatment levels to the Courtenay-Comox Sewage Commission into November.
A BACKGROUND REFRESHER
Back in 2014, the sewage commission surprised the public with the now-discarded plan to prevent failure of the Willemar Bluff beach pipe by building a new pump station on Beech Street in the Croteau Beach area, located in Area B, not the Town of Comox.
Croteau Beach residents raised concerns about negative impacts on their groundwater wells and the propriety of forcing sewerage infrastructure on a neighbourhood that neither benefits from it or has a legislative voice on its governance. There was no public input prior to the plan’s announcement.
They also presented an independent financial analysis that showed the regional district had less expensive options.
As planning proceeded, and La Rose was appointed to a new position with authority over the project, it was discovered that the regional district’s original cost estimates were low by at least half and that other red flags had emerged.
La Rose recommended abandoning the original plan for a highly consultative process to develop a long-term plan that would consider a broader range of issues and visions.
The provincial LWMP process recommended by La Rose included forming Technical and Public advisory committees (TAC and PAC), who would also meet jointly and make recommendations with a single voice.
WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS?
The joint TAC-PAC recommendations are for three options.
First, a system to pump sewage directly from the Courtenay No. 1 pump station on Dyke Road over Comox Road hill, through Comox and along Lazo Road to the Brent Road treatment plant.
Second, the advisory committee collapsed three variations of conveying wastewater to the treatment plant via tunnels into one option. In one variation, the sewer pipe would tunnel through Lazo Road hill. In another, it would tunnel through both Comox Road hill and Lazo Road hill. And using a gravity tunnel from Comox to the treatment plant will also be considered. While tunnelling is considered one option, all three tunnelling variations will be studied separately.
Third on the shortlist is to consider the three variations of the tunnelling option but as implemented into two phases.
Earlier this year, the sewage commission unanimously approved the recommendations of its Technical and Public advisory committee.
La Rose says the TAC and PAC committees also recommended three options for treatment levels at the Brent Road treatment plant. They include continuing with secondary treatment, adding filtration for all but peak wet weather flows or filtration for all flows. All three options would include disinfection in the form of UV light.
This article was updated on June 15 to correct the three conveyance route shortlist options.
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What is your source for saying that the conveyance route, without tunneling will proceed along the Lazo Road to the CVWPCC?
The graphics provided by CVRD as part of the Survey that was circulated prior to the COVID shut down appears to depict the route going down Curtis Road.
I have reason to understand that the cut-and-cover route has not really been considered by the PAC half of the TAC/PAC Committee. I should have thought that making recommendations about the conveyance route would be premised on a full consideration of the the actual routes being considered by Staff/TAC members and consultants. To not do so is to render the PAC part of the TAC/PAC a complete sham.
The CVRD’s first tried to destroy the Willemar Bluffs from the water side. Is it now trying to destroy the Bluffs from the back side of the Bluffs by excavating the sand hill (that is the Bluff), and running larger pipes than anything we’ve seen so far, down the winding route that is Curtis Road, in order to accommodate future wastewater from Area A?
There wasn’t a representative of Area B on the South Sewer Select Committee, but there certainly should have been if wastewater from the South Region was going to be pumped though Area B. The Select Committee was not an advisory committee to the Sewage Commission, but to the CVRD Board.
Why are the Area B representatives on the PAC not consulting with Curtis Road Owners if, indeed the cut-and-cover route which the TAC, Staff and the consultants are really considering (outside of TAC/PAC meetings) is as depicted? They have had months to do so, since the release of the graphics. So has the TAC.
Perhaps the graphic was an error. If so, then that needs to be made publicly very clear. The routes that were previously depicted throughout the LWMP seemed to be the ones that had been recommended in previous, multitudinous studies, dating back many years.
Previous routes held out to the public included:
(a) following the Lazo Road and taking the pipe into the CVWPCC along the portion of Brent Road that is the main entrance into the facility;
(b) following the Lazo Road and then turning East opposite the Eastmost end of Beckton Drive to join up with the extension of the East-West portion of Brent Road within the CVWPCC property itself, so that the pipe enters from the West;
(c) following Lazo Road until it turns North, but running the pipe straight through onto Balmoral Road, turning it North onto either Hughes Road or Morland Road and then East into the CVWPCC lands, so that the pipe enters the CVWPCC from the West.
One or more of those routes have been depicted in materials provided to the PAC, but a Curtis Road route had not been depicted nor considered, until the graphic provided with the scuttled Survey. Someone at the CVRD had to have approved that depiction, but it wasn’t the PAC members who approved it (and who’d never considered it, according to their meeting Minutes).
I am opposed to running a larger (than current) diameter force main down Curtis Road and within less than 100 paces of the beach. To be seeking public approval for that, without have reported to the public on the outcome of the sea rise study that it has been commissioned, is unconscionable. For Staff and Consultants to have tried to slip this route past the PAC and the public is outrageous. If the PAC didn’t notice the sleight-of-hand in the graphics, it should have. And should have roused itself to communicate with those most impacted.
Curtis Road owners and residents have ‘carried it’ to the CVRD, the Sewage Commission, and the sewage system users for 40-years. However well the CVWPCC functions as a considerate neighbour to the East Comox Peninsula can largely be attributed to the Curtis Road owners and (more recently) the Croteau Beach people. They cannot be expected to take the degradation (and risk of degradation) of their properties, for the sole benefit of current and future sewer system users, any longer. To expect them to always be driving the bus for preserving what’s left of the Bluffs and for the smell in the air is wrong.
The conveyance route should stick to the upland areas and stop heaping risk onto the lowland areas.
The Ministry of the Environment is looking for innovative concepts to come out of the LWMP Process. A cut-and-cover route down Curtis Road is not innovative by anyone’s stretch of the imagination.