The lack of a sewage treatment facilities in Victoria really is unacceptable.
Victoria revisits issue of treating its sewage
By Jonathan Martin
Seattle Times staff reporter
Victoria, B.C., is the only large city in North America that has made no effort to stop pumping its raw sewage into a waterway. Even Tijuana, Mexico, does more.
Each day, 34 million gallons belch directly into the Strait of Juan de Fuca — more than enough to fill the Exxon Valdez every other day.
But after years of notoriety, the genteel capital of British Columbia finally may be willing to clean up its image.
A blue-ribbon panel of scientists hired by the local sewer board said, in polite language, that dumping straight into the ocean was "not a long-term answer" for sewage treatment.
The cold, brisk waters of the Strait may dilute some of the environmental harm, but Victoria must weigh the political and economic costs of lagging behind other metropolitan cities, the scientists from the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry wrote in a report presented to the sewer board on Wednesday.
In the front row of the meeting was "Mr. Floatie" — an anti-dumping activist wearing his familiar dark brown costume.
The report, years of bad publicity and a financial pledge by the Canadian government may finally be enough to restart long-stalled plans for a sewage treatment plant, said Alan Lowe, Victoria's mayor.
"The city of Victoria continues to have a black eye from the environmental groups as well as the tourism sector," he said. "Our neighbors to the south are concerned. They're not dumping sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but we are."
Lowe said the sewer board still needs to land more government money for the plant, estimated to cost about $400 million. He also must get consensus from those who believe the effluent is sufficiently diluted by ocean waters.
"The stars are starting to line up," Lowe said.
If so, it would end a running dispute between Victoria and Washington state.
In 1992, a Washington lawmaker led a tourist boycott of Victoria over the sewage dumping. The boycott led to a promise of a secondary treatment plant by 2008. But that pledge has not been fulfilled.
Victoria does not want or need more bad publicity, especially with the 2010 Winter Olympics heading to Vancouver, said Bruce Carter, head of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce.
"It's not the type of reputation we want to create," said Carter. "We are the city of gardens. It's not responsible for us to dump that raw sewage."
And besides, said Lowe, the mayor, if the dumping does not end, "there could be protesters" during the Games. "Nobody wants that."
Glenn Kuper, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology, said the cities of Port Angeles and Sequim, located just across the Strait, treat their discharges. "We believe it would be appropriate for Victoria to invest in a similar level of wastewater treatment, especially given our focus on protecting Puget Sound," he said.
The U.S. government's recent interest in saving the southern resident orca whales, which travel past Victoria, also has renewed protests over the dumping.
"To be in the year 2006 and having a major city discharge raw sewage is completely unacceptable," said Kathy Fletcher, executive director of the People for Puget Sound. "It's always struck me as problematic to lean on every person with a septic system and yet have a whole city discharging raw sewage."
Sewage for the greater Victoria area, with more than 300,000 residents, is flushed out to sea in two pipes submerged near the entrance to the Port of Victoria. Residents and business are asked to not flush toxin-laden liquids, but water samples have found levels of fecal coliform bacteria at 1,400 times the Canadian national standard just above the pipes.
The only filter is a screen, intended to catch toilet paper and condoms, which used to wash up on San Juan Island, said Christianne Wilhelmson of the environmentalist group Georgia Strait Alliance.
"Somewhere along the line it's become a belief system that we are lucky in Victoria to have an ocean that will just treat this sewage and wash it away," she said. "To me, it's obvious: Sewage is pollution, and you don't dump pollution in the environment."
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