Snow Lake’s sewage treatment plant has done a crappy job of properly treating wastewater. Failures at the plant were causing partially treated wastewater to be released into Snow Lake.
The town has now gotten to the bottom of the issue, after calling in the manufacturer and draining one of the two treatment cells.
Snow Lake chief administrative officer Robert Hedley said the release of effluent was caused by the chains that spin in each cell, called biowheels, wearing out constantly.
“We didn't know why we were having consistent failures, changing those biowheels,” Hedley said.
“You normally can't tell because normally those biowheels are basically buried right up to inputs coming into the effluent chamber. You can't really see where the thing on the bottom is.”
The Town of Snow Lake explained in a news release that each time partially treated wastewater was released, the town reported it to Manitoba Sustainable Development, who monitored the situation.
High amounts of untreated sewage going into a water system can cause a process known as eutrophication, where excess nutrients in the water can cause damaging algae blooms. Hedley said Snow Lake was not in much danger.
“A lot of municipalities like Montreal, they had these huge, septic spillage into their river and lake systems as well,” Hedley said.
“[Manitoba Sustainable Development] won't let us do that. There's no way we would even do it anyway. Even when our end result testing is coming back, it's a small amount that was getting out. It's not even killing fish.”
Figuring out what the sewage problem was and fixing it has been a big priority for Hedley and the Town.
“It's not an old plant - it's only about six years old,” Hedley said.
“This is a $9 million plant... this has been a major preoccupation to make sure that we get this right.”
Hedley said the town has been preparing for the cost to fix the plant, but doesn’t know exactly what the final bill will be.
“A lot of it has been absorbed because we budgeted for it,” he said.
“It's hard to know, by the time it's done. I've already had lots of finance meetings. We have the funds available to be able to cover this off. It's not going to affect our taxes or anything like that... We might have to defer a couple of projects for next year.”
Hadley said he was relieved when the problem was finally found.
“My major concern was that we were going to spend this time and money, and we're still going to have problems - but we found it,” he said.
“It took us a while for them to figure it out as well. It should be the regular 20 year life cycle. It'll just be regular maintenance.”
Snow Lake residents won’t notice changes as the fixes are made, as their sewage will be transported to a treatment plant in Wabowden. The cell that was drained was also sent to Wabowden.
