April 22, 2009

Halifax sewage plant faces year of downtime after spill

HALIFAX

Mayor Peter Kelly is confident the city’s damaged sewage treatment plant will be back online better than ever next year.

“When this one comes back on stream for next year, all three will be in operation and we’ll be better than we ever were,” he said.

Kelly said he’s also confident the city’s insurance policy will cover any cost of the shutdown that was caused when a power outage Jan. 14 allowed seven million litres of raw sewage to flood the $54-million plant and damage electrical systems.

“There has been a degree of concern and frustration and rightly so — we experience and feel that as well but we’re committed to move things forward,” Kelly said.

He wasn’t sure if the other two sewage-treatment plants — one that’s not up to full-speed in Dartmouth and another in Herring Cove that is scheduled to be running this year — have the potential of facing similar snags.

“This one has a different need than other plants depending upon grades and elevations and gravity and other factors,” Kelly said. “So for us any lessons learned from this one will be applied to those ones as well.”

Regional councillors learned that it will likely be a year before Halifax’s downtown sewage treatment plant is working again.

A forensic review of the plant and what went wrong is expected to be done next month. Some equipment will likely have to be replaced and it will take six months to get the new gear.

Officials don’t know who will be pay for the cost of the cleanup and improvements. It will run into the millions, although staff would not even guess at a dollar amount.

It’s too soon to tell whether taxpayers could be on the hook for any of the costs.

Untreated waste has been flowing into the harbour since the plant shutdown.

Councillors got a look at before-and-after photos from inside the Upper Water Street plant, showing machinery awash in sewage and electrical equipment with sludge stuck to it. The full extent of the damage is still not known.

What is known is that at 2 a.m. on Jan. 14, alarms went off at the plant because of a power outage. The plant’s operator arrived a short time later to find that the two diesel-powered generators had kicked in and the sewage sluice door leading to a deep well below the plant had closed as it was supposed to do.

Sometime before 4 a.m., while the worker was bringing the plant back online, things started to go wrong.

A generator stopped working with the sluice door open seven to eight centimetres. With the pumps not working and the sluice door partly open, it took less than an hour for the plant to fill with waste, Anguish said.

Officials hope to retrieve digital data from the plant’s computers in the next few days, and it should shed some light on what happened that night.

The plant is covered by property insurance and also by the builder’s risk insurance. Lombard Insurance, the property insurer, was initially in charge of much of the investigation, but in recent weeks Allianz Insurance, the builder’s risk insurer, has taken over.

Canadian Press

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