With much fanfare, Halifax Water president Carl Yates appeared before city council Tuesday and announced that Harbour Solutions, the new sewage system, is at “total completion.” One after another, councillors liberally dished out accolades, patted themselves on the back and made unsupported allegations that the media somehow misreported the story.
But while the largest public works project in Halifax history stayed on budget—total costs came it at $330 million, compared to a projected $333 million—Harbour Solutions is by no means an unblemished success story.
The project will be forever marred by the PR and environmental disaster of the January 14, 2009 malfunction of the main Halifax sewage plant, causing about 100 million litres of raw sewage to flow into the harbour each day. The plant is now working as designed, but the fix took about a year and cost $10.9 million; most of that cost was covered by insurance, but ratepayers are on the hook for $500,000.
And while Yates celebrates “total completion,” he still refuses to make public the $100,000 forensic audit of the plant malfunction, saying there is “a small lawsuit” related to the failure that has yet to be resolved. Without that audit, the public still has no way to know who was at fault for the plant failure.
The lawsuit related to the plant failure is not the only legal action related to Harbour Solutions: there remains an active lawsuit with regard to the Pier A Pumping Station, the structure at the corner of Barrington and Inglis Streets that has repeatedly spewed raw sewage into surrounding apartment buildings. Yates also refuses to release documents related to that malfunction.
The Freshwater Brook sewer line flows into the pumping station; Yates has always maintained that the replacement of that line, which saw south end streets dug up for the last two years, was unrelated to the pumping station failure, but councillors Tuesday suggested that it was. The conversation was cryptic, as council discusses the lawsuit in secret, but the line was replaced specifically to divert rain water away from the pumping station, which tends to overflow during storms.
Whether it is considered a design success or not, Harbour Solutions was built to “primary” treatment standards, and so fails to meet newly announced “secondary” standards set by the federal government.
As councillor Linda Mosher points out, council had directed that Harbour Solutions meet much higher environmental standards, but due to cost cutting and diversion of funds, some to the Freshwater Brook project, those standards were not met.
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This article appears in Jun 16-22, 2011.
Harbour solutions was a joke. I think they screwed it from the start and we have something that is years behind in technology and is like a band aid on a gaping head wound.
HRM f$%#s up as usual
The piping in the picture appears to be held together with duct tape, and held up with bits of old boards scavenged from street rubbish. While I am no snob when it comes to emergency plumbing repairs–that looks like the sort of makeshift I would do when the main line out of my trailer gets out of order on its way to the septic tank–I am also an old woman lacking both training in the plumbing arts and funds to hire a professional. You would think for umpty-million dollars they could have constructed something more substantial.
And do you not get winds there? Those boards seem likely to head back to their former homes on nearby streets in the first stiff breeze. Maybe the fence will hold things in place for awhile. If they used high quality duct tape.
Vancouver will be paying $1.5 billions to upgrade its primary sewage plants to the secondary level demanded by new federal laws. How much will Halifax have to pay to meet the same legal requirements?
The photo is a year old.
What about the filter that blocks all the stray condoms and tampon applicators? Wasn’t there a problem with that as well? Haven’t been for a walk around Point Pleasant park beaches in a while to see how the filtering process is working in that regard…
I will believe that the Harbour Solutions Project is complete when I see the lab results confirming that the plants are in complete compliance with their discharge permits.
Xan: that “plumbing” is actually from an air release valve and is the temporary stuff they installed last year (or the year before…?) when the smells were really bothering everyone, prior to full operation. That diverted the released gasses to an air scrubber. Quit trollin.
Once again, Tim Bousquet chooses to write an exceptionally one-sided piece with little or no actual evidence on anything. In addition, anyone with any sort of civil engineering background would realize that the freshwater brook project was necessary for completion of the treatment plant, here’s why: Freshwater brook was once an actual brook running through downtown halifax but was diverted into the combined sanitary/storm system constructed “back in the day”. Once we smartened up and realized that dumping raw sewage into the harbour was a bad idea, we needed to treat all effluent going into the harbour. A full flowing brook and all its tributary watershed area is far too much effluent to treat and so we needed to separate the “clean” brook water in a new pipe away from the “dirty” sewage. Without that project, the halifax treatment plant would have had to be much larger and treat alot of potentially “clean” water. How that could possibly be related to the failure doesn’t make any sense from an engineering standpoint and it is bad reporting to imply anything else.
longwalker– the point is that the Freshwater project was NOT part of Harbour Solutions. The design of the entire system was that Pier A pumping station could handle all the water. That was clearly mis-engineered. The pumping station failed, the city and contractor are suing each other over it, the city digs up and puts two pipes in, which again, wasn’t in the original design. That’s a screw up on someone’s part, hence the lawsuits.
Antonx – I was down to Point Pleasant Park, and there’s still plenty of beach whistles there. In fact, a market researcher could probably get a good study sample on consumer preferences based on the sheer number of them on the beach.
And people let their kids play there. How the hell do you explain what those things are to kids?!
To have any level of sewage collection/treatment is a plus for our environment. This process is aerobic (when working) which does not generate CH4 (methane) Methane is 21X’s more globle warming than C02 which is the primary gas released in a working system. Remember the smells when the system was only using the screens? Remember the odor eaters Halifax Water brought in to help control the odors? (electronic air cleaners) Well that was the smell of methane warming our plantet. That magic gas thats added to propane so if theres a leak you can smell it.. (have a sniff of your barbeque before you light it.. ) the smell of 2009.. Raw sewage to the ocean is an anaerobic process generating methane as it decomposes.
In the end this system generates good paying jobs. I’m only disappointed on the “cost to tax payers” when Halifax had been collecting funds for a system for over 20 yrs that went into general revenue?? As well,, the process where Halifax Water didn’t get a one time capital cost from property owners as was the norm for systems put in during the Halifax county days. In stead they collect capital cost through user fees and have other systems that paid their capital cost for their rural or suburban systems now paying 62 % of their sewage bill for the Capital cost of this harbour solution project. To those of you on this new system.. you are welcome. Its a pleasure to subsidize your green food print. Just let us know when we can pay some more.. like your.. capital cost for your recreation facilities that we pay for and you don’t.
I read the article, I see “The plant is now working as designed” and that it stayed under budget and I consider the plant to be a success. It does what it was supposed to do, and it cost us less than it was budgeted to cost. Perhaps it fails to provide safe low income housing, nor does it provide urban grown organic vegetables, and it’s not acting as a bastion of culture that provides a stage and a champion for local artistic talent – but then, that’s not what it’s for.
It’s for processing waste water. It does what it’s designed to do, for less than it was supposed to cost. That’s a success.
With any major engineering project, there are glitches. Buying a bridge, a highway system or a sewage treatment system is not like buying a computer you just pull out of the box and plug in. If anything, harbor residents should be pleased there have been so FEW glitches and the thing has come in close to budget.
Halifax residents first started paying into an obligatory fund to build a sewage treatment system in the 1970s. We should be ashamed it took this long to get a sewage treatment system, and be happy it has finally arrived and is doing what it is supposed to do. If it had been built in the 1970s as it was supposed to be done, our beaches would be that much cleaner today.