Yesterday was the first day of summer, which means that the Halifax Water Commission has missed its long-announced target of having the failed Halifax sewage plant up and running and fully operational by spring.
All along, Water Commission manager Carl Yates has said he expected to meet the timeline. Commissioning a sewage plant is no small matter, as the much delayed Dartmouth plant is demonstrating. It’s several months of increasing sewage flows into the plant and re-calibrating equipment, which is evidently very touchy. I don’t fault Yates; he’s a capable manager and is being extremely cautious in the wake of past failures, which he inherited. No doubt the plant will eventually be working as intended. Just now, Water Commission spokesperson James Cambell tells me the last bank of UV lights will go in tomorrow, so I guess it’s spring plus two days, for the plant to be fully operational.
Still, the present lack of communication is annoying. As I write this, Halifax council is in a secret meeting, which is agendized simply as “Contractual Matter – Harbour Solutions.”
There are, I should stress, two contractual matters at hand. Chronologically, the failed sewage plant is actually the second. Yates has claimed all along that insurance will cover the costs related to the failure of January, 2009, but if that’s the case, why is council today meeting in secret?
Maybe the secret meeting involves the first of the contractual issues, related to Pumping Station A at the corner of Barrington and Inglis Streets. Citing litigation (in small claims court, related to the flooding of cars in a nearby apartment building with sewage), Yates continues to decline to discuss the issue in detail with me, but he has admitted that the pumping station had design errors, which the Commission is attempting to fix. (Yates will not say if the design errors and the apartment flooding are related.)
Hopefully, we’ll know more later today, after council breaks from its meeting.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.
From today’s Herald:
The plant has been back in full operation for at least a week and a half, a Halifax Water spokesman said Thursday.
It recently went through a testing phase and “the (treatment) system is running now,” James Campbell said.
The $54-million waste-water plant malfunctioned in January 2009 during a flood that was prompted by a power failure in the downtown neighbourhood in which it is situated.
“It’s running as it should be running,” said Campbell. “They’ll keep monitoring it . . . but the plant is essentially fully operational.”
So Tim, your complaint is that the deadline was missed by a few weeks? Would you have prefered the plant be put into service prematurely and risk another failure. Of course that would actually give you something to write about instead of trying to make a big issue about people trying to get things working properly and prevent another incident.