There was nobody at the Halifax sewage plant on the night of January 14, and no workers present to check backup generators when a power outage hit the plant. With no power available, the machinery at the plant was quickly overwhelmed and the entire system failed. As a result, raw sewage has been flowing into Halifax Harbour ever since.
That, anyway, is the scenario a person with knowledge of the situation has outlined for me. No one else has verified the claims and, citing pending lawsuits, city officials refuse to comment on the plant failure. But my source has always been reliable in the past.
Halifax council is scheduled to discuss the sewage plant failure at its meeting today, but supporting documents for the discussion have not been made available to the press and the discussion, which had originally been planned to take place in public, has been moved to a secret in camera portion of the meeting.
The hyper secrecy around the issue suggests that officials are worried the city will be found at fault for the failure and will have to pay full costs related to cleaning up and restarting the plant.
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.
Happy Birthday.
LTMA– It would be corruption if they were taking pay offs to cover up those issues. Sadly, there is no evidence of that happening, so… That said, the recent scandal with the FD and now this, means that they’re incompetent, and in all honesty, that’s the voter’s fault.
As a retired sewage plant Employee,I find it very hard to believe that a city the size of Halifax has a plant such as this in operation with out a central control room and monitor system(S.C.D.A)maned 24/7
Heads should roll.
Which ones ?
Can you imagine the hell the left would be raising if this had been completely private. We would have heard all that crap about ‘profits’, public sector is cheaper etc. CUPE would be all over this like flies on shit and now we learn it will be closed for at least 12 months.
I demand a public inquiry.
First one of the 3 party leaders who calls for a public inquiry gets my vote.
I don’t know if its feasible or not but it’d be awesome if The Coast could do an online recap of Council’s proceedings on Tuesdays. I try to watch it when I can but man, that shit goes on forever sometimes, and most of the inane banter drives me crazy. Last nights crosswalk light discussion was pretty fun.
Cranky– if we ever get wireless in City Hall, I’ll do a blow-by-blow as it happens, live blogging it.
In the meanwhile, I will start doing a weekly recap, as soon as I can get to it. See the post just up above…
That’d be cool, but just a synopsis would do fine. For the policies that have the greatest direct effect on people its the one thing lacking in our ‘local’ papers. If people were actually told what was going on in their on a weekly basis people would get pretty riled.The cat thing and road widening are examples. I’ve seen some pretty stupid ideas, like $30,000 to build a parking lot at long Lake. I mean. $30,000?
Are the other plants unattended at night ?
Why was the Halifax plant unattended ?
Who made the decision ?
How many times was the back up system tested in the same manner as that which led to the flood ?
Did any of the insurers have their own independent consultantant/s confirm the suitability of the operating system and test the system prior to accepting the risk ?
What odds this is before the courts at the 2012 election ?
What odds the insurers refuse to pay for several years ?
Just asking.
I’m really pressed for time, but I’ll try to give the whole rundown later today.
I think present management of the system (i.e. the Water Commission) probably has a good hold on the issues and the repair and restart of the plant. They’re not to blame for what happened in the past. But that said, there’s likely something we’re not being told about what happened.
Calling RCMP in to audit or investigate the HRM is useless now…since they married down into the HRMP their standards and professionalism went out the window. They are all one big happy posse now… with weapons….
this city is run like a corrupt ‘old boys’ club… it’s pathetic