VANCOUVER — After delays and continuing debate about the best sewage-treatment option for Victoria, the Capital Regional District agreed yesterday to proceed with a revised design for construction of a sewage-treatment plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt.
“We support the decision to move ahead. It has been a decade since the provincial government ordered the CRD to build sewage-treatment facilities,” said John Werring, senior science and policy adviser with the David Suzuki Foundation. “With this decision to proceed, it’s time to stop talking and polluting and start building.” The waste water treatment plant will provide tertiary, which includes high level filtering, sewage treatment by 2020.
The CRD was ordered in 2006 to have a sewage-treatment plant running by this year. Following years of public consultation and technical input, the CRD was on its way to meeting that goal with a plan to build a secondary treatment plant at McLoughlin Point. By 2014, the process was derailed by organized opponents who argued that sewage treatment was unnecessary, and the plan and consultation inadequate.
“We’re hopeful that yesterday’s decision will put this issue to rest in the region. Moving ahead with a sewage-treatment plan backed by strong science is not only the right thing to do, it is essential,” Werring said. “Dumping raw sewage into the ocean is simply unacceptable for any forward-thinking community.”
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Media contact:
John Werring, Senior Science and Policy Adviser, David Suzuki Foundation
Cell: 604-306-0517