Wastewater treatment company seeks to dump 30M litres in N.B.
Atlantic Industrial Services in Debert, N.S. is hoping to ditch its wastewater in Dieppe, N.B.
CBC News Posted: Aug 06, 2014 8:37 PM AT Last Updated: Aug 06, 2014 8:40 PM AT
This AIS facility in Debert, N.S. was told they could not dispose of their wastewater in Debert's municipal sewer system. (Google Maps)
Thirty million litres of fracking wastewater could be disposed of in a New Brunswick municipal sewer system if the province gives permission to the Nova Scotia company seeking to dump it.
Atlantic Industrial Services, a company that takes wastewater from other companies and treats it, needs to get rid of 30 million litres of wastewater currently being held in Debert, N.S., near Truro.
Officials in Debert have rejected the wastewater so AIS is looking to Dieppe, N.B., proposing to get rid of it over two years. The whole process would require shipping three tanker truck loads of wastewater every day, five days a week.
The waste would eventually be released in Dieppe’s municipal sewer system.
City officials in Dieppe say the province has to first approve the company's environmental impact assessment before it can even consider the project.
Cleared by environmental report
That assessment said the treated water "meets the Dieppe municipal sewer discharge criteria, and if released to the environment would pose no human health risk or environmental risk.”
In Debert, the municipal council rejected treated wastewater from the same company over concerns over high levels of sodium chloride and some radioactive material.
AIS says it has improved its treatment system to reduce those levels.
Stephanie Merrill, the director of Fresh Water Protection Program with the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, said there are still too many questions about the impact of the water.
She says the province doesn't have a policy on how to deal with the wastewater.
No decision yet
“The rules for industry that were released in 2012 I think, said that we will cross that wastewater bridge when we get there,” she said. “Now all of a sudden the bridge is in front of us.”
“We're reacting very quickly to a problem that was created in Nova Scotia without a policy for documenting and a process for a longer term situation to release shale gas waste.”
City officials in Dieppe said they were only recently informed about the project through the Department of Environment and the company's environmental impact assessment.
In a statement on Wednesday, the province of New Brunswick said no approvals have been made.
Related Stories
- Leaking fracking waste still worries Kennetcook crowd
- Fracking waste water leak in Kennetcook investigated
**********************************
Following is the comment made to the CBC by Richard Lachance and Eveline Hache:
30 million liters (or about 8 million gallons) of "treated" frack water takes 2 years to transport and dispose? The fracking of just one unconventional shale gas well requires 1-5 million gallons of clean water mixed with a stew of toxic chemicals of which half may stay in the well untreated and the other half comes back as flowback that needs to be processed or "treated". Each well may be fracked multiple times. Each well pad contains multiple wells. The GNB want to authorize thousands of these wells. Are we the only ones who see a potential disaster with this scheme?
Where are the independent testing reports that certify the safety of this so called "treated" flowback water? Where are the review and comments from the NB scientific and engineering communities? If this "treated" flowback is as clean as AIS claims, why not pump it into our public drinking water systems? If it isn't safe enough to drink, then why would we feel it would be safe enough to dump billions of gallons into the Petitcodiac (and other rivers) and eventually the Bay of Fundy? Are we actually considering death by a billion cuts?
Is this the future legacy we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren? This is a legacy of environmental destruction and death on an industrial scale. They will ask us how we ever considered such an absurdity. We can and must do better than this.
Where are the independent testing reports that certify the safety of this so called "treated" flowback water? Where are the review and comments from the NB scientific and engineering communities? If this "treated" flowback is as clean as AIS claims, why not pump it into our public drinking water systems? If it isn't safe enough to drink, then why would we feel it would be safe enough to dump billions of gallons into the Petitcodiac (and other rivers) and eventually the Bay of Fundy? Are we actually considering death by a billion cuts?
Is this the future legacy we want to bequeath to our children and grandchildren? This is a legacy of environmental destruction and death on an industrial scale. They will ask us how we ever considered such an absurdity. We can and must do better than this.
No comments:
Post a Comment