TIMES
ALBERNI VALLEY

Deadline looms with no clear plan
Quintin Winks, Alberni Valley Times
Published: Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Pressure is building on the Beaver Creek Improvement District as it nears a deadline forcing it to provide safe drinking water to its residents.

But as the year draws to a close and the Vancouver Island Health Authority deadline looms ever larger, the district is no closer to a solution than it was in 1995 when the first report on a region wide water supply was conducted.

Ted Maczulat, a trustee with the BCID, said the district is stuck.The district is waiting for the release of a report on a regional water system before it decides what to do about the situation.
Quintin Winks, Times

On the one hand is the VIHA deadline. If that deadline expires in the spring of 2011 and there's no water filtration system in place, no one's entirely certain what the health authority will do. Yet Beaver Creek's board of trustees was told by those who elected them not to spend millions of dollars on a filtration system until after the 1995 report on a filtration system for the region is updated.

The report that Maczulat and the improvement district are waiting for is being conducted by Koers & Associates. The first draft isn't expected until at least March, said Tony Koers, principal of the company. First the engineering company will meet with elected people and officials from Beaver Creek and Cherry Creek improvement districts, the City of Port Alberni, the regional directors and First Nations representatives. Then the company will conduct public meetings. It's all likely to take some time, and that's what worries Maczulat.

"Politicians will have to mull it over and decide what to do and probably have some more meetings and talk to the people about it," Maczulat said. "Then they'll have to have somebody design something and this whole process is going to take years yet and in the meantime we're stuck with having to boil water because it rains."

But that's not all. In addition to having to boil water and the possibility of financial penalties imposed by VIHA, the end product might cost more than a system designed to service just the BCID, Maczulat said.

When Koers first conducted the study of a region-wide water source in 1995, it involved piping water from Great Central Lake to the City of Port Alberni over a distance of 17 kilometres. The pipe and the filtration facility were estimated to cost about $50 million.

It's likely those costs would be far higher today, possibly as much as $100 million, Maczulat said.

"If the regional district could get two-thirds of that in grants that still leaves, let's say $30 million for the local constituency to cover," Maczulat continued. "Beaver Creek's share of that could be, if you divide $32 million through four, half being the city and the other half borne between the regional partners, that still leaves Beaver Creek with an $8 million share. And the engineers told us we could build our own pretty fancy system for $6 million."

But according to Koers, the new study is looking at piping water from Sproat Lake, which would greatly reduce the distance the water must travel. It's also looking at meeting VIHA's requirements without filtration by drawing from a water source that doesn't suffer turbidity. The clear water would then just need to pass through an ultra violet disinfecting facility and then be subjected to chlorine treatment.

"Once you do the primary disinfection with UV, you can get away with a really small chlorine dosage," Koers said.

While options seem to be materializing, the BCID is still a long way from saying goodbye to its boil-water advisories. Area residents, which number about 1,100, are resisting footing a bill for several million dollars for filtered water. And the Vancouver Island Health Authority doesn't want an outbreak of water-borne illness from inadequate water treatment. The trustees are caught in the middle and waiting to see which direction to move next.

"I guess we'll just have to wait for the report," Maczulat said.

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© Alberni Valley Times 2009