The city of Montreal, Quebec had planned to dump 7.5 billion liters of wastewater into the nearby St. Lawrence River on the 25th of October 2015, but the government, just one week away from the election, intervened and ordered them not to.
The sewage dump was part of a plan to move a snow chute but the Canadian government, a US Senator and the public had major concerns about how the wastewater would adversely affect the river’s ecosystem and drinking water sources.
The Guardian reports:
“A citizen petition with 90,000 names opposed to the project was presented to Mayor Denis Coderre at a city council meeting on Tuesday. The environmental group Save the River had argued there must be a way for the city to dispose of its sewage without potential harm to human health and wildlife.
Coderre said city officials had selected the best option in terms of time and cost and believed drinking water for downstream communities would not be affected by the project, which aimed to be completed by mid-November.”
This news article illustrates a really tough problem with wastewater infrastructure management, that certain parts of any wastewater system have no redundancy – most often the discharge end.
How to manage this lack of redundancy and the environment considerations when major rehabilitation work is required, takes a lot of planning, consultation, an examination of alternatives and gaining of stakeholder agreement.
From an infrastructure management point of view duplicating wastewater systems for the very few times they might need to be shut off doesn’t present as optimal use of scarce capital funds. This has to be balanced against environmental and community health concerns.
When starting to consider these types of projects some infrastructure management thoughts are:
- Allow for long lead times to get these projects approved
- Allow for a lot of community consultation
- Assume environmental protection groups are going to be unhappy – bring them into the consultation process, and work with them to meet mutually acceptable solutions
- Allow for a lot of political dialog and discussion
- Work hard to build trust across multiple stakeholders and interest groups around the work that needs to be completed and why
- Bundle work, bringing renewals forward if necessary – so if you do have to discharge untreated effluent, the maximum amount of work can be completed at the time
- Be rigorous in your risk analysis
- Ensure your project planning is excellent and very well organized to minimize discharge duration
- Communicate, communicate, communicate
In the final analysis, a planned discharge as part of a well-organized project, executed in the minimum amount of time whilst completing the maximum amount of work is a better proposition than a major asset failure, followed by a longer and more expensive unplanned discharge.
The infrastructure management communication challenge is taking all the stakeholders with you through the planning and project execution process.
PHOTO CREDIT: Karl Hipolito (Used with permission).
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