The City of Castlegar says a technological solution to reduce odours from the south-end sewage treatment plant has not worked.
Assistant utilities manager Aaron Geck told city council this week that the installation last year of a geotube dewatering system for solid waste hasn’t produced the results they were hoping for, despite extensive efforts.
“We immediately started to run into challenges running these things,” he said, adding city staff are now exploring other options “because obviously this is not working for operations or the community.”
The geotubes were supposed to help get rid of a foul smell that hangs over that part of town, especially in the summer. In 2023, the city awarded a $611,000 contract for the equipment, which was installed the following year. The city then spent about a year trying to fine-tune them.
Previously, the city had allowed liquid biosolids to dry in two sludge ponds before wood chips were added and the material was hauled to the landfill. However, they had trouble keeping up due to the limited size of the drying beds and started to stockpile the material on site. The Ministry of Environment said the stockpiles didn’t comply with the city’s permit, so a contractor was hired to haul them away.
The city chose the geotube dewatering system, in which biosolids are not exposed to open air as they are in the sludge drying beds, hoping the smell would go away. But for a variety of reasons, that hasn’t worked out.
“[We] crossed every t, dotted every i, ran these things exactly as the supplier and our consultants were saying to do, and we still weren’t getting the results we were looking for,” Geck said.
Councillor Darcy Bell asked if some of the cost the city has spent on the geotubes can be recovered, since they did not work as advertised. Municipal services manager Chris Hallam said they are looking into it.
Councillor Sue Heaton-Sherstobitoff said she hoped a solution could be in place by next summer. “When it gets hot, the smell is heavier and stinkier,” she said.
“Our site is not right [for geotubes],” Hallam told council. “They perform better when you have a lot of area that you can put these tubes out to dewater over a longer period of time and it’s out in the countryside, away from residential [areas].”
Hallam said they are looking for a medium-term solution, since a long-term sewage plan may call for replacing the facility altogether.
“We’ve got to balance how much we actually spend at a facility that in 10 to 15 years ideally is no longer needed to manage our sewage,” he said.
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