City plans to recoup costs of dealing with CRC oil spill

The City of Regina will seek to recoup any of its expenses after contaminants from oil that spilled at the Co-op Refinery Complex (CRC) got into Wascana Creek.

“No municipal wastewater treatment plant is designed to treat this kind of event,” said Kurtis Doney, director of water, waste and environment for the City of Regina.

Doney, addressing a news conference on Tuesday at City Hall, added that the majority of hydrocarbons, or oil, were contained in city lagoons. But not all of the spill was caught.

Doney was asked whether the city plans to seek compensation,

Doney said the city is keeping track of expenses during its investigation. And while he stopped short of calling it a fine, Doney said they are expecting to get those losses back.

“We will be looking to recoup any costs,” said Doney.

Further testing found that hydrocarbons were present in tainted water that made it into Wascana Creek. Doney added that the contaminants are “low risk” but again was unable to specify how much contaminated water entered the creek.

Doney said the city and EPCOR, the company that runs Regina’s wastewater treatment facility, continue to run tests on water at the plant, in Wascana Creek and the Qu’appelle River.

“We first discovered the hydrocarbons in our main wastewater Pumping Station,” said Doney.

Kelly Struski, communications with EPCOR, said the city alerted the wastewater treatment plant of the high levels of hydrocarbons on May 22 coming downstream from the refinery.

That triggered the plant to divert the flow of effluent to EPCOR’S lagoons to be contained.

Struski was not able to specify the capacity of the lagoons or how much contaminated water was diverted.

“Wastewater treatment plants are not designed to treat hydrocarbons,” said Struski, speaking on Monday evening. “No municipal wastewater treatment plants are.”

But according to John Hilts, CRC operations superintendent, hydrocarbons are always present in the effluent sent to the city wastewater treatment centre.

“The regular wastewater flow which always contains some oil,” said Hilts, speaking on Monday.

“We send water, three and a half to six and a half million litres of wastewater to the city on a daily basis. It always does contain some oil in the PPM levels.”

The measurement of parts per million (PPM) is used to describe the content of contaminated water.

On Tuesday Doney was unable to say if there was an acceptable PPM level of hydrocarbons heading from the refinery to the waste treatment centre.

Doney said the wastewater treatment centre is primarily designed to treat human waste. He said there was an agreement between the city and the CRC regarding effluent leaving the refinery, but Doney said he “can’t speak to details of what was in that agreement.”

On Tuesday Struski responded that “at times, the wastewater treatment plant has detected levels of hydrocarbons in the influent. At low levels, the plant will treat these hydrocarbons without much problem.”

The cause of the May 22 spill is attributed to high wind speeds at the CRC. According to the refinery, the winds caused waves on open air ponds containing oil, water and sediment. Winds caused waves on the ponds, which dislodged sediment. That sediment then caused a discharge of oil contaminated water destined for the city’s waste water treatment centre.

Doney added during the press conference that the risk to environment remains low and that the city and EPCOR were told to notify downstream users a week after the spill occurred.

An investigation is ongoing, as is the cleanup.