Treatment plan fosters distrust
Risk and trust.
There’s too much risk and not nearly enough trust to bring Northern Pulp’s plan for a new wastewater treatment facility to fruition, according to Andrea Paul, the chief of the Pictou Landing First Nation, and scores of fishermen and residents in Pictou County.
“I know that they keep saying they are meeting the regulations,” Paul said of the proposed treatment facility, which includes a pipe that will extend into the Northumberland Strait to discharge treated effluent from the kraft mill process.
“I see what’s in Boat Harbour, the process in Boat Harbour, so when they are explaining this system it is hard for me to visualize it when the only truth I know is what I’ve seen.”
What Paul and the nearly 500 people who live on the Pictou Landing reserve have seen over the past 50 years is a treatment plant that has dumped hundreds of millions of litres of toxic effluent daily into Boat Harbour. The province has pledged to shut down the Boat Harbour plant by 2020 and begin remediation of the 140-hectare lagoon.
The pulp mill at Abercrombie Point will be required to have a new treatment facility ready for operation by that 2020 deadline.
“What I want to see is a process that maintains the integrity of the environment,” Paul said, summing up an impassioned address she had delivered earlier this week at one of three meetings at which Northern Pulp unveiled the design plan for the new treatment facility.
Concerned Northumberland Strait fishermen met with the company on Monday and two public consultations were held on Tuesday and Wednesday. A 26page handout and accompanying slides that were presented at all three meetings included a representation of four small bottles of treated mill effluent. The first, dark and murky, was labelled 1970s. The second was still dirty but clearer and supposedly came from the 1990s. A 2017 bottle was more diluted and a projected 2020 bottle was clear.
“That really bothered me,” Paul said, adding that the clear water is exactly what her people were promised in 1967 when the Boat Harbour plant was opened.
“And the future was clear. That’s exactly what our people were told back then. Everything would be great. To use that kind of imagery again, I felt it was rude. It was unsettling. “Here we go again.” Speaking on behalf of the Northumberland Fisheries Association, lobster fisherman Allan MacCarthy said the Monday meeting did not offer any answers.
“It was a complete embarrassment to Northern Pulp, KHS Consulting, Dillon Consulting, their lawyers, engineers and spin doctors,” Maccarthy said.
“We were two hours asking questions and we didn’t get one answer. There was no science involved with their answers.”
KHS provided Northern Pulp with a comprehensive engineering study on the construction of a new treatment facility and Dillon Consulting came up with a facility design.
“The expert from KHS admitted that they didn’t do a lobster larvae study,” Maccarthy said. “That’s the foundation of our industry.
“Do you think we can trust them (Northern Pulp) or the Department of Environment with risk management? The science they were using is from 2007. When you are dealing with science, a year is like an eternity. . . . They are asking the lobster industry, the biggest exporter in Nova Scotia, a billiondollar industry in Nova Scotia, they are asking us to risk it. They told us in 1967 that Boat Harbour would be OK. They are asking us 51 years later to trust them again.”