The city is working hard to fix the lagoon odour issue.
The 2016 budget had money set aside to address the odour issue, including a lagoon assessment done by engineering firm, Catterall and Wright.
Unfortunately, the problem runs much deeper than that according to a report that engineers, Kevin Forsdahl and Shaun McLeod from Catterall and Wright presented to council on Jul. 25.
Public Works Director, Peter Bergquist, says the Humboldt lagoon system is currently at capacity but is still functioning fully and safely.
What that means is that the lagoon will have to be either expanded or replaced within the next five years compared to the next 10 years that was originally planned, says Bergquist.
Bergquist says the city will be looking into cost benefits of continuing to fix the current odour issues, however it may be more cost effective to hold off until a sufficient upgrading plan is put in place.
“Now we’re in the process if it is even worth putting the money in to address the odour issues or go for the future designed plan...by addressing the issues of core capacity you’re addressing the odour issues on a long term basis.”
According to the report, odour issues are being caused by the lagoon being seasonally overloaded with the storage cells “being operated above their designed capacity to achieve acceptable effluent quality.”
The current lagoon system will not be able to handle anymore growth from the city, says the report.
Before they can go forward with the level of upgrade, some questions still need to be addressed by council and staff.
One of these is population threshold and the costs associated with that, says Bergquist.
“How big do we want to make it for? Do we want to make it for 9,000 population? Twelve-thousand? What’s going to be the price tag associated with that?”
When it came to a similar project with the water treatment system, Bergquist says that they have upgraded to a system that will be able to handle a population of 9,000 with an option to upgrade to 12,000.
This would seem like a sufficient plan for the lagoon system, but by building the lagoon too large or too small each would cause different problems with efficiency and cost.
“We have to be really confident on the growth numbers in order to design for this,” says Bergquist.
New wastewater regulations that were brought in in 2015 change how long material has to be held before being released, says Bergquist, which makes for higher quality effluent being released into water systems.
Bergquist says that will affect how the current system is either upgraded or replaced.
If the current system is replaced with a brand new system, location needs to be taken into consideration in relation to people’s homes.
Another question to take into consideration is whether the minimum requirement from residential areas is going to be sufficient or is a further distance away required for a better quality of life, says Bergquist.
What is needed from here, as outlined by Catterall and Wright, includes required increased treatment capacity, storage capacity, sufficient buffer areas, and odour control, as well as a downstream impact study.
At the city council meeting, Mayor Malcolm Eaton said that they will be looking in to federal and provincial funding to help with the inevitable costs associated with the new lagoon.
