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A Wonderful Fairy Tale

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Active Earth engineers told the public and government that the Stebbings Road Quarry site was geologically ideal for a contaminated soil facility because the bedrock there was impermeable.  Expert testimony before the Environmental Appeal Board proved that to be unfounded so that the site cannot be defended on that basis.  The proponent now does not defend their optimistic site description but suggests instead that the public and government should ignore the failings of the site, but instead accept that the engineering technology of the facility and their remediation securities will suffice to protect Shawnigan’s water forever.  Why, we could put one of these anywhere!

What a wonderful fairy tale!

Landfills exhibit a hierarchy of environmental risk.  At the bottom level of risk is a municipal waste facility, next in risk level is one taking industrial grade contaminated soil, a third level is industrial grade but with more noxious levels of contaminants and finally a hazardous waste level at the top of the pyramid.  The CHH/SIA quarry proposes to take material at the third level of risk. 

If we were to proceed to select a site that is suitable for establishing a landfill for contaminated soils at the third level of risk, the CHH/SIA quarry would fail the most fundamental of selection criteria.  Not only would it fail in the case of contaminated soils, but would not even pass as a location for the first level risk of a municipal waste landfill.  The main characteristics of the site that would instantly disqualify it are that it sits atop a vulnerable aquifer and immediately adjacent to surface streams, all of which lead directly to a major community drinking water supply.  The consequence of a system failure is a risk to public health.

The Stebbings Road Quarry site was not selected after a systematic search for a suitable location that could meet technically sound criteria for a contaminated soil facility.  It was an artifact of commercial opportunity, based on the favourable economics of reclaiming an existing quarry with contaminated material that would command much richer hauling charges than the innocuous domestic grade soil that was specified in their existing mining permit.

When the contaminated soil remediation and landfill at the quarry was first proposed it was characterized by the proponent’s engineers as an ideal location because the bedrock of the quarry was unfractured, impervious to water flow and thus an ideal container for contamination.  The claim was made that it would take one hundred thousand years for groundwater to penetrate vertically to an aquifer that incidentally is also said by the engineers not to exist and three thousand years to flow in the non-existent aquifer to the lake and 3 million years for any leaching effluent to reach Shawnigan Lake via the bedrock cap that is said to underlay the pit.

Before and during the EAB hearings that concluded on July 25, 2014, this model of the quarry bedrock geology was repeatedly called into question by qualified hydrogeologists called by the Shawnigan Residents Association and the Cowichan Valley Regional District.  It now appears that the bedrock is actually fractured, that water moves easily within the fissures and that the technical assessment done by the proponent’s engineers was rudimentary at best and certainly highly optimistic. 
Testimony established that the engineering company has not been paid by the proponents to date but is owed over half a million dollars to be recovered only once the permit was confirmed and operations begun.  This appears to make the engineering firm a material investor in the property, an advocate for the project rather than a scientifically objective party, and provides a powerful incentive to exaggerate the suitability of the site.

Legal counsel for the proponent did not call the engineering company before the hearing as an expert witness.  Thus the site conditions and engineering plan, upon which the permit was largely based by the Ministry, could not be directly examined or the engineers cross-examined.  It had to be discussed obliquely by reference to a range of other documents and the opinion of a proponent-hired geologist. This was a very strange way to demonstrate the quality of the site research and the engineering proposal and raises the question of why the proponent’s engineers were not invited to defend their assessment.   The proposition was made by the proponents’ legal counsel that the expert witnesses provided by the Shawnigan Residents Association and the CVRD dealt only with fragments of the engineering proposal rather than its full extent, having of course set up such a spurious argument in the first place by refusing to call the engineers to testify.  

As a result of the collapse of the proponent engineer’s site model, the proponents and the Ministry fell back on the idea that a fully engineered facility would be an acceptable substitute for the absent naturally suitable conditions originally used to justify the project.  Thus the third level risk was transferred conveniently from a naturally suitable condition of impervious bedrock that would persist in perpetuity to a man-made system with a finite lifespan, dependent on continuous monitoring and maintenance only during the life of the project and a few years beyond.   The proponents presented this explanation as “adaptive management” and flexible learning by the proponents’ engineers rather than the wholesale retreat from its demonstrably inadequate and optimistic initial assessment and the misleading public justification that it truly represents.

The Ministry of Environment statutory decision maker proceeded to work with the proponent to devise permit conditions including cell liners, leachate controls, monitoring regimes, additional test wells and treatment facilities to compensate for the demonstrably unsuitable site conditions and the concerns of government staff experts, independent experts and the public.  While the advice of the chief internal ministry technical advisor was to seek the analysis of a completely independent hydrogeologist, that was simply not done by the statutory decision maker and the main criteria for approval continued to be the assertions of the engineering/advocate hired by the proponent.  The impression created for the Shawnigan public is that the project was going to be approved by the Ministry decision-maker despite any evidence of site unsuitability.  Countering this apparently biased Ministry analysis of the site and the proposal has cost the community residents and the taxpayers of the entire Cowichan region a million dollars to date in hard-won local funds to fight a miscarriage of provincial responsibility.   This is in addition to the tax-supported cost of government lawyers at the hearings who were there to defend the decision of the statutory decision maker and finally, the work of the Appeal Board.

What resulted was a complex, costly and ultimately fragile engineered system of pollution control that was dependent on the proponent’s limited-life liner systems, paper commitments for extreme diligence and expert site management along with intimate monitoring by the proponent and the Ministry in perpetuity.  In the fifty year intended lifespan of the facility there is sufficient risk of management and engineered system failure, let alone within the hundreds of years, and in some cases permanent, lifespan of the contaminated material to justify great public concern.  In the case of system failure the risks to the community water supply are immediately realized because there is no natural hydrogeological barrier within the local bedrock and no feasible way to remediate contamination of an aquifer.   What this all represents is a “bait and switch” operation that trades a promise of natural site integrity for the illusion of an ever-changing man-made substitute.  It represents a failure of responsibility to protect the Shawnigan public from a predictable water contamination risk by the proponent, its engineering firm and the Ministry of Environment.

The Shawnigan public cannot have any confidence whatever in the competence of the proponent, its engineers or the Ministry of Environment to uphold the conditions of the permit that is now on the table at the Environmental Appeal Board.  The company has made repeated mistakes in quarry management including encroachments on nearby public property as recently as during the construction of the settling ponds intended to divert surface water from contaminated material. The engineering firm has mischaracterized the hydrogeology of the quarry site through an optimistic and inadequate assessment that is still accepted by the Ministry. The Ministry has a long history in the Shawnigan area of complete inability to control illegal dumping of contaminated soils stretching back thirteen years, a well-known part of the public record.  This is a recipe for failure.  Money is to be made in the short term by the proponent and its engineering firm, developers elsewhere gain a cheap dumping site, the Ministry can assert that it is serving the public interest, but the Shawnigan public will bear the obvious risks in perpetuity.

Testimony at the EAB hearing went into great detail about the decision making process of the Ministry, the adequacy of public and First Nations consultation, the assessment process used by the proponent’s engineers, the evidence about hydrogeological conditions of the site, the adequacy of the permit conditions, the history of the proponent’s management of the quarry, the financial capability of the proponent to conduct the necessary controls and to remediate mistakes.  All of this included proponent arguments to disregard the critical evidence that the site itself is fundamentally unsuitable for a contaminated soil landfill.  It remains unsuitable because the bedrock conditions do not provide a fail-safe natural barrier to leakage of contamination to the Shawnigan watershed system in a case of an engineered system inadequacy or failure. 

No amount of argument about the validity of the permit conditions or the intentions of the proponent, its engineers or the Ministry can substitute for naturally suitable site conditions.  Even if naturally suitable site conditions had been shown to exist at the present time, which they were not, there is no guarantee that they would withstand fifty years of concurrent blasting in the quarry, earthquakes or the severe storms that are expected to increase with climate change. 

The Ministry and the proponent claim that the permit is a “living document” and “performance based”, meaning that the conditions can be changed or upgraded as problems emerge over time.  They propose that the control systems will operate effectively to alert the self-reporting proponent to contamination problems early enough to provide the necessary repairs before the aquifer is damaged.  Further, the Ministry attests that it will be providing diligent monitoring of the operation for fifty years and beyond. The Ministry of Environment has amply demonstrated that it lacks the capacity to deliver on such a promise. It is not credible that the proponent will maintain the continuous diligence and financial capacity necessary over 50 years and beyond through every business cycle.

What this demands of the Shawnigan public is an extraordinary degree of suspension of common sense and denial of actual experience to believe that such a fairy tale will come true. 

 

VIA Rail announces that an agreement to resume operation of the Island train service has been concluded

Today we received some good news for a change. VIA Rail has announced that an agreement to resume operation of the Island train service has been concluded and that what is now left to do is the work to make the rail safe. Resumption of rail traffic holds major potential for economic development in Shawnigan, echoing our tourism history. As a six year old I remember waving the flag to the Engineer at Cliffside, stoping the huge train for a ride to Victoria. My mother's generation came to regattas and stayed in the elegant hotels at Shawnigan. This time will no doubt be different, but we now have the opportunity to create a twenty first century version of our own. Congratulations to the Island Corridor Foundation for taking the long view and for keeping a vision alive despite the inevitable criticism and doubt

Bruce Fraser
Area Director

Below is the transcribed comments that the President and CEO of VIA
Rail made today at the VIA Rail AGM.
regards
Graham Bruce
Chief Executive Officer
Island Corridor Foundation
Box 375 Stn A, Nanaimo BC V9R 5L3
Office: 250 754 7254 | Direct: 250 246 4320 | Cell: 250 210 0411 |
Fax: 888 662 4197 | www.IslandRail.ca [1]

  • "The Vancouver Island service was suspended in April of 2011 for
    safety reasons. The BC Authority, determined that the operation was
    not safe for passenger service and VIA Rail concurred with that. As
    soon as that track is fit for service, we will resume service. A Train
    Service Agreement that has been in negotiation for the longest of
    times between the owner of the track the Island Corridor Foundation
    [2], its contractor, Southern Vancouver Island Railways, and VIA, is
    for all intents and purposes concluded and hopefully by the end of
    this month will be officially signed. Which will allow SVI and ICF to
    get on with getting their funding and doing the work required to
    return this track to safe operation."