An emergency incident at the Iona Island Wastewater Treatment Plant led to raw, untreated sewage being released into the Strait of Georgia on Thursday.
Metro Vancouver confirmed that the plant discharged a raw amount of sewage into the ocean on Thursday due to an emergency.
The regional district says it experienced a service disruption at around 2:40 p.m. after an unusual volume of rocky debris jammed its screening equipment.
Sean DePole, director of wastewater operations at Metro Vancouver, told Global News that the equipment needed to be isolated for about three hours while work was being done.
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“Any material that we receive at the wastewater treatment plant here in Iona comes in from the service area through our customers, so through drains, sinks, toilets, as well as catch basins and maintenance holes,” he said.
“So everything that we receive does come from our customers and does come from people, so this is not an exception. This material was introduced into the system from somewhere upstream.”
DePole said this type of incident has happened before.
He assured residents that there is no impact on human health.
“During the short duration of three hours that we had a service interruption, the wastewater effluent was discharged out of our seven-kilometre-deep marine outfall because of the duration and through our modelling, we’ve indicated that there is no impacts to human health or the environment based on, again, the duration,” DePole added.
The release stopped at 6 p.m. and DePole said the plant has been operating since then.
Metro Vancouver says the beaches are being monitored by Vancouver Coastal Health.
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