The old saying is that good fences make good neighbors. Well, so do waste treatment plants.
OK, that doesn’t have quite the same ring. But it pretty much sums up the relationship between Washington and its neighbor to the north, Victoria, British Columbia. Situated on Vancouver Island, just 25 miles from Port Townsend, Victoria and the cities that surround it are finally preparing to stop dumping raw sewage into the waters of the Salish Sea.
Those waters are shared by Washington and British Columbia, along with orcas, salmon and other marine life. Yet since the late 1800s, Victoria residents have been flushing their toilets directly into the Strait of Juan de Fuca between the two countries. For a metropolitan area of more than 350,000 people, that amounts to roughly 30 million gallons of sewage a day.
Washington leaders long have insisted this is not very neighborly — and they have been correct.
For an environmentally conscious corner of the world, the idea of dumping sewage into waters that are culturally and economically important to the region should be anathema. A year ago, for example, Washington declared the Strait of Juan de Fuca a no-discharge zone for boat sewage.
As early as 1993, Washington leaders called for an economic boycott of Victoria in an effort to press the issue. And in recent years, Gov. Jay Inslee and congressional representatives have tried to force the hand of the British Columbia government.
But naysayers insisted that most solid waste was caught in mesh traps and prevented from entering the sea and that the cold, fast-moving waters of the Salish rendered the discharge inconsequential.
Still, the waste contains high levels of ammonia, fecal coliform bacteria, metals and other toxins. Heather Bartlett, water quality programs manager for the state Department of Ecology, said that impacts fish: “The pollutants from the toxic and the metals stay. They stay on the fatty tissues.”
It wasn’t until the Canadian government approved new regulations in 2012 that British Columbia leaders got off the pot and made plans for a treatment facility. The $765 million plant is required to be online by fall 2020.
In addition to lessening the “ewwww” factor, the move is good news for Washington residents. “There’s a pretty good exchange of water between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound,” Bartlett said. “This is altogether better for the Salish Sea and the Puget Sound.”
For years, the issue has drawn protests in Victoria, including from James Skwarok, a teacher who would dress as “Mr. Floatie.” “We have had a false image of a garden city and underneath, we had all the sewage going into the ocean,” Skwarok told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Our beautiful ocean is not a big magical toilet where everything disappears. It was an embarrassment for the tourism industry and for local politicians to have this tall turd walking around.”
Yes, that would be embarrassing, and it has not been a good look for Victoria, where leaders say the community is the last in North America to discharge waste into coastal waters.
All of this is relevant to Washington because what happens off Canada’s coast does not stay in Canada; it impacts the Northwest corner of the United States. The same can be said about air pollution and carbon emissions and plastics pollution.
Therefore, we applaud the people of Victoria for finally working to treat their wastewater. It is, after all, the neighborly thing to do.
