Blog Reflection

Where does your sludge ("biosolids") go? Does this surprise you? Do it for either Winnipeg rural or your hometown.

In my home town, Fort Smith, NWT, the sludge from our waste goes into the slave river! Our waste water is sent to a three cell system that we have on the north end of town, where it is treated and some chemicals are removed. From here the biosolids are sent into the slave river downstream from the town.

This does not surprise me because I knew it was happening. A lot of northern towns do not have adequate enough treatment centers for waste water and almost all of them dump into neighboring rivers. The area surrounding Fort Smith is mostly forest and the dirt has a high concentration of sand, so we cannot use the biosolids for agriculture. The slave river which runs from lake Athabasca to the Great Slave lake is a fast flowing river. It has many sets of rapids and the water quality is full of sediments. Not much plant life grows in the river but this does not make it ok to dump sewage into it. There are still some who fish from it and there are parts of the river upstream from the sewage pipe where you can safely swim and kayak. However, there is a very small community called Fort Fitzgerald just south of Fort Smith on the slave river and I don't know if they get their sewage pumped out by truck or dumped directly into the river. But if they did dump theirs directly into the river then that could be contaminating our recreational areas in the river. This is not a good thing to be dumping biosolids into a river but in a small northern town I believe that it makes less of an impact then keeping them around and creating a health hazard. I think that the environmental issues dealing with larger cities are a greater concern because they have more of an impact.