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Look at environmentally safe sewer options
by John Corsiglia
to the Sooke News Mirror, March 28, 2001
You may recall that a couple of years ago there was a catastrophic die-off of Salmon at the Prime Pacific fish farm in the Sooke Basin. The manager of that operation, Chris West, explained on CHEK TV that the organism that killed these fish was Chrisochroumulina, an organism that under certain conditions changes from being a tiny floating plantlike plankton into a deadly predator that attacks and kills fish and shellfish.
Recently, Swedish biologists have determined that this organism's predatory mode is triggered when there is an increase in ammonia levels in seawater. This nasty predator that turned from Dr. Jekyl to Mr. Hyde in our own Sooke Basin, probably did so because of the nitrogen in fish waste. More human waste could conceivable have the same effect.
Logic tells us that dumping a town’s ammonia rich effluent into our marine environment will likely contribute to toxic plankton blooms. If this sewage or the toxic plankton associated with it are carried into the Sooke Estuary system it could mean big trouble for our local fish and shellfish. Is it worth taking the chance?
Do we want to risk destroying Ayum Creek and Sooke River Salmon as well as Dungeness Crab, and the wonderful Sooke Shrimp for ANY reason? I don't think so. Isn't this why the Ocean's Act stresses the precautionary principle: Don't take chances when you don’t know that something is safe for fish.
Surely the business folk over in Sooke can bring Mayor Macgregor's fertile imagination back to earth and come up with something environmentally safer. It ought to be possible for a town to expand its business interests without killing everything that moves!
How about converting liquid sewage into liquid gold. There is plenty of flat land up behind Sooke. How about a treatment plant coupled with a sod farm? It ought to be possible to spare the fish AND turn a profit!
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