Ponoka guilty of polluting Battle River

Caught in a bureaucratic tug-of-war between provincial and federal government departments, the Town of Ponoka has been fined and penalized about $70,000 for polluting the Battle River with sewage lagoon effluent in 2009.

CAO Brad Watson was in Ponoka provincial court Dec. 2 to answer to the federal Fisheries Act charge the town allowed “the deposit of deleterious substances of any type in water frequented by fish.” The act provides a broad interpretation of deleterious and includes any substance with a potentially harmful chemical, physical or biological effect on fish or their habitat.

The Town of Ponoka is licensed by Alberta Environment to release treated effluent water into the river twice a year. In accordance with the license, water was released when the town was directed to but the water, when tested by Environment Canada officials, showed ammonia levels higher than acceptable.

“The problem is the regulations from Alberta Environment do not coincide with those of Environment Canada, Watson explained in an interview.

During the hot, dry summer of 2009 when the town released its effluent, licensed agricultural users, the City of Lacombe and the Centennial Centre for Mental Health and Brain Injury had just completed dumping water into the river.

“We were the last,” Watson said. “We don’t know the quality of the stuff that was released upstream…The Town of Ponoka was the one that got caught.”

As the town was dumping the last of its lagoon effluent into the river, Environment Canada received a complaint about the quality of water in the Battle River.

“There couldn’t have been a worst time to take a sample. We should have complained before we released,” Watson said.

Test minnows, like canaries in a coalmine, died in the sample taken from the lagoon. Watson said while the ammonia was too high for the minnows to survive, it was not “glaringly toxic.”

“The water we are releasing is better than the water in the river,” he said.

“But they didn’t and they wouldn’t test the water in the river. If they had tested the water in the river, they’d have found it worse than what we were releasing.”

Ideally, the town would be permitted to release effluent in the spring when the water is high and there is good flow to the river to mitigate trace elements in the discharged water, Watson said.

“Now when we get approval from Alberta Environment, we get approval from Environment Canada too.”

The town will be fined about $3,000 for the violation of the Fisheries Act and pay a penalty of about $67,000 that will go into a fund to help improve the Battle River ecosystem. Watson said the town will write a paper on their experience and hopes to have it posted on websites such as those of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) Alberta Association of Municipal Districts and Counties (AAMD&C) and the Alberta Water and Wastewater Operators Association (AWWOA) to help educate others who might find themselves in a similar situation.

The Town of Ponoka hopes to bring a resolution to the floor of the AUMA convention next fall to deal with the issue of conflicting provincial and federal regulations.

Watson said Wetaskiwin MP Blaine Calkins, a former member of the federal fisheries and oceans standing committee, supported the town’s position and was working to make changes to the federal act but was forced to put the issue on the backburner when the charge was laid.

The $70,000 fine and penalty will be expensed from the town’s water and sewer reserve account.