by Donald W. Deer
Special to Whitewater News
WHITEWATER REGION (Cobden) — Having several concerns about the new Water Pollution Control Plant (WPCP) being planned by Whitewater Region for the town of Cobden, I decided to call my contacts at GE Water Technologies. They advised me that there is an Effluent Treatment Plant in Port Carling, Ontario of a similar size as to what is being planned for Cobden. The plant was completed and went on line in June 2015. It services the town of Port Carling which has a population of about 900 people with about 400 connections to the plant. The plant has Membrane Bioreactor Technology(MBR) and has a capacity of 926 m3/day. The Cobden plant, according to the Environmental Assessment prepared by Jp2g, will have a capacity of 1000 m3/day.
The Manager of Water and Wastewater Operations in Port Carling advised that the plant cost approximately $15.4 million with $8.5 million being financed by the Building Canada Fund and the rest was financed through Development Charges.
The engineering design firm for the plant was AECOM and the general contractor was Baseline Constructors and the plant was not built as an EPC. The two MBR units are General Electric ZeeWeed 500D manufactured by GE Water & Process Technologies in Oakville Ontario. This plant has full redundancy.
The maximum flow recorded in the Port Carling plant in April 2016 was 2143 m3/day and the plant experienced no bypasses because they have no pipe that allows bypasses. The final effluent analysis for total phosphorus (TP) for 2016 in milligrams/liter(mg/l) was: Minimum: 0.03, 4 week average maximum: 0.05 and the average for 2016 was 0.05 . The highest weekly average for TP in 2016 was 0.09 mg/l.
Gary Younghusband and myself, representing the Muskrat Lake Association, along with Whitewater Region’s physical services manager Janet Collins and supervisor of solid waste Steve Hodson and Joe Janota of Jp2g and Bob Lecraw toured the Port Carling facility on September 6. There were several reasons that I wanted to tour the plant:
1) To see if the Port Carling plant is the size and scope of the plant that Whitewater Region is planning for the town of Cobden. My understanding from Janet Collins is that it is very similar in size and scope to the one planned for Cobden .
2) It baffled me that Port Carling built a plant of similar capacity to the one for Cobden but at approximately $6 million more than what Whitewater Region is planning to spend. It also baffled me that Whitewater Region council would proceed with a project based upon what I understand to be a Class “C” (-15% to +20%) estimate. During my career I’ve been in charge of close to $2 billion in industrial capital projects and have never seen one that got final approval to proceed without a Class “A” (-5% to +10%) estimate.
3) I wanted the team from Whitewater Region to see a modern MBR Technology plant that had been built two years ago to get their reaction and for them to be able to make informed decisions.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered:
) Why doesn’t Whitewater Council get a Class “A” estimate for the cost of the plant?
2) What is the real cost of this plant?
3) If the cost is greater than the $9.4 million estimate what is the no-go number?
The rate payers in Cobden that will have to pay for this plant deserve answers.
