Cowichan Valley Citizen dateline December 2046
The inquiry into the failure of the contaminated soil dumpsite in Shawnigan Lake has wrapped up after six months of testimony. The site was owned by Cobble Hill Holdings which no longer exists having gone out of business 10 years earlier when the site hit capacity for contaminated soil. The site failure resulted in the release of not only contaminated water run off, which had been a problem for years preceding this complete failure, but also the release of large amounts of contaminated soil which slid down into the valley below completely ruining the valley and releasing enormous amounts of additional contaminant in the water supply for over 12,000 people who continued to live in the Shawnigan Lake area. It was noted that the area had failed to grow larger due to in part to the location of the contaminated dumpsite above the water supply source.
No blame could be assigned and since the company no longer exists there is nobody to remediate and pay for damages. When asked for a comment former environment minister Mary Polak noted that she was surprised at the failure as the company had assured her that it would not fail. Meanwhile the current Liberal government expressed sympathy for the people in the Shawnigan Lake area. However they could not commit to a time line or final amount of taxpayer dollars that would be needed to clean up the contaminated soil from the area. In the meantime water is being trucked into the area to supply local residents. But as the current minister noted this stop-gap measure could not be sustained by the current government and it would be up to the local municipality to sort out a new source of water. Options such as sharing Victoria’s reservoir have been discussed, but that solution seems to be unlikely as the Mayor of Victoria commented that they did not have the capacity to supply Shawnigan Lake and noted that Shawnigan Lake should have protected its watershed in the same fashion as Victoria did.
This situation is reminiscent of many of the berms/containment ponds etc. failures in the province going back as far as the 2014 Polley Mine tailings pond failure, also in which no blame or fines were imposed.
Glenn White
Shawnigan Lake