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Jenny HowellThe Amazing Adventures Underneath our Grass & GardensJune 8, 2007 |
By now, most of you will be aware that our water supply in Williams Lake is in trouble. Maybe you've heard from your kids or grandkids through our school program, or from previous articles, that the aquifer we draw our water from is being used at an unsustainable level. You may have picked up a leaflet from a local garden centre on xerophytic plants, and are heading out today to start on your own xeriscape. Or perhaps you're making a real effort to shorten your showers to five minutes, you have a pickle jar happily sitting in your toilet tank and you're carefully following the list of suggestions on how to cut back the amount of water you use on your lawn. If so, well done, thank-you, and keep going!
We're wrapping up the second part of our school program, and this time round, you may find the kids in your life coming home and enthusiastically telling you more than you ever wanted to know about… sewage. OK, perhaps enthusiasm is the wrong choice of words, after all, most of us don't really want to spend much time thinking about what happens to our water once we're finished with it. Like garbage, we'd rather send it off to some far distant place and hopefully never see it again. But one of the many benefits of reducing our water use is we will inevitably produce less ‘used water' or sewage.
One of the questions I ask the kids in my classroom talks is ‘where does our City sewage go?'. Of the over 1,000 kids I've talked to, only three or four have had the right answer. Fair enough; wastewater is not usually a high priority with 7-13 year-olds. But, surprisingly, they are quite interested in finding out more, and we have had some great classroom discussions.
So what does happen to it? Well, after it heads merrily down the drain, it mingles with all your neighbours' sewage and the whole lovely lot ends up down at the sewage treatment facility down in the Williams Lake River Valley, down below the town dump. There it goes through a grinder to chew up everything further (there are bits of plastic, cigarette buts and various other unidentifiable “whatsits” floating in it) and the liquid portion heads into the first of a series of three lagoons. There it spends a month or so being digested by a bunch of hard-working anaerobic bacteria; then on to the next lagoon. This time the aerobic bacteria take over the job of processing, and finally, after another month or so, it's on to the last lagoon. This last lagoon is now clean enough that there is a good population of birds and ducks living around and on it. Then this water travels by pipe to the Fraser River, where it is discharged.
After traveling through the lagoons, the water entering the Fraser is obviously of much higher quality than when it entered the plant as raw sewage. The bacteria have dealt quite effectively with the human waste and other natural products entering the system. What they are not so good at handling are the various chemicals they come across; the cleaners, the prescription drugs, the bits of paint etc, that end up down the drains. A good proportion of these will travel through the system unchanged and enter the Fraser, which of course leads eventually to the ocean, where currents will spread them further and so our waste ends up traveling places we may have only dreamed of!
So next time you turn on the tap, try to be conscious of using only what you need, which in turn means you send less down the drain. Consider switching to biodegradable alternatives for cleaners, soaps and shampoos, to give those helpful sewage bacteria a fighting chance at cleaning and purifying our waste (after all, we need to keep them happy, as who else would want their job?!). Then, both locally and globally, you'll be able to consider yourself ‘Water Wise'.
Water is Life… Use Responsibly. For more information on the declining Williams Lake water supply and ways you can easily start reversing and protecting it, please go to our Water Wise page or call 250-398-7929. The Water Wise program is brought to you by the Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society and is funded by Eco Action, Environment Canada until June 30, 2007.
Jenny Howell, Water Wise Instructor, Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society
This article first appeared in the Williams Lake Tribune on June 8, 2007
Cariboo Chilcotin Conservation Society
Unit 201, 197 2nd Ave North Williams Lake, B.C., V2G 1Z5
Phone/Fax: 250 398-7929 • ccentre@ccconserv.org • Coordinator: Marg Evans
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