navy in deep doo-doo after sewage pump fails

OTTAWA - Canada's West Coast navy found itself in deep doo-doo after a sewage pump failed at a military dockyard, dumping a massive amount of human waste onto the base.
"Effluent happens," says an internal e-mail describing the accident last year at Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt, just outside Victoria.
The sewage station suffered a "catastrophic" failure on Friday, April 13 last year when its main pump failed and a safety valve malfunctioned at the same time, newly disclosed documents show.
The station, which pumps raw sewage from all the toilets on the base and from the ships docked alongside, was soon flooded with waste. The effluent then entered the storm sewers and began to gush like an oil well from the sewer grates onto a road, eventually spilling into the harbour.
Internal records, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, show that an estimated 200,000 litres, or about a year's output from a typical household of three people, were released.
The flow continue for more than nine hours before maintenance workers, along with two pump trucks brought onto the base, were able to staunch the flow.
"It was difficult to stop because worker safety became a factor," spokesman Lieut. Paul Pendergast said in an interview. "It was very difficult to get someone down there, and repair the situation."
The station, which pumps base sewage over a hill and into the main Victoria sewage system, has since been fitted with a new valve and a temporary pump while it undergoes a complete makeover.
The $1.4-million construction project, began last November by a private firm, is expected to be complete by March this year.
The internal documents show the navy knew for several years that the aging sewage station, which the military acquired from the community of Esquimalt, was a disaster waiting to happen.
"The sewage lift station equipment was identified before handover from the Municipality of Esquimalt as being in poor condition from lack of refit," says a military report. A plan was drawn up as far back as April 2005 to build a replacement.
Pendergast said the proposal had been approved but "bad luck" caused the pump failure before work could begin.
"We do take these issues seriously," he said.
The navy ordered a washdown of the storm sewers, but could do nothing about the spillage into the harbour, leaving any cleanup to the salt water and tides of the Juan de Fuca Strait.
"If you had gone down (to the harbour) six hours or 12 hours later and taken a sample, you would not have found anything unusual there," Pendergast said.
He cautioned that officials could only estimate the amount of effluent released, and that some of it included waste water from showers and sinks - or greywater, in military parlance - in addition to human waste, referred to as blackwater.
Victoria has come under fire for years for its minimal treatment of sewage before liquid waste is pumped into the ocean through two outfall pipes that stretch more than a kilometre offshore and about 60 metres deep. There are long-term plans to provide proper waste water treatment.
About 6,000 people are employed at the Esquimalt base, 2,000 of them civilians.