Just what is in our lake water?

[AtticSalt]

Just finished reading this awesome letter that was posted on Castanet....a must read...(shutter)

Downstream affairs

Contributed - May 23, 2017 / 2:50 pm | Story: 197698


So, you have had a good meal and feel the urge to visit the dual flush item in your closet. Ah, that was good, flush and we get on with our day. With the aid of drinkable water, your effluent rushes down the black pipes to the Kelowna sewer plant. When all the sewage enters the sewer plant, the first thing is a travelling screen that removes any not dissolved articles: diaper, sanitary pads, condoms, plastic items and much more. The left over brown liquid enters the sedimentation vessels where alum will be added to aid in getting the suspended solids to settle to the bottom for removal. This chemical is hydrated potassium aluminum sulphate — known in the business as potassium alum. This chemical does not leave the solution, it is now part of the soup. In sedimentation, the most of the solids will be captured. Now we go to the biological nutrient removal—including phosphates, nitrogen, and ammonium nitrate(these are the dissolved chemicals in the soup from your dual flush item).

Measurement of total dissolved solids, fecal coliform, E. coli levels are recorded for IHA standards. There may be a final filtering system involved in certain systems to polish the effluent to make it look clear as water. Before this “effluent” enters our lake and drinking water, it is passed thru an ultra violet system to kill bacteria only not any other chemical is removed.

All the drugs, chemicals, soaps and cleaning products and all the other chemicals that are flushed thru your body and other systems operating in town will be carried to the lake to be your future drinking water. This includes all the waste from the hospitals and manufacturing as well as funeral homes and laboratories etc. What volumes are we speaking of? Kelowna can manage a total of 42 million litres but average 28 million and West Bank averages 10 million litres per day, every day of the year — soup effluent from the plant — not drinking water quality. IHA is not interested in any of the trace chemicals in solution of the effluent because the testing of this effluent is near to impossible. So, the drinking water will contain traces of all the drugs consumed in Kelowna because the drugs consumed by people do not remain in your system, the go down the dual flush item to the lake. Water, our drinking water, is the universal “solvent” in chemistry so, water will gladly carry along all the dissolved chemicals right thru the sewer plant into Okanagan Lake. Where, you ask? All Kelowna sewer effluent enters Okanagan Lake at the KLO beach 1.6 km out from shore at 645 meters depth. Why so deep? So you can still swim there and not smell or see the sewer effluent.

Okanagan Lake flows from the north, south towards Penticton and Okanagan River. On the way south from KLO, the sewer effluent passes the Cedar Creek domestic water intake, so please enjoy your next cup of java if you are on this system. Vernon has removed their sewer effluent from entering Okanagan Lake many years ago. If they had not done so, Kelowna would be drinking Vernon sewer effluent since their water also flows south towards Kelowna. Okanagan Lake, compared to the dual flush item in your home, only flushes once in 60 years. Can you imagine how many millions of litres of sewer effluent will enter the lake in the next year or ten years? This will mean a concentration of sewer effluent in the lake and once it is past the concentration where people will refuse to drink it – then what? Is it time for a change of plans? Do you believe Kelowna and Westbank should think about their water supply before they spend many millions on their “now” plan and later find out that they have made a mistake “not removing the sewer effluent” from entering the lake and drinking water.

With the population of Kelowna and area, growing steady each year with no end in sight, the amount of sewer effluent will also grow with the installation of many more thousand dual flush systems. Take KLO Road with 280 new condos being built there — at least 500 more dual flush items and more sewage to the plant.

I really doubt that Kelowna has enough “thinking and forward thinking staff” to make this decision to remove the sewer effluent before it is too late and we are past the point of no return. Why can we not be like Vernon? We have plenty of orchards and forested areas for sewer effluent use. Maybe it could help to reduce forest fires too? Do not take your drinking water supply for granted, say something.

Jorgen Hansen

[lightspeed]

The residents of Kelowna are treated like crap. We deserve better.

[60-YEARS-in-Ktown]

Right now, logs of many species, large quantity of dockwood... Other flotsam.. In the pics I noticed Neon green starfish..
It will be an interesting treasure hunt walking the beaches when they return..

[Ken7]

Right now, logs of many species, large quantity of dockwood... Other flotsam.. In the pics I noticed Neon green starfish..
It will be an interesting treasure hunt walking the beaches when they return..

Throw into the mix several sunken vessels, which according to Mary POLAK are not pollution as there is no visible oil or gas floating to the surface above or near them.

I feel years from now we will all pay for the neglect our Governments are currently hiding from us. Very sad, but no-one wants to be accountable and accept responsibility for their actions.

[Randall T]

And add all the street snarf and chemicals that wash into the lake when it rains. Funny how a dribble from some little old lady's heating oil tank warrants an all out hazmat attack with a very large bill attached.

[Jlabute]

Ogopogopoo :-)

[Rwede]

Actually, Okanagan Lake is too clean. The nutrient load is too low to support what once was a thriving fish and invertebrate population that relied on the nutrient-plankton-daphnia-minnow-adult fish food cycle.

The nutrients that are there get washed to the ocean via the Columbia system. They can't get back unless we restore migration routes for sea-run fish, whose life cycle brings those nutrients back upstream. Either that, or we adopt a lake fertilization program as was done on Kootenay Lake.

Truth be told, when we supplemented the lake with nutrient-rich outfall, we supported a better ecosystem than we have now with "cleaner" water. We have no fish coming from the ocean to replace nutrients, so our past practices actually mitigated this problem quite well.

The author of that letter is, IMO, thinking only of human wants, and neglecting to consider the natural ecosystem in his rant. The guy fancies himself as an "environmentalist," but I think he's way off the mark on this issue.

[AtticSalt]

I think you have your types of 'nutrients mixed up...how is human waste a beneficial nutrient to any environment when it includes more than just digested food...not to mention what else gets dropped or flushed into it. We will see the real damage to this lake after is takes it's 100 year burp (turnover) and everything that has been pumped into it comes to the surface....it real is a no brainer....

[Terris]

Add in...

The leachates plume that has been making its way into the lake for the last 100 years from the old dump which was located at the current Okanagan College/KSS site and now also from the current city landfill through the Brandt's creek channel.

All this passes silently through the glacial floodplain underneath us as we smugly believe, the picture being painted by our civic leaders, that they are keeping our water safe.

https://civicinfo.bc.ca/practices_innov ... ission.doc

[Rwede]

I think you have your types of 'nutrients mixed up...how is human waste a beneficial nutrient to any environment when it includes more than just digested food...not to mention what else gets dropped or flushed into it. We will see the real damage to this lake after is takes it's 100 year burp (turnover) and everything that has been pumped into it comes to the surface....it real is a no brainer....

No, I have my nutrients straight.

I just attended a couple of informative sessions, one on the history of Kootenay Lake's ecosystems, and another on the history of salmon and nutrients in Okanagan Lake.

The pharmaceuticals debate has been ongoing, with little to no consensus on whether there is a downstream effect or not. Oils and other contaminants from road runoff of course is undesirable.

Stick with the proven science - phosphorous and nitrogen, in levels that don't cause eutrophication, are beneficial to "flushed out" lake systems like Okanagan Lake that have had the natural cycle of nutrient replenishment halted.

When the flow of fertilizer nutrients into the Columbia system was stopped when a Cominco fertilizer plant in Kimberley was greatly restricted in the early 1970s, Kootenay Lake lost a pile of biodiversity and fish populations crashed. Read the Executive Summary if you can't handle the 290 pages. http://www.sgrc.selkirk.ca/bioatlas/pdf ... _South.pdf

[Terris]

Some interesting stats from the past...

http://www.waterbucket.ca/okw/sites/wbc ... dia/51.pdf

I found the stats on kokanee spawning numbers to be particularly telling; compared to now.

To claim that the fish population, after thousands of years of inhabiting and thriving in unpolluted water, was somehow benefitting from manmade pollution is rather fallacious...

[Rwede]

Some interesting stats from the past...

http://www.waterbucket.ca/okw/sites/wbc ... dia/51.pdf

I found the stats on kokanee spawning numbers to be particularly telling; compared to now.

To claim that the fish population, after thousands of years of inhabiting and thriving in unpolluted water, was somehow benefitting from manmade pollution is rather fallacious...

You failed, *removed* to read what I said.

Before the Columbia and Okanagan rivers were dammed, the sea-going fish could return to the Okanagan system and return nutrients to the lake when they died after spawning. That's how the fish population thrived in days long past.

Now that those fish cannot bring the nutrient load back from the ocean, the lake-bound fish population is struggling because they don't have the nutrients to grow plankton, which feeds daphnia, which feed fish fry.

When we introduced nutrients into the lake from human uses, the lake's productivity increased. Now, we've removed most of those nutrients, and the fish are suffering.

Read it again.

ETA - your report is from 1972. We were pumping poop into Okanagan Lake then, and had half a million spawning kokanee. Now we don't pump poop, and have <100,000. Go figure.

[GordonH]

Back in the 60s BC Government thought introducing Mysis Shrimp into Okanagan would be good food source for the Kokanee..... that backfired huge time. Since then Mysis Shrimp grew big time & Kokanee drop big time.

Very bad idea to bring in foreign item

[smoky500]

No one has mentioned the effect that introducing the mysis shrimp caused, they stole a lot of the fish food. Everything we do has an effect on the ecosystem, some good, most bad. There's just too many people in the world.

[Barney Google]

Back in the 60s BC Government thought introducing Mysis Shrimp into Okanagan would be good food source for the Kokanee.....
Very bad idea to bring in foreign item

Never mess with Mother Nature...she no likey and payback is a very cranky female canine that's going to

bite in the nether regions BIG TIME!!!