Osoyoos halts flow of liquid waste

Kristi Patton - Penticton Western News Published: July 07, 2009 6:00 PM

The Town of Osoyoos is raising a stink over the latest issue with the regional district. Mayor Stu Wells said that in recent years the amount of liquid waste being dumped into the Osoyoos landfill has grown so significantly it is having a negative impact on the town. “With that increasing volume of waste has come a big increase in the odour,” Wells says. “There used to be an offensive smell a couple of days a week, but now the smell is there seven days a week, and it’s having a real negative impact on visitors to the Desert Centre, which is one of our premier tourist attractions.” Osoyoos town council decided to limit dumping at the Osoyoos liquid waste pits to septic effluent which comes from within the town after noticing the amount of waste growing is due to towns such as Oliver and as far away as Cawston, Keremeos and Rock Creek hauling to the lagoons. Council decided 10 months ago to raise the cost of dumping septic waste to $33.50 per tonne, equivalent to Penticton’s waste site, so South Okanagan rural residents wouldn’t have a financial incentive to truck their waste to Osoyoos. At the same time council gave the RDOS a one-year notice that starting Sept. 1 the Osoyoos site will no longer accept liquid waste from outside the town’s boundaries.

Wells said the RDOS is being very proactive in addressing the need for new liquid waste locations in the region and he wants to help find a solution. At the same time he said Osoyoos has to manage its own locally generated waste and its dumping sites responsibly and limiting it to residents only is the way they can do that. The regional district CAO Bill Newell said the plan had been to use the Penticton septic waste site at the wastewater treatment plant but travel time is a concern to some of the residents down in the Osoyoos area. A letter from the RDOS requesting the Sept. 1 deadline to be extended was sent to Osoyoos last Thursday. “We spent millions of dollars on the Penticton site that was our first choice ... we don’t particularly believe that just dumping waste into an open pit is the way to deal with it either and I think that is Osoyoos’s point of view so we wanted to treat it through Penticton but obviously it’s a big increase in cost to those haulers,” said Newell. “We are going to do a feasibility study on the site that had previously been open in the Oliver area at their solid waste site. Environmental guidelines have changed since that was in use so we would have to figure out exactly how that would be done in order to use that.”