Sewage Treatment
The Silver Star ski area is located at the headwaters of several community watersheds, and so one would think that in order to protect those watersheds, the Provincial government would insist on best practices regarding wastewater treatment. However, in its haste to fast-track ski resort development, the Ministry of Tourism and the Ministry of Environment have instead provided very little guidance or performance criteria for ski resorts regarding wastewater treatment.
At Silver Star, instead of insisting on the very best wastewater treatment technology, the Province has allowed the resort to make do with its aging and over-capacity lagoon-based system, which works very poorly in the winter, just at the time when process volumes are the greatest. The end result is discharge of effluent high in nutrients, which poses a threat to aquatic systems and domestic water users downstream from the resort.
With 26,550 beds now planned for the mountain, sewage effluent volumes could eventually quadruple to over 80 million gallons a year, yet the current storage capacity for effluent is only about 20 million gallons, in an unlined exfiltration lagoon. According to the sewage utility's own estimates, approximately 85,000 gallons of high-nitrate Class C effluent is discharged daily from this lagoon to groundwater at the headwaters of Vance and Coldstream Creeks. Despite this daily discharge, future resort growth will likely result in the lagoons filling to capacity by midway through the ski season, thus forcing the resort to find alternate methods of disposal.
From Sewage to Snow
The discharge permit for the Silver Star sewage treatment plant allows the sewage utility to discharge effluent via snowmaking, which will likely occur on the lower slopes of the Silver Woods ski basin, in the Vance Creek drainage, once sewage volumes exceed the storage capacity. This should be of great concern to residents downstream from the resort, as little or no nutrient removal occurs during the snowmaking process. Thus, upon melting in the Spring, resultant nutrient loading to Vance Creek, Bessette Creek, and the Shuswap River may compromise aquatic systems in those waters.
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