By John Francis
The late Barbara (Hepburn) Grison left Lion’s Head in her youth but returned in her middle years. She bought and ran Lion’s Head Beach Motel. In her spare time, she immersed herself in the committees and working groups that underpinned our tourism industry, as well as the committees that worked to preserve our natural and human history.
One issue blended all three of her passions — ecologically sustainable sewage treatment.
How does sewage treatment fit into tourism? Bear with me. Barbara had quite a vision.
Nearly 30 years ago, Bear River, Nova Scotia built a solar greenhouse sewage processing plant that would process 15,000 gallons of wastewater per day. What came out the other end was almost pure enough to drink.
Here is an excerpt from an archived web page about the facility: (Google Bear River Sewage Plant to find it)
“The Bear River Solar Aquatics Wastewater Treatment Facility is a wastewater treatment system that functions in a greenhouse. The facility at Bear River is 2400 square feet and contains a dozen solar tanks as well as a solar pond. The solar tanks are home to a variety of plant life as well as bacteria, snails and fish. The purification of the wastewater starts with what is called the blending tank. Here the solids in the wastewater are broken up and bacteria are added. This process, known as bioaugmentation, is used to aid in converting the wastewater to prime material for the ecosystem to feed on. By breaking up the solid material the facility avoids producing sludge like conventional systems, which allow the solids to settle out. At this stage the water is also aerated, with the increased oxygen levels in the water enhancing and accelerating the process.”
The effluent then flows through a series of tanks, gravity fed from one to the next. Each tank is a mini-ecosystem, containing a mix of algae, zooplankton, phytoplankton, snails, fish and plants that feed on the nutrients in the wastewater. “As the wastewater progresses from one tank to the next, more and more of the organic compounds are removed.”
The final stages of the process involve the effluent flowing through a marsh which removes the last of the nutrients.
A sewage processing facility like that would be an excellent tourist attraction, Barbara Grison said. She was right, of course — it’s green, it’s sustainable, it’s the future. It would dovetail perfectly with the eco-tourism destination we want to become. The image of tourists lining up to visit a sewage facility takes a bit of getting used to, but I think Barbara was right — it would happen. The idea that our sewage doesn’t have to be toxic waste, that it can be processed into harmless nutrients, is very attractive, especially to the kind of people who visit national parks and hike the Bruce Trail.
And Lion’s Head might be the perfect place to build an Ontario prototype of the solar aquatic sewage process. The synergies just scream — eco-tourism, national and provincial parks, Bruce Trail, environmentally sensitive organic soils, Karst complicating wastewater disposal. Lots of room at the edge of the village to put in a facility and create a marsh to work the final stage of purification. Surely there is enough ammunition in there to properly load up a grant application…
Longtime municipal Councillor Tom Boyle would dutifully bring this idea up every term of Council, hoping it would get some traction. It never did; I guess the time was never right.
Maybe it is now.
Just imagine it — the Barbara Grison Solar Sewage Processing Facility, Open Daily for Visitors 10:00AM to 6:00PM; please book ahead through ParkPass as space is limited.
And while we’re thinking outside the box…
There’s a new scam on the horizon — floating STAs. Imagine a barge-type houseboat. Completely self-contained, with solar panels and a back-up generator. A couple of bedrooms and a full galley, with a swimming deck at the stern and a sun-deck on the roof. Lap of luxury, right?
OK. Now imagine that thing moored in front of your waterfront home, with a new set of party animals brought in every three days. Imagine the noise, the garbage, the sheer intrusiveness of it.
And imagine that you can’t do a damn thing about it, because the waters of Georgian Bay and Lake Huron are not part of the Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula, so Bylaw Enforcement has no jurisdiction.
A lot of special places on the peninsula are vulnerable to this sort of thing, from LaRondes and McKay’s Harbours on Cove Island in the national park, to Eagle Harbour, Johnston Harbour, Pinetree and Little Pinetree Harbours, Stokes Bay, Pike Bay — you get the idea.
It’ll never happen? I think a lot of people said that about STAs and by the time they realized it might be a problem, it was way too late to do anything but damage control.
I think we might be able to get out in front of the floating STA issue, but we’d better hurry. I believe it’s one of the things Council will think about this term.
