The Ontario Minsitry of the Environment has published the results of a 6 month technical review of small waste water treatment facilities in Ontario, focusing specifically on the facilities in the Municipalities of French River and St. Charles. The report, 10EBR006.R, deals primarily with the Noelville Sewage Lagoons (NSL) in the Municipality of French River and is a tragedy of errors, beginning with their conclusion that,

The problem is that the NSL facility is NOT a continuous plug flow reactor. The NSL facility consists of two large open air waste stabilization ponds. That fact was clearly indicated in the original Certificate of Approval and in the Engineering specifications for the construction of the lagoon.

Satellite image of Noelville sewage lagoons off of highway 64. The town of Noelville is to the left of the lagoons.

The review was initiated in response to an application under the Environmental Bill of Rights. The contents of the original application and supplemental material requested by MOE staff clearly indicate that the NSL facility is a waste water stabilization pond. The point of the application for review was that MOE officials determined the capacity of the facility using a model of a plug flow reactor. Rather than accepting the possiblility of an error and addressing the concerns in the application for review, the MOE 'experts' simply declared that the facility is actually a plug flow reactor. This Orwellian declaration cannot change the fact the the NSL facility was designed and constructed as a waste stabilization pond and operates in batch treatment mode.

I have submitted a response outlining some of the problems with the review to the MOE and to the Environmental Commissoner of Ontario (ECO). The MOE officials are not interested, but the office of the ECO has indicated that they may comment on the matter in their annual report in 2012, fifteen months after the review was completed. I have also contacted various government officials but they all appear to be quite happy with this departure from reality, because they can now claim that there are no problems with the guidelines for the operations of Ontario's 100s of waste water treatment lagoons. This 'bury our heads in the sand' approach apparently serves those in Toronto well, but it signals an impending environmental crisis in Ontario due to their mismanagement of hundreds of sewage treatment facilities accross the province.