Editor:
Banff’s bright blue sewagesucker is now spending a lot of time and money sucking out the “huge amounts of grease in the sewer system, matting together with rags and wipes and other inappropriate materials” that is clogging the sewage pipes now suspended under the ‘Pont de Merde.’
Those “football-sized blobs of grease” that “have been found floating in the wastewater treatment plant in recent years” obviously flowed through the previous sewage pipes buried under the Bow River.
The process previously utilized is called gravity. To the best of my knowledge there were no costs associated with this gravity-driven process.
The fact that the pump control equipment in the lift station cannot lift our effluent up and over the Bow River is indicative of either a design flaw or the purchase and installation of equipment that is not powerful enough to do the job that gravity used to perform, for approximately 100 years, at no cost.
Now we will probably have to purchase stronger pumps. Hopefully there’s a market for slightly-used sewage pumps.
Those restaurants that are largely responsible for the grease blobs and debris that forces the sewagesucker into action should be fined. Nothing educates like pulling cash out of a scofflaw’s pocket.
I find it difficult to understand how anyone could believe that the ‘Pont de Merde’ was free, particularly given the ongoing, and escalating, maintenance and operational costs.
Jon Whelan,
Banff
