The Halifax Media Co-op reports that Colchester County Council has voted to “allow its municipal engineer to consider Atlantic Industrial Services’ application to dump ‘treated’ frack-wastewater down the Debert sewer system. The engineer’s recommendation, whatever it might be, can subsequently be opposed by council, and potentially reversed. …(AIS) is in possession of not only 4.5 million litres of waste water from (Triangle Petroleum’s) fracked wells in the Kennetcook area, but has also received approximately 11 million litres of fracked wastewater from (Corridor Resources Inc’s operations in) the Penobsquis area of New Brunswick… According to AIS, all of this water is being held in on-site lagoons. AIS’s Debert facility has a holding capacity of 35 million litres and claims that it has the technology to treat the 15.5 million litres of wastewater, which is currently considered a radioactive substance due to its elevated levels of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORM). These may include uranium, thorium and potassium, among other radioactive substances.”
On September 26, the Council of Canadians signed on to a submission by concerned citizens and organizations to Colchester County Council expressing concern about the application to dump fracking-wastewater in their sewer system. In late-2011, the Council of Canadians successfully opposed a plan that would have allowed fracking-polluted wastewater being discharged through a wastewater treatment plant in Niagara Falls, New York into the Niagara River, http://canadians.org/blog/?p=13978.
The full Halifax Media Co-op article by Miles Howe is at http://halifax.mediacoop.ca/story/fracking-wastewater-new-norm-nova-scotia/13170.
