Repairs to the ageing sewage treatment facility are underway, while Kettle and Stony Point First Nation await delivery of new equipment.
New replacement sewage treatment equipment is on its way to Kettle and Stony Point, following the community's declaration of a state of emergency due to the impending failure of their current infrastructure.
Kimberly Bressette, Chief of the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point Council warned that without action there could be serious widespread ramifications. “There would be an environmental catastrophe. The waste would go into the lake.”
The two rotating biological contractor systems used in their facility to treat waste by removing pollutants have been failing more often. Currently, one is not working at all, while the other has recurrent problems.
“For years, we have been applying band-aid solutions to the one,” said Chief Bressette.
Repairs are currently underway to these existing systems, which have reached the end of their lifespan, as they wait for a replacement system.
“We were getting 3 to 4 calls a day, alarms going off, that there were issues,” said Chief Bressette. “We were doing everything we could.”
The continuing problems prompted Council to declare a state of emergency in early May and institute an emergency plan.
“We reached out [to Indigenous Services Canada] for emergency response funding and they did commit to that,” said Chief Bressette.
If the systems had failed, then waste would have to be trucked out of the community.
“We’ve been meeting with Indigenous Services for months now,” said Chief Bressette. “The government of Canada has a fiduciary responsibility to First Nation people, especially for the infrastructure needs of our communities.”
“It is moving along quicker now,” adds Chief Bressete, “and that was our intention with the state of emergency. It felt like nobody had been listening to us all this time, and how important it is to make sure it isn’t going to fail.”
Chief Bressette sees it as a systemic problem that they had to wait so long and declare a state of emergency before action was taken. “It’s a problem all over, the wait times for funding.”
“The last four to five years, we have been working on this,” says Chief Bressette. “This is the last hour.”
Chief Bressette wants to make sure the issues with the sewage treatment systems are satisfactorily resolved before ending the state of emergency. “We’ll have to decide going forward if we want to stay in the state of emergency. The repairs are a band-aid solution. We do need the new system.”
