As president of the Brentwood Bay Marine Community Society, I am weary of hostile shoreline property owners repeatedly given a public forum in the media where they blame boaters for pollution in Brentwood Bay, without any evidence.
Many factors are at play. What most people don’t know is that an old sewage line running along the waterfront has given the municipality problems in the past. And as the bay has a long history of waterfront occupation, there will be many abandoned septic fields and sewage outfalls along the shore.
Another factor is the hundreds of transient boaters who pass through the nearby marinas. I was moored at one of the marinas last weekend, and you could smell someone emptying their holding tank.
If your tank fills up and there’s no pump-out station nearby (there isn’t) some people will simply discharge where they are, if for no other reason than to be able to empty their toilet.
There are many boats in Brentwood Bay, but only a small fraction house liveaboards, and most are across the bay from the beaches, near Todd Inlet. The notion that they are somehow contaminating the entire bay, which reaches over 100 feet deep in some places, is ludicrous.
Additionally, I know that at least two boats use composting toilets, and another two use marine-sewage sterilization equipment.
As we have long been blamed for poor water quality, our society took it upon ourselves to do our own water testing, at our own expense, and the only place we detected enterococci is a couple of locations near shore, especially very high levels near the municipality’s sewage pumping station. Out in the bay, the testing is clear, even downstream of the liveaboard boats.
We’d honestly like to engage in a more comprehensive testing of the bay to put this debate to bed once and for all, but testing each sample costs almost $50, and it’s difficult for our members to shoulder that cost, especially as there’s little evidence it would have any effect on the pressure to remove boats from Brentwood Bay.
The society also welcomes the Canadian Coast Guard to take a more active role in the bay, to enforce existing rules. As a legal society, we don’t have the authority, and neither does the municipality, even if it get its licence of occupation — it has gone on record saying enforcement will still be left to the federal authorities.
False Creek was shut down to swimming due to E. coli pollution, and yet liveaboards were chased out years ago. Liveaboards were chased out of the Gorge Waterway, and then they found out the pollution was coming from properties on the shore. Trout Lake was just closed for the same reason, and yet there are no liveaboards.
Hostile shoreline property owners have long used the red herring of polluted water to recruit official sanction against the marine community, and these recent reports are more of the same.
Nathaniel Poole is president of the Brentwood Bay Marine Community Society.
