A blocked Saanich sewage pipe backed up and overflowed last week causing some minor contamination of at least one community garden plot, officials say.
“The effect on any of the plots was minimal,” said Erwin Dyck, the Vancouver Island Health Authority’s South Island supervisor of health protection.
VIHA was called after Saanich works crews discovered sewage backing up in a sewer line behind Rowland Avenue.
The crews flushed the line but discovered the next day that some had been flushed up through a manhole and run down a hill toward the allotment gardens at 641 Kent Road, near Swan Creek.
“It only got as far as the very first garden plot in the direct line of this overflowing sewage and it didn’t really penetrate that far into hers,” Dyck said.
The sewage had travelled a fair distance down a bank and the bulk of it was running down into a ditch system. But some escaped into the public garden area.
There was minimal danger to public health, Dyck said. People with concerns were told to leave any vegetables still in the ground for a couple of weeks.
“As the soil dries out, the sewage organisms will be killed off very quickly in the soil and anything that’s pulled — any of the root vegetable — would have to be washed and cleaned and peeled anyway before you’d eat them. So there really wasn’t much risk there,” Dyck said.
As precaution, areas exposed to sewage were treated with lime.
