Parents of students attending Eagle Mountain middle school in Anmore are being urged to begin a letter-writing campaign to try to resolve the septic contamination leaching onto the school’s property from the nearby Anmore Green Estates housing development.
In an email distributed to parents on Tuesday, the chair of the school’s parents advisory council, Diane MacSporran, wrote: “As a parent, I am appalled at the lack of urgency to this matter.”
She said parents should address their concerns to Minister of Environment and Climate Change George Heyman as well as the mayors of Anmore and Port Moody, the MLA for Port Moody-Coquitlam, Rick Glumac, the Ministry of Education, along with School District 43 officials and trustees.
Part of the school’s property has been off limits since Dec. 23, when the Anmore Green strata council erected blue steel fences to comply with a pollution abatement order issued last November by the Ministry of Environment; that order followed tests in September that indicated high levels of fecal coliform and E. coli in ground water seeping from the nearby housing development’s two septic fields.
MacSporran, who has a daughter at Eagle Mountain, said the loss of outdoor space where kids frequently played and explored during lunch and recess breaks has been frustrating.
“There’s so much fence around, it’s fairly limited in how the kids can play and get moving,” she said.
Still, kids will be kids and sometimes they breach the fencing to retrieve a stray ball, MacSporran said.
“Just thinking where their hands and feet have been, wearing the same shoes in the field, it gets my stomach turning.”
The call for a letter-writing campaign comes after members of Anmore Green’s strata council met with the school PAC April 9 to provide an update on efforts to address the pollution problem. Mitra Samiei, the PAC chair for neighbouring Heritage Woods secondary school in Port Moody also attended the meeting but said her group has yet to decide whether it will join the campaign.
An engineering report commissioned by the strata and submitted to the environment ministry in January said the “only practical and feasible option” to stop the leaks of contaminated water is to connect the 51 properties directly to Port Moody’s municipal sewer system about 60 metres away. The strata stands by its commitment to cover all the costs to achieve that, said its vice-president, Brandie Roberts.
“The pipe hook-up is still the simplest long-term solution that is most protective of the kids,” Roberts said.
While the city of Port Moody has said it would allow the hookup at Anmore Green’s expense, such a connection also requires assent from the village of Anmore, which is not part of the of the Greater Vancouver Sewerage and Discharge District (GVS&DD), which administers municipal sewer systems and the cost of running them for all of Metro Vancouver. Anmore is on septic systems and the village’s mayor, John McEwen, has said its residents aren’t interested in paying for the GVS&DD’s annual membership fees.
MacSporran said the inability of Anmore Green and the various levels of municipal, regional and provincial government to find a solution has been frustrating.
“It is discouraging that the parties in place can’t come to an agreement,” she said. “Most parents are shocked it’s still happening.”
But Roberts said there may be a path to a solution.
In response to a request from the environment ministry, the strata will commission a second engineering report to investigate whether the 30-year-old septic fields can be repaired or redesigned to a level that complies with municipal wastewater regulations that were in place before new standards were implemented in 2012. That report would then be peer reviewed by a third, independent engineer before being submitted to the ministry, which would then decide whether to allow an amendment to the permit that allows the strata to operate the septic fields.
“Anything to get a resolution is where we’re trying to go,” Roberts said. “We want to stop creating a health hazard downstream.”
It can’t happen soon enough for MacSporran.
“I just want a clean place for my kids to play, for all the kids to be able to play.”
