By Thomas Locke

My assessment of the public health risks to residents on Washington state’s North Olympic Peninsula posed by British Columbia’s capital city of Victoria’s long-standing practice of dumping raw sewage into the Strait of Juan de Fuca has provoked an interesting series of responses.

(Locke is referring to his response to Jan. 18 letter published in the Peninsula Daily News, “Victoria sewage.”)

The fact that there is no immediate health threat to North Olympic Peninsula residents neither excuses nor endorses Victoria’s lack of a modern sewage treatment system.

Nor does it discount the potential for environmental harm from toxins like mercury or PCBs that can “bioaccumulate” in the marine food chain if allowed to get into the waste water stream.

North Olympic Peninsula residents in Clallam County and Jefferson County are protected by the vast amount of water that separates us from Vancouver Island.

If anyone’s health is at risk, it would be the British Columbians that live near the sewage outfall.

After decades of controversy, the city of Victoria is being compelled by the British Columbia Ministry of the Environment to construct a land-based sewage treatment facility at a cost likely to exceed $1.2 billion.

Victoria’s lack of past investment in sewage treatment has created a huge financial obligation for current and future Canadian taxpayers.

U.S. citizens would be well advised to look closer to home for opportunities to improve water quality and protect public health.

On the North Olympic Peninsula, the impacts of poorly maintained or overtly failing sewage systems are well documented.

Degraded water quality has ended commercial oyster growing in Dungeness Bay near Sequim.

Discovery Bay in Jefferson County is heading for a similar fate.

Hood Canal is threatened by nutrient loading that stimulates algae growth and depletes the dissolved oxygen fish and mollusks need to survive.

Each of these problems has complex causes, but the role of human waste disposal, including substandard septic systems, is indisputable.

The Washington state Board of Health’s new on-site sewage code (which took effect in July of 2007) requires all septic system owners to take responsibility for the proper operation and maintenance of their systems.

Some have objected to the cost of this so-called government mandate (just as some Victorians have protested the Provincial mandate to take responsibility for treating the sewage they generate).

Many see this maintenance as an important investment in the health of their families, protection of the groundwater that provides their drinking water, and their part in preventing contamination of the rivers, lakes, and marine water we all share in common.

For those who remain unconvinced of the benefits of maintaining their septic system there is another reason. It’s now the law.

North Olympic Peninsula residents appalled by Victoria’s long history of raw sewage dumping may want to heed the financially painful lesson its residents are learning.

Failing to invest in public health and environmental protection imposes huge costs on future generations.

For our neighbors to the North, that bill has come due.

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Thomas Locke, M.D., is the public health officer for Clallam and Jefferson counties on the North Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, located about 2½ hours northwest of Seattle. He wrote this article for the Peninsula Daily News.