Metro Vancouver’s sewer system celebrates centennial
Posted March 20, 2014 12:22 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – Without a sewer system, Vancouver faced massive beach closures and typhoid outbreaks. Thankfully those were flushed out when Metro Vancouver created a regional sewer system 100 years ago.
Metro Vancouver politicians realized they had to do something to get the poop out of our salmon-rich waterways and beaches in 1911, so a Montreal sanitary engineer was called in to help.
Current Metro Vancouver Utilities Committee Chair Darrell Mussatto says construction began on a sewer system three years later to serve the population of 182-thousand people.
“Now that we have well over 2-million people in the area, in Metro Vancouver, we have to keep the water to much higher quality.”
With the exponential population growth, Mussatto says much has changed. “We’ve progressed from just taking simple sanitary sewer water to making sure we treat it the best way possible so that the water that’s going to the Georgia Straight and such, the Fraser River, is a much higher quality water than it used to be.”
Just like 100 years ago, Mussatto reminds you the only thing that should be flushed is human waste and toilet paper.
