By the time crews are ready to cap the out-of-control, breached aquifer in Vancouver’s West Side, as many as 365 days and estimated 615 million litres of groundwater could have gone down the drain.
Up to two million litres of water have gushed each day from a hole drilled in a residential lot last September by an inexperienced geothermal company. The accident sparked an evacuation order and fears that a sinkhole could swallow neighbouring multimillion-dollar homes. It has cost the city an estimated $2.7 million, and counting.
City staff say it could be another month until the breach at 7084 Beechwood St. is capped. Once it is, the city and the province plan to recoup the cleanup costs from the property owner “through a variety of legal mechanisms,” said Jag Sandhu, a city spokesman.
B.C. Groundwater, a hydrology firm called in to mop up the breach, has drilled three depressurization wells and two monitoring wells “to better understand the characteristics of the aquifer and manage the pressure of water,” said Sandhu.
For the past six months, the unused groundwater has been routed through the sewer system to Metro Vancouver’s waste water treatment plant at Iona Island. There it is processed along with the other 516 million litres of waste water that reaches the plant each day.
The aquifer was breached Sept. 25, according to documents recently obtained by Postmedia in a freedom of information request.
City staff did not immediately have a sense of the magnitude of the problem, it appears from the documents, and their first cost estimate to resolve it weighed in at just $150,000 to $200,000.
But this was not the kind of problem staff normally deal with, as Pat Ryan, the city’s director of building code and policy, noted in an email sent shortly after the breach.
“Quick update on two issues that occurred this evening and are now resolved,” Ryan wrote Sadhu Johnston, who had been acting as city manager for two weeks by that point. The first issue Ryan mentioned was a fire at a small apartment building. The second was the breached aquifer.
“A generator is set up for the pumps and all neighbours … were notified, with the company remaining on site until they can stop the flow,” he said.
But the company did not hang around for long, Johnston later told Postmedia, stating that the “freaked out” drillers fled the job site and then the country. In March, the residents of two neighbouring homes were issued evacuation orders that remain in place, given lingering fears that attempts to cap the well could cause a sinkhole in the surrounding area.
The problem property is valued at $3 million by B.C. Assessment. The adjacent homes are valued at a combined $9.3 million, and the surrounding 10 properties, which were put on evacuation alert, are valued at a combined $50 million.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
