Opportunity awaits.
Ken Swain, manager of the Boat Harbour cleanup project, doesn’t know the exact number of jobs that will be created during the remediation, but predicts it will be hundreds over an estimated four- to five-year clean-up period.
The current Boat Harbour Treatment Facility is scheduled to be closed in January 2020. When it does, a full-scale effort will begin to return Boat Harbour into a tidal estuary. A tremendous amount of work will be associated with the project, which will involve removing contaminated soil, cleaning water affected, building a bridge where the causeway is now on the Hwy 348 and eventually removing a dam.
Michelle Francis-Denny is serving as the Pictou Landing First Nation community liaison for the Boat Harbour Remediation Project. She helped organize a job fair at the Pictou Landing First Nation on Friday to allow people in the community to see what jobs might be available when the remediation starts and what training is available so that people from the community can prepare now to be ready when the work begins.
“My whole goal is to collect as much community assets as I can to start developing training plans to prepare our community to take advantage of this engagement with Nova Scotia Lands,” said Francis-Denny.
She said it’s a top priority to have involvement from Pictou Landing First Nation in the project and that it will be a mandatory part of tenders on the project.
“We want to get our community excited, and get our community trained and get them ready to engage the cleanup on the project,” she said.
Already some members from Pictou Landing have been able to take part as preliminary work was done for the remediation including such aspects as bird surveys and sifting for an archaeological study.
Swain hopes the job fair will also help assure people about the province’s commitment to this project.
“I think what an event like this does is reinforce to the community that we’re moving ahead with the project and it’s real,” he said.
Many of the jobs that are created will involve the construction trade with a lot of material handling and moving of sediments.
Swain said they’re on track to begin full remediation in 2020. Currently they’re in the final stages of the site assessment, which has involved monitoring wells, taking core samples and completing various tests to fully understand the extent of the damage.
“We understand the problem really well and now we’re looking at the various options for the solution, for the cleaning up and weighing the advantages and disadvantages and costs associated with each of the elements of the project,” Swain said. “…The biggest challenge is the actual effective removal of the contaminated material from Boat Harbour, the treatment of the water associated with that and how we treat that material and dispose of it.”
He hopes that they’ll be soon ready to submit their documentation for an environmental assessment.
The provincial Environment Department hasn’t said yet whether it will be required to undergo a class 1 or a class 2 assessment.
After that, the goal is to have a completed design and tender-ready documents for the project by mid to late 2019.
The province has allocated $133 million for the remediation, although final costs of the project have not been determined.
Later this year, those working on the project will remove sediments for treatment from a cove on site that’s being used as a pilot for the project. Different methods will be tested for removal and treatment with the goal of coming up with the best cleanup option.
