It may have been a couple of weeks ago, but the St. Lawrence River was the unwanted recipient of over 4.7 billion litres of raw sewage dumped into its waters by the City of Montreal.

The environmental impact that much sewage will have on the river is still yet to be determined but on the local side of raw sewage, dumping sewage like in the St. Lawrence would not be acceptable in Okotoks when it comes to the Sheep River.

With the obvious size difference in sewage plants from Montreal and Okotoks in effect, Operations Manager for the Town of Okotoks Dave Robertson says the dumping that occurred down east didn't need to happen at all.

"The biggest problem that occurred down east with the Montreal situation was, this was on the books for quite sometime, it's the collection system coming into the plant that is deteriorating on them and they don't have any alternate pipes to divert the flow," he says.

Robertson says if a situation like the one in Montreal were to scale up to be problem at the Okotoks sewage plant, there would be a procedure in place to not have any dumping occur.

"What we're dealing with we'd be able to manage well ahead of a problem," he says. "We did have a pipe coming across the river that separated during the flood of 2005 and the raw sewage from south Okotoks was directly going into the river, within three days we had a temporary lift station blocking off that flow."

The good news for the St. Lawrence River was the plant was able to limit the amount of time and untreated sewage diverted directly into the river as it only took 89 hours to have the plant fully functional again.

Robertson says in the future if something on a smaller scale in Okotoks were to occur, there are plenty of environmental procedures put into plants in Alberta that wouldn't see direct dumping into the Sheep River.

"Okotoks prides itself on within its carrying capacity of the Sheep River and its natural environment and that's evidence by the quality of treatment that we are discharging back into the river and it's monitored and heavily regulated."

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