Restoring an important community’s relationship with the water and land of A’se’k.
What is the Boat Harbour Remediation Project?
Boat Harbour, or A’se’k in Mi’kmaq, was a tidal estuary connected to the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia. The Pictou Landing First Nation (PLFN) community lives beside A’se’k and knows it as “the other living place” or “the other room.”
A’se’k was a gathering place where food, knowledge, and skills were exchanged between generations and among family groups. Mi’kmaq used the land for refuge, recreation, fishing, hunting and gathering of medicines, foods and herbs, as well as for physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional purposes.
In 1967, the Province of Nova Scotia constructed the Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility to treat effluent, or liquid waste, from the Abercrombie Point Pulp Mill. Its construction turned the tidal estuary into a treatment basin. Much of the community use of the land was lost.
Pictou Landing First Nation’s wish is that Boat Harbour be cleaned so the community can restore its relationship with the water and land of A’se’k. The Province is planning to clean up A’se’k and surrounding lands so it can return to a tidal estuary and natural restoration can return over time. In 2015, the Boat Harbour Act made it law that effluent from the mill had to stop flowing into Boat Harbour by January 31, 2020. Since the Act was passed, the Province’s cleanup team has been working with PLFN during the design and planning of the cleanup. The project will remove harmful contaminated material from the land, water, sediment and wetlands and reconnect a clean A’se’k to the ocean. The causeway and dam at the mouth of the harbour will be removed and replaced with a bridge to allow a return to tidal and to permit boat access.
What’s contaminating Boat Harbour?
To return A’se’k to a tidal estuary, we need to remove contaminants from the water and sediments. This includes: metals (like zinc, mercury, and cadmium, which came from industry processes), PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which come from burning fuels), and dioxins and furans (which are organic materials probably from the Pulp Mill process). The dioxins and furans are of most concern, because exposure to these chemicals can affect human health.
The Facility, including Boat Harbour and its wetlands, contains more than one million cubic metres of sludge and sediment— enough to fill about 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Sediments with lower levels of contamination have been found outside the dam structure, in the estuary. No contaminated sediments related to the facility were found beyond the estuary or in the Northumberland Strait.
Across the bottom of Boat Harbour there is an average of less than 30 centimetres, or one foot, of contaminated sludge. It sits in a layer on top of the original A’se’k harbour bottom, but it does not go down into that clean harbour bottom. There is also contaminated material in the wetlands where untreated effluent was discharged in the early years of the mill operations when there was no treatment system.
How are we cleaning up Boat Harbour?
Our plan is to remove the sludge from the bottom of Boat Harbour, using a dredge that will sit on a barge, and pump the sludge through a pipe to the existing containment cell on the site. In some cases, close to the shore or in the wetlands, we may use landbased heavy equipment to dig up the sludge and then transport it to the containment cell. Once in the cell, we will use large fabric bags, called Geotubes®, to contain the sludge. Water, called leachate, will be drained from the sludge in the Geotubes®. The water will be treated before it is released to the estuary.
The containment cell has received and contained Boat Harbour sludge since the mid1990s. We have tested the site and we know it is working well as planned. However, we will make it safer by improving the cell liners and leachate collection system. At the end of the cleanup, leachate will be directed to a buried tank, which will be regularly pumped out and disposed of at an off-site wastewater treatment plant. The top of the containment cell will be capped, and long-term monitoring will continue after the cleanup to ensure the cell is working as planned.
The cleanup also includes:
treating water as we dredge and manage sludge
cleaning, inspecting and leaving in place or removing the pipeline from the Mill to Boat Harbour. PLFN have asked that the pipeline be removed in the area between Indian Cross Point and Highway 348. The Province is honoring this request
removing or finding a new purpose for buildings on the site
removing the causeway and replacing it with a concrete bridge and removing the dam
The cleanup is expected to take somewhere between 4 and 7 years to complete and is expected to cost more than $200 million. Read the full brief on our Resources page.