On April 27, 2018, Iain Rankin, environment minister for Nova Scotia, announced plans to cleanup the Canadian province’s Boat Harbour wastewater lagoon. The new project will be the largest cleanup effort overseen since the cleanup of a steel mill industrial waste site.
According to Rankin, the overarching goal of the project is to restore the waterway to a pristine tidal estuary. The site has been used by a variety of industries over many years to discard waste, so the location is now rife with a varied selection of contaminants.
The project will first be subjected to an environmental assessment that will take place over the course of 275 days. It will analyze the effects on human health, air, soil and water quality, and the impact on nearby communities.
With respect to the current timeline, it is expected that construction for the project may not commence until the year 2020, which will take five years to complete.
The project has a current price estimate of approximately $133 million, but Rankin claims that money is not the primary concern with the execution of the cleanup.
“Price is not my concern, this clean up is too important,” Rankin said. “This needs to be dones and needs to be done thoroughly.”
“I don’t think we can overstate the importance of this project,” Rankin said.
