Infrastructure Under Stress

 

If you had any doubt about whether our infrastructure is already stressed, some recent events should be a wake-up call.

 

On August 2 most of Semiahmoo experienced a power outage of about 8 hours.  According to the Northern Light an underground power cable under the Semiahmoo Resort shorted out.  It could have been much worse.  Thanks to some luck and good work by the Blaine Power and Light crew, service was restored after about 8 hours.  Read the Northern Light article here.

 

Blaine’s long-term supplier of chlorine gas, which is used to treat the potable water supply, appears to be abandoning the City as a customer.  This requires that the City build a facility to make sure the chemicals are available to provide safe drinking water.  The money to do this is coming from deferring other water related projects.  This is not “free money”.  The bill for the deferred projects is still due, just a little later.  Hopefully we will be lucky and skate by and deferring these projects will not result in additional failures.  See the Northern Light article here.

 

Whatcom News reports that on August 22 a transformer owned by Puget Sound Energy failed and left large parts of Birch Bay and Blaine without power.

 

That is not all!  In the Semiahmoo Resident’s Association’s May 2022 Board Meeting, the then Director of Public Works of Blaine related some of the failures and deficiencies of the City’s basic infrastructure.  According to him, most of the systems suffer from poor maintenance and there are severe problems with a 7,000 feet section of sewer line in the Lettered Street area in East Blaine.  The sewage treatment plant will not have enough capacity to accommodate the announced expansions, and so on. 

Listen to his presentation here or read the transcript. 

                 The sound quality of the recording is at times poor.  The transcript is done by computer speech

                  recognition and un-edited.  Where the sound quality is poor, the transcription may not be accurate.

                  For an accurate version of what was said, please listen to the recording.  Enough is audible and transcribed to follow what was said. 

 

If infrastructure is strained now, what will things be like when all this new development puts even greater demands on an already fragile system?

 

Addressing the problems will cost a lot of money and cannot happen overnight.  Even if the decision was made today to spend the money, fix the flaws, and expand capacity, all of us will for some time have to rely on the existing systems, issues and all.

 

And remember, all that money is not free.  It is passed on through higher utility and/or tax rates.

 

We deserve answers on what it is going to cost and how much of that cost will be borne by us, the utility customers and taxpayers, and how much, if any, by the developers.

 

Please let your elected representatives know that you would like to know those answers.