Whittakers at Pender Harbour, Wastewater System

Project Highlights

Whittakers at Pender Harbour is an oceanfront residential development on BC’s Sunshine Coast consisting of 25 bare land strata single family residential lots.  Kerr Wood Leidal was retained to assist with the development of an assurance plan, and to design and provide construction administration for the Whittakers wastewater system.

BC’s First Assurance Plan

For this kind of development, the Municipal Sewage Regulation (MSR) requires one of three types of financial security arrangements.  Until this project, the two options used for developments located outside municipal wastewater servicing boundaries were either a capital replacement fund or a municipal-type servicing agreement with the local authority (whereby the latter takes over ownership of, and responsibility for the entire installation).  For the development’s owner, neither options was acceptable, and KWL assisted in developing the third option: the assurance plan.

The purpose of the assurance plan is to reduce the up-front costs for developers and to spread financial risk through insurance instruments.  The plan and design focused on all aspects of risk management associated with the system design, construction, management, and financial assuredness.

As a result of extended efforts, this development attained BC.’s first approved assurance plan under the MSR.

Wastewater System

The wastewater system was designed as a STEP (septic tank effluent pumping) system to treat and dispose Class D septic tank quality effluent to ground.  The major components of the system comprise:

Individual Lots

• Sanitary sewer
• Two-compartment septic tank complete with effluent filter
• Effluent pump housed in a fibreglass tank complete with filter, check valve and electrical connections, and
• Forcemain to property line with check valve and isolation valve housed in a concrete box.

Communal Area

• A common forcemain receiving pumped effluent from individual lots
• Equalization tank, splitter chambers, and dosing chambers.
• Effluent disposal fields complete with distribution boxes, inspection ports, groundwater monitoring wells and isolation valves, and
• Groundwater interceptor trenches.