A resort in Revelstoke, B.C., has been penalized more than $70,000 for failing to properly train staff and monitor sewage outflow into an area not far from a drinking well.
Glacier House Resort Ltd. — which operates a lodge, restaurant, pool and a number of cabins north of the city — was handed the penalties after inspectors with the Ministry of Environment and Parks found it did not have a sewage monitoring program or certified staff to manage its onsite sewage disposal system between 2022 and early 2025.
Treated sewage at the resort is normally disposed 70 metres from a well that acts as the facility’s source of drinking water, wrote director of the Environmental Management Act Jason Bourgeois in his decision.
The proximity of the facility to the well was found to increase the risk of harm to human health, leading the director to define the contravention as “moderate.”
“Drinking water contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria can cause stomach and intestinal illness including diarrhea and nausea and even lead to death,” he wrote.
In his decision, Bourgeois initially found the resort had gained more than $101,000 in economic benefits for its failures to maintain trained personnel. However, the director reduced that penalty to $40,000 because of regulatory limits on how much government can penalize a scofflaw in a single-day period.
In submissions, the director of the resort said that when the new owners took over in 2020, they did not receive any information around compliance issues with the sewage system.
“As a small, independent resort operator, we do not possess internal technical expertise or trained staff in this area,” wrote the resort’s director.
The resort submitted that it had hired Kala Geosciences Ltd., a third-party environmental consulting firm, to handle the technical and compliance matters on the resort’s behalf.
In submissions, Kala said it hired Kamloops-based Paradigm Drilling to drill three groundwater mounting wells because it wasn’t clear if the existing wells were usable. But according to invoices, the work did not satisfy all the environmental violations found at the resort.
Bourgeois ultimately found the resort had failed to monitor daily effluent volumes through the sewage system between 2022 and 2024. It also failed to record quarterly flow rate of sewage into the receiving environment at least nine times over the same period.
And in 2022, ministry inspectors found the resort had failed to install a sampling facility and flow measuring device for its sewage system.
Glacier House Resort has 30 days from July 23 to appeal the decision.
