The Septic Sense program continues in Alberta! Read on to learn how this program is helping to protect the environment by raising awareness with rural landowners about the proper management and maintenance of private septic systems.

Septic systems may not be a great dinner party conversation, however, knowing how to manage and maintain your private sewage system is an important aspect of sustainable rural living. Educating yourself about how to properly care for your septic system preserves your property values and ultimately, ensures harmful substances don’t infiltrate Alberta’s groundwater or water-bodies.

The last Alberta census shows that rural residential landowners represent 14% of Alberta’s population, and many of those rural residents have private septic systems. According to Alberta Municipal Affairs, every day the average person contributes 340 litres of sewage through a private sewage system (septic system). For a family of four living in a two-bedroom house, that amounts to 1,360 litres per day and just under half a million litres per year!

Owners of private sewage systems are responsible for ensuring their systems operate properly and safely. The decisions of those property owners about how to manage and maintain their septic systems have the potential to have a significant cumulative effect on the Alberta landscape. Historically, there have been limited resources and support directed specifically to educating property owners on how to manage these important systems.

In response to this need, since 2015, Land Stewardship Centre, in cooperation with the Alberta Onsite Wastewater Management Association (AOWMA), has been delivering the Septic Sense program. The Septic Sense workshop is a comprehensive information session, supported with take-home resources, that enhances local accountability for water resource management through education and engagement with landowners who have private wastewater systems on their property.

“Public education is an important component of a successful wastewater industry, and we are pleased to be a part of the process,” says Lesley Desjardins, Executive Director at AOWMA.

The highly successful workshop series has been offered in over 40 different municipalities across Alberta, reaching almost 2,000 people and has helped to raise awareness of responsible stewardship practices to realtors and landowners, alike.

Jeff Porter, Agricultural Fieldman with MD of Foothills has said there has been a lot of interest in the workshops from residents, because septic systems remain a mystery to many people who live on farms and acreages.

With funding and support from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation (AREF), in 2018, LSC and AOWMA hosted 30 free workshops for landowners and Realtors in Alberta to better understand how to manage their rural property and mitigate negative impacts on the landscape from improperly managed septic systems. This support from AREF was crucial to delivering the workshops this year. LSC and AOWMA are very grateful to AREF for their support, and for seeing value in this educational initiative which has provided important information and resources to rural landowners, Realtors and municipalities across Alberta.

Now, with a couple of years of successful workshops complete, and a positive reputation in the community, Septic Sense has evolved and will now be offered on a cost-recovery (fee-for service) basis that will allow AOWMA to sustain the program in the future. Going forward, AOWMA will continue raising awareness of best management practices to many more Realtors and Albertans, to create sustainable communities and foster a healthy environment. Please contact AOWMA directly if your organization or municipality is interested in hosting a Septic Sense workshop.

Lesley Desjardins, Executive Director of AOWMA, giving a Septic Sense presentation in Leduc County. (photo from the PipeStone Flyer)

Oil and gas wells have been drilled across Alberta for decades. While the Alberta Energy Regulator keeps track of all the wells and what company is drilling for what, the where question hasn’t been easy for an ordinary Albertan, or someone thinking of buying a property, to inquire about any wells that may be nearby. Until now.

Joel Gehman, a professor in the School of Business at the University of Alberta, has built WellWiki.org, a website loaded with information about each of the roughly 600,000 oil and gas wells that dot the landscape of Alberta. “These wells could be operating, and actively producing. Or they could be in some stage of inactivity or even just in the early stages where they’re just being licensed and drilled,” says Gehman. “Every well has a biography. The website is trying to tell the story of each individual well and provide the full chronology of what’s happened there.”

Gehman first started collecting data about wells back in 2013 as part of his research into how corporations respond to concerns around sustainability. Recently, with $35,000 of funding from AREF, Gehman hired a project manager and two software engineering students to help him expand the site and add thousands of pages of information. The new data of Alberta oil and gas wells went live in December, 2018. “The goal for the project is to simply make it easier for the average citizen to learn information about oil and gas activity that’s happening in their community, neighborhood or backyard,” says Gehman.

If you see a well somewhere, all you have to do is make note of the company name and well identification number on the signage at the well pad, and use that information to find the well on the website.  Information about that particular well will pop up—when they started and finished drilling, a map, the depth of the well, and license number.  When you search by company name, you also see all the other wells it operates.  You can also search by location.

“Resources like WellWiki allow folks on both sides of a real estate transaction to understand what’s happening on the land,” says Gehman. “There are many things involved in a real estate transaction, this isn’t necessarily going to be the biggest one, but it’s an important piece of awareness to have.” In some cases, when the well was drilled it was in the middle of a farmer’s field, but new neighborhoods are moving into the area. “That’s not the well’s fault,” he says. “That’s the urban sprawl. But nonetheless, as that happens, the people moving into those neighborhoods may want to be aware of what’s happening in adjacent parcels of land.”

The original website was getting about 10,000 visits a year—including from people working at oil and gas companies. The new and improved WellWiki.org will likely see more visitors from outside the energy industry. “The target user for this website is anyone who has an interest in oil and gas activity in their community.”

For more information, please visit WellWiki.