Mystery of the orange goo river

By Amy Dove - Goldstream News Gazette - May 02, 2008

Natural or not, residents worried about sludge

There is something foul coming off Skirt Mountain.

This time it’s not traffic congestion or urban development that has residents worried about the fate of a once pristine section of forest. Deep in the woods, just below the Bear Mountain golf course, an orange gooey substance is leaking out of a constructed rock wall.

“This natural environment was unbelievably rich,” says Florence Lake resident Trisha Glatthaar.

Like many of her neighbours, she has walked in the woods for years, following a trail up the hillside and into a canyon. There what was once the “purest” spring water has been choked with mud and orange sludge so thick everything it touches dies, she says.

It started seeping out of the rock wall in November 2006. Residents have used the network of trails and logging roads to hike through the area for years and never seen the substance.

Describing it as an orange river of pollution, Glatthaar notes before there was sludge there were mud flows. When the rock wall was built and the space behind it filled with rumble, a mud flow choked out the creek in December. The strong stench of sewage drifted through the canyon, although the source is unknown, she says.

“What we smelled was a provincial park outhouse … flowed over the top,” she says, noting the smell travelled back down the hill in their clothes.

By January the flows became white, mixing with the mud into a tan coloured mess. Everything it touched — from plants to frogs — was killed, Glatthaar says.

“That white spread out all over the floor of the canyon. What in the world was that?” she questions.

Before she got an answer it turned orange. “It only got brighter and then it went blood red in March,” she says.

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Summer came and it dried up, leaving with it a cash of dead frogs that once lived in a pool at the mouth of the canyon. It seemed for a while that everywhere you looked there was a dead frog, Glatthaar says. Once she found five of them piled close together.

The next winter the orange came back. With the consistency of soft modeling clay, residents were afraid to touch it. Taking their concerns to city hall, they petitioned the City of Langford to have it tested.

Enkon Environmental Ltd. was hired to test the water. The results came back nondescript with some higher levels of fecal coliform associated with deer droppings. There was nothing to cause alarm and follow-up testing has been done, says Susan Blundell with Enkon.

The orange colour is the result of high levels of naturally occurring iron, which is all over Skirt Mountain, said Les Bjola, Bear Mountain developer. That the substance coincides with the construction of the rock wall means nothing, he said, alluding to the fact it may have happened in previous years. The wall was built two years ago to raise the height of the land for a proposed vineyard.

Unsatisfied with the results, Florence Lake resident Jennifer Andison paid for her own testing of both the lake water and the goo. The results came back much the same. The goo itself isn’t toxic, although where it is coming from is anyone’s guess.

MB Labs did a chemical breakdown of a sample of water from Florence Lake and the goo itself, says Wendy Riggs, senior microbiologist at the lab in Sidney. The tests determined levels of iron, maganese, aluminum, copper and arsenic among other elements had a higher presence in the goo than the water. None of the readings were classified as toxic.

Without the proper tests it is unclear what the orange goo is, but Riggs has some speculations. The mass accumulations are similar in appearance to what is entirely a natural process. Different organisms thrive off of heightened levels of minerals — which in this case could be the iron and maganese based on the colouring.

They act as accumulators, pulling the elements out of the water source and into a condensed mass. Depending on the geology of an area, there can be pockets of these elements beneath the water system.

Often times the formations are nature’s way of cleaning itself, Riggs says.

“In some respects it looks sinister, but they are actually from the environment,” she says. “(Nature’s) capacity to adapt and repair is quite staggering.”

The other more sinister option is that someone has done something foul and introduced higher levels of these elements into the ecosystem. Without the proper tests it’s impossible to tell, she says.

“It could be either way or something that’s a complete surprise,” Riggs says. “Without knowing what’s going on there … the rest is speculation.”

Florence Lake residents aren’t content with knowing what is in the goo, they want to know why it’s there. The fact it began when the heavy blasting and logging on Skirt Mountain did raises concerns over the environmental impact of the development there, resident Christina Carrieres says.

“Where is it coming from?” she questions. “If it’s a natural phenomena, what creates that phenomena to begin with?”