Australia’s most remote ski resort is scrambling to come up with a plan for shifting millions of litres of sewage after a fire destroyed its waste treatment plant and put its snow season in jeopardy.
Charlotte Pass village in the Kosciuszko National Park has been closed to the public since the fire broke out about 6.30am last Friday and left it unable to process any wastewater from showers, taps and toilets.
Charlotte Pass hosts about 31,000 visitors each ski season.
The resort is now fighting the clock and its alpine environment to get its sewage system back online before the June long weekend, when the ski season starts and roads close for the winter.
The treatment plant is designed to process sewage for about 1000 people at a time, and the resort hosts about 31,000 skiers and snowboarders each year. A day pass costs $149 this year.
Charlotte Pass Snow Resort chairman Kevin Blyton said it would not be easy to get the plant working again so the resort could open for the ski season.
Options include trucking the effluent off-site and processing it elsewhere, or setting up some sort of temporary processing system.
“I must caution that all of these potential options present significant challenges and may not be operationally feasible,” Blyton said in a statement, noting the “unique alpine region” and short timeframe in which to do the work.
The resort is working with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Environment Protection Agency and the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure to work out a plan.
Charlotte Pass – Australia’s highest ski resort – is home to a 161-bed hotel and a dozen smaller lodges that become snowbound in winter.
Guests are ferried into the resort from Perisher using specialised transport vehicles that are fitted out with tracks to travel over the snow, and a special “freight truck” with tracks carries supplies into the resort once a week. About 600 people a night are allowed to sleep in the resort under its lease with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Fire destroyed the Charlotte Pass sewage treatment plant.
The timing of the fire is terrible for accommodation providers, who have already bought food supplies and hired staff for the winter season, and comes on top of three seasons of COVID disruptions and below-average snowfall last year.
It took firefighters about two hours to bring the fire under control. The blaze is not being treated as suspicious but Fire and Rescue NSW are investigating what caused it.
It is the second time in five years the waste treatment plant has caused problems for Charlotte Pass Snow Resort.
The company was fined $144,000 in 2022 for releasing 11 million litres of partly treated effluent into the Snowy River system during the 2019 ski season, when part of the treatment plant stopped working.
Skiers at Charlotte Pass.Credit: Luke Glossop
The Land and Environment Court heard at the time that the resort was aware of the problem and had tried to truck out the waste, among other solutions, but the trucking company pulled out of the job after just a few days when weather conditions deteriorated.
Resort owner Blyton Group also operates Selwyn Snowfields, which was badly damaged in the 2019-2020 bushfires and only reopened to skiers and snowboarders last year. A lack of snow forced it to close about six weeks later.
National Parks and Wildlife Service directed inquiries to the Blyton Group.
Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.