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Only 75 per cent of downtown sewage, storm water makes it to municipal centre
If you live downtown and think every time you flush the toilet you’re sending the waste to a treatment centre, think again.
Lots of it is going directly into the Ottawa River.
After Somerset Councillor Diane Holmes sounded the alarm this week about increasing amounts of raw sewage being dumped in the river, Ottawa city staff have admitted that only 75 per cent of sewage and storm water from a large section of downtown makes it to the municipality’s treatment centre.
The remainder—about 400,000 cubic metres a year—is dumped untreated into the Ottawa River in contravention of provincial environment laws at five overflow sites in the downtown area, the city’s infrastructure manager Alain Gonthier said.
How much is 400,000 cubic metres of fluid? An Olympic-sized swimming pool holds about 2,500 cubic metres of water; an average-sized oil tanker ship holds about 25,000 cubic metres of fluid. In other words, the equivalent of 16 tankers or 160 Olympic-sized pools worth of sewage and storm water a year is going untreated into the river.
Municipal bureaucrats say the Environment Ministry knows about the situation and has approved a new system that will capture 91 per cent of sewage and storm water from most of the downtown core.
That $20-million system, which makes better use of existing capacity in pipes, is scheduled to be completed by 2008. It will allow the city to comply with environmental laws that require 90 per cent of a municipality’s combined sewage and storm water flow to be treated.
The problem stems from older sewers that carry rain water and sewage.
In newer areas, the two go into separate pipes. Rain water is dumped in streams, ponds and other appropriate places, while the sewage is sent to a treatment centre in the Green’s Creek area.
However, in most of Centretown, the Glebe and Sandy Hill, it all goes into the same pipes and is supposed to be sent to the treatment facility. But when heavy rains fall, there’s simply too much volume for the pipes to handle.
It has to go somewhere or the stinking mix will back up into people’s basements. To avoid that, the city dumps it where ever it has to, like in Fleet Creek in Ms. Holmes’ ward.
Ms. Holmes said she’s known for years the city does this, but that the practice has now reached unacceptable levels due to infilling and development in the city’s core and increased rainfall.
Indeed, one of two overflow valves in Fleet Creek has been opened 22 times this year, and Ms. Holmes says something more than the current plan needs to be done.
She says it’s time to start looking at building a large holding tank to deal with the excess sewage and storm water. An idea to put such a tank under Somerset Street was looked at years ago but at $65 million to $70 million, it was deemed too expensive.
“We’ve got to get this right because what were doing now is appalling and unacceptable,” Ms. Holmes said.
She said the new system is just a short-term solution because, with projected intensification planned for the city’s core, the sewers will be overwhelmed shortly after being installed.
When the degree of the problem was revealed yesterday to the city’s planning and environment committee, chairman Peter Hume, councillor for Alta Vista, said he was more than a little concerned.
“Whoa,” he said. “Oh God.”
He said it’s now “absolutely clear that we have to grab hold of this utility and bring it to an appropriate level.”
He said it’s time for the municipal government, its bureaucrats and citizens to start facing the facts about the sewer system downtown and people have to understand that investments in this basic infrastructure have to be made.
“We need to be frank about this situation, and when people see what’s going on, I think they will understand why we need to spend the money we need to spend to fix this,” Mr. Hume said. “This is not good.
“I’m positive that when somebody flushes their toilet, they are confident they aren’t flushing it into the Ottawa River, but guess what, they are.”
Mr. Gonthier agreed that this was happening, but said most of what’s being discharged into the river during overflows is storm water, and that any sewage is “very diluted.”
“It’s not raw sewage. It’s predominately storm water overflowing,” he said.
However, he couldn’t point to any testing of the overflow to show how concentrated the sewage-storm water mix is.
He said when the new system is installed, the city will dump less than 170,000 cubic metres into the river yearly and comply with environmental regulations.
Mr. Hume, however, said the city needs to do better than that. “It might be impossible to get to 100 per cent,” he said. “But I think the public would have a higher standard than 90 per cent. That’s still a lot.”
He said as chairman of the planning and environment committee, he will work to find a way to fix the problem.
“These are the basic services the city runs on, and we have to find better ways of doing these things. It will cost money, but I think if we are open about these types of problems, the public will understand that we need to spend this money.”
All of the overflow pipes empty into the Ottawa River. Along with the two in Fleet Creek, which flows into the river on the eastern edge of Lebreton Flats, there are ones behind Parliament Hill and the Royal Canadian Mint and one near the mouth of the Rideau River.
Petrie Island Beach, on the Ottawa River in the city’s east downstream end, was closed often last summer due to high E. coli counts. It cost more than $2 million to build the beach.
From June 28 to Aug. 8, it was only open 11 days, and even on days it was open, people reported developing rashes.
According to Health Canada’s website, the main cause of E. coli getting into water is raw sewage.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2006