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The City of Ottawa is on the right track for finding a solution to its sewer-overflow problems but it’s done a poor job of communicating with the public on the plan, says Ontario’s environmental commissioner.
Gord Miller, in his report released Monday on sewer flows into the Ottawa River, commends the city for defining the problem well, conducting works already to clean up the problem and making a plan to conclusively solve it.
But Miller faults the city for conducting public consultations on the program only this month. He concludes that, by starting to talk to the public only now about the detailed plan, the city “lost the opportunity for potentially valuable public input and ideas, as well as the good will and buy-in such consultation cultivates.”
Miller says that when there was a mechanical failure of a sewer regulator this summer — which resulted in an unnecessary sewer overflow into the river ó the public wasn’t aware of the new control technology the city was in the process of installing. So people “inaccurately cast the incident as an example of the city’s inaction on the problem.”
Sewer overflows into the Ottawa River have been a big issue for the last two years. In a 2006 incident an overflow gate remained open and three quarters of a billion litres of sewage got into the river, then the incident was not reported to the provincial government. Sewage overflows during rainstorms are common in larger cities where the sewer systems are old.
City staff, led by engineer Dixon Weir, have come up with a plan to run wastewater into storage tanks, then have it released and treated during dry periods. One strategy is for a decentralized storage system that would cost about $45 million and meet provincial standards but would still see between two and four sewage overflows into the river per year.
The second strategy is to build a much larger storage system that would eliminate all overflows in a normal weather year. It would cost about $120 million.