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OTTAWA – The city wants to build a pipeline to carry toxic leachate out of a Nepean landfill to nearby sewage lines.The city presented the plan at a public meeting Tuesday evening of residents who live near the Trail Road landfill. Many were unhappy with the plan, which they said could lead to further contamination of the area. Project manager Ted Woytowich says the pipeline would carry the waste until it joins the city’s sewage system at the Jock River. “It’s a high-density polyethylene pipe. The advantages of this pipe is that the joints are welded, so basically it’s a leak-proof pipe if installed correctly,” he says.
The city was working on a plan to treat leachate accumulating inside the Trail Road dump, when it discovered potentially more dangerous contaminants from an abandoned Nepean landfill nearby. That landfill was built before dumps were protected by plastic liners. City officials say they settled on the pipeline solution after weighing the costs and benefits of three different approaches to the problem. They also considered building a treatment facility at the site or trucking the waste to an existing sewage treatment plant. Both alternative solutions were rejected as too expensive. Trucking also might result in new environmental problems, city officials said. But local residents question whether the sewage system would be equipped to handle large amounts of toxic waste.
Jeff Voyce, who lives close to the path of the proposed pipeline, says the city’s sewage system has suffered several recent leaks that saw tons of sewage flood back into basements in Alta Vista and Kanata. “Because of the frequency of breaks in Ontario’s sewer systems, houses are going to be flooded with more than just biomass; they will also be flooded with toxic materials,” he says. “And our sewage leaks will be more toxic than ever.” Voyce says the safest course is to treat the sewage on site, so that if it does spill, it just sinks back to where it came from.