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The City of Ottawa will try to determine where the feces causing high E. coli counts at Petrie Island beach is coming from while pushing ahead with development of the facility.
The two-year-old beach on the Ottawa River in Orleans cost $2 million to develop and the city is spending another $2.1 million bringing water, sewage, and electricity to the area and constructing a pavilion.
Last summer, the beach was closed for swimming 45 days because of E. coli in the water and was open 26 days. The city’s other beaches, Westboro, Mooney’s Bay and Britannia were closed for swimming 29, 10, and zero days respectively.
In 2005, Petrie Island was closed for 15 days.
Jean-Guy Albert, a program manager at public health, said last year’s E. coli counts are much greater than projections based on water quality studies, and that the cause is unknown.
“It could be as simple as an anomaly, but who knows,” Mr. Albert said.
To determine where the feces is coming from, samples of the E. coli will be DNA tested this summer to determine if the source is animals, birds or humans.
He said if it is birds, steps can be taken to keep them away, but if it is animals or humans, getting the water cleaner will be a tough task.
“At the end of all this, (the high counts) may be a reflection of deteriorating water quality in the river, and there may be no easy steps to take,” he said. “We’ll have to see.”
Earlier this year, members of Ottawa city council were shocked when they were told the municipality is dumping significant amounts of raw sewage into the Ottawa River upstream from Petrie Island.
In the summer months, 25 per cent of sewage and storm water—400,000 cubic metres or enough to fill 160 Olympic-sized swimming pools—from a large section of downtown are being flushed into the river. This happens when old sewers that combine sewage and storm water are overwhelmed during rainstorms.
This is below the provincial standards that say 90 per cent of sewage and storm water from combined sewers should be treated.
A city plan to better use space in existing pipes is expected to allow Ottawa to reach provincial standards, but Somerset Councillor Diane Holmes points out that with the city promoting intensified residential construction downtown, the new system will be overwhelmed in short order.
Also, Quebec provincial records show the City of Gatineau routinely dumps untreated sewage into the river.
What maddens one city councillor is that his colleagues knew about the potential for the E. coli problem years ago, and voted to construct the beach anyway.
Indeed, three years before the beach was created, Mr. Albert wrote a report saying “the water does not meet provincial swimming guidelines a good deal of the time.”
Because of this, Knoxdale-Merivale Councillor Gord Hunter, who voted against the project, was not surprised by the high bacteria levels at the beach.
“We were absolutely told that this beach is going to have water quality problems, and now we have them,” Mr. Hunter said.
“There were studies and they predicted this.”
Despite the E. coli problem, city officials are pushing ahead with development of the area.
Aaron Burry, the city’s director of parks and recreation, said even with the high E. coli counts, the number of people using the beach is about four times what the city predicted, and that the island is meant to be a park, not just a beach.
The numbers back him up, too. In 2005, 140,000 people went to the beach, and 168,000 more used the trails, picnic area, and other things on the island. These numbers dropped last year, but they are still above estimates.
The city has set aside $900,000 for a pavilion on the island that will house washrooms, an office and a canteen. Mr. Hunter said that “is an incredible amount of money for a building that will be used three months a year at a beach people can rarely swim at.”
At next week’s economic affairs committee, city staff are requesting permission see if a private partner would be interested in expanding on this to include a cafe, outdoor seating, community space, showers and other facilities as well as running the whole thing.
Orleans Councillor Bob Monette, whose ward the island is in, says despite the concerns, the development should go ahead.
“This is a recreational area with a lot of uses, and we don’t have anything else like it in the east end,” he said.