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A day after public works staff admitted there have been 1o major sewage spills into the Ottawa River in the last decade, two city councillors said if department managers knew about them and didn’t report them to the Ministry of the Environment, “heads should roll.”
Councillors Alex Cullen and Rick Chiarelli made this judgment after city staff revealed late Thursday that in the last 10 years, there have been nine major spills into the river—on top of one in 2006 that led to Environment Act charges against the city and the firing of a mid-level employee who allegedly did not report the spill.
Dixon Weir, the director of the city’s water and waste water department, said a recent search of records relating to the spills has turned up no indication of whether they were reported to the ministry, which is required by law. The city has asked the ministry to review its records to see if they were.
Mr. Chiarelli called the situation unacceptable.
“It indicates that there is a serious flaw in the way things are being done,” he said. “There have been too many slipups, and there needs to be accountability. It’s more than one person, and we need to deal with these people.”
Mr. Cullen said he and other councillors are dismayed to learn of the other spills, and it’s frustrating that public works officials can’t say whether they were reported due to incomplete or non-existent record-keeping.
“If these weren’t reported, heads should roll,” he said. “This is just not satisfactory.”
At a closed-door session of city council late Thursday, elected leaders directed their lawyers to try to work out a plea bargain on the charges the municipality faces for the 2006 spill of almost a billion litres of raw sewage. And at an unannounced briefing afterward, council learned the municipality has a history of major sewage spills.
City lawyers were instructed to approach the Crown to see if prosecutors are interested in making a deal that would see the municipality plead guilty to charges stemming from the 2006 spill, in return for a reduced fine.
The council vote to seek the plea bargain passed by a large margin, but it was not unanimous.
Following the vote, city staff broke the news that on nine other occasions since 1998 the city spilled large amounts of sewage into the river, including four major spills from the now notorious Keefer gate where the 2006 spill occurred.
Ottawa’s downtown core has combined sanitary and storm water sewers. When it rains, the system is often overwhelmed, and to relieve pressure and avoid backups in basements, gates open at five points and sewage and stormwater are dumped untreated into the Ottawa River. These are called overflows, and they are legal.
When the rain stops, the gates are supposed to close. However, sometimes a gate gets jammed open, and raw sewage is dumped into the river until someone detects the problem and gets the gate fixed. These are called spills, and they are not legal.
When the gates get jammed open and a spill occurs, it is supposed to be reported to the ministry as soon as the public works department becomes aware of it. This was not done in 2006. That spill was reported nine months later, and it only came to the attention of city council and the public this summer.
A review of records dating back to 1998, when monitoring equipment was installed, revealed the amalgamated Ottawa and the former regional government had more spills or potential spills than the city bureaucracy had realized.
The monitoring equipment doesn’t directly record flows through the sewage gates, but Mr. Weir said the records indicate the potential spills “likely” happened.
He said to be safe, the city reported them to the ministry yesterday, when the city also asked the ministry to review its records to see if the spills were reported when they occurred.
Since 2006, the city has established a monitoring system on the gates to avoid spills. The city is also putting in another system designed to limit overflows, and the Keefer gate is being replaced.
City manager Kent Kirkpatrick began investigating the 2006 spill as soon as he learned of it, and one employee was fired. (The employee is grieving his dismissal.) Mr. Kirkpatrick’s investigation is continuing, and Mr. Cullen said the city manager now needs to look at the 10-year history of sewage spills in the city.
“We’ve always known there were overflows, and now we hear there are serious spills quite often, and we don’t know whether or not they were reported,” he said. “It’s very disconcerting to discover these things.”
Mr. Chiarelli noted that the situation has prompted the city to take action to limit spills and overflows, but he said that’s hardly a silver lining when you look at the facts.
“We’ve been dumping raw sewage into the river for quite some time, and we don’t even know if we knew it, or we knew it and we didn’t report it,” he said. “Any way you look at it, there’s been a serious breakdown and there needs to be accountability.”
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City’s Worst Sewer Gate
Estimated volume, in cubic
metres, of sewage spills into
the Ottawa River from jammed gate at Keefer sewage outflow:
Year Duration Volume (m3)
2006 12 days 960,000
2004 4 days 190,000
2000 1 day 50,000
1998 4 days 60,000
1998 6 days* 80,000
Source: City of Ottawa
(C) Ottawa Citizen