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Ever have one of those days when it seems like all the crap in the world is heading in your direction, like you’re a bullseye or something, must have it marked on your back—“Please toss excrement here”—and try as you might to figure out why this is happening why you, why now, what did you do to deserve this, and no answers ever come, just more crap.
Yves Grandmaitre has had days like that. No, that’s not true. He has had an entire season of days like that.
Grandmaitre is the owner of Ozile’s Marina and Bait shop on Petrie Island, Petrie Island being several kilometres downstream from where nearly a million cubic metres of raw sewage was dumped into the Ottawa River in the summer of 2006.
It’s only been a few days since news of the spill hit the media, but he doesn’t want to hear any more Bait and Poop shop jokes. Or hear from anglers who complain to him they “didn’t catch sh—” and then burst out laughing. (Yeah, like we’re going to believe that one today.)
“I think Petrie Island gets a bad rap,” says Grandmaitre, whose family once owned the islands outright before donating part of them to the old Township of Cumberland. “Every beach in Ottawa has to close down sometimes, but when it happens at Petrie it seems it’s front page news.”
NOT A TYPICAL SUMMER
Not that the summer of 2006 was a normal summer for any beach, let alone Petrie. Closed for 45 days because of high E. coli counts, Grandmaitre couldn’t figure out what was happening. He was convinced someone was dumping sewage somewhere, he just didn’t know who, or where.
Now that he knows the dumper was the City of Ottawa, he has a few questions.
Such as, how could a faulty sewer valve go undetected for two weeks, while almost a million cubic metres of raw sewage went down the Rideau River and out into the Ottawa River?
After it was detected, why did no one on city council know about it for two years?
And the best question—why, when fecal counts on the Ottawa River went soaring in 2006, forcing the beach on Petrie Island to close for more days than it was open, and when people started to ask why this was, and lots of other people were saying the beach was a bad idea, the city should never have spent $4 million building it, we told you so—why when all this was happening did no one at the city who knew about the spill pipe up and say:
“I wonder if it might have something to do with the million cubic metres of crap we pumped into the river?”
Perhaps there was a way of connecting those dots.
“You’d think they could have figured it out before now,” says Grandmaitre, his voice sounding both weary and incredulous.
PRIOR INVESTIGATIONS
“The city investigated what was happening that summer, Environment Canada did its own investigation, and the only thing we were ever told was that the contamination was coming from the Ontario side of the river.”
The whole time those investigations were going on, people at the city knew exactly what had happened. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment knew as well (the city notified the MOE within weeks of the spill).
It’s like some party game that went horribly awry. Split the crowd into two groups. This group here will contaminate the basement. The other group will try to figure out how the basement got contaminated. First person on any team to speak to someone on the other team loses.
On you mark. Get set. Go to work.
I agree with Grandmaitre that Petrie Island always seems to get the dirty end of the stick (sorry about that.) You can pretty much say the same thing for the entire east side of the city.
But if you have never been to Petrie Island, you are missing one of the gems of the nation’s capital. The fishing is fantastic. There is a nature reserve, a marina and the beach is gorgeous.
Everyone who thought the city wasted its money building that beach has to do a little rethinking today. Apparently, if you’re not dumping raw sewage into the river, it works out fairly well.
Ottawa Sun