Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
Senior city staff said yesterday that the problems with the city’s sewer system have been fixed and it’s time to look forward. After reading Auditor General Alain Lalonde’s report, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t want to look back.
Lalonde’s report will delight the city’s many critics. It identifies incompetent senior staff with a cavalier disregard for the most basic functions of their jobs; a failure to be honest with the public; layer upon layer of managers, but no one taking charge; and an inexcusable failure to maintain the city’s sewer system. That basic maintenance, the easiest thing to get right, was the primary cause of a large spill in 2006 that led to the audit. For people who opposed amalgamation, there is also the fact that the sewer system started going downhill in 2001, after the new city cut inspections and maintenance.
The city’s original explanation for the 2006 sewage spill was that a mechanical gate had simply jammed. The real story is one of human malfunction. The auditor says the gate, designed to divert sewage into the Ottawa River in times of heavy rainfall, hadn’t been properly maintained for years and the city was aware it was in poor shape.
Senior city staff said yesterday that the problems with the city’s sewer system have been fixed and it’s time to look forward. After reading Auditor General Alain Lalonde’s report, it’s easy to see why they wouldn’t want to look back.
Lalonde’s report will delight the city’s many critics. It identifies incompetent senior staff with a cavalier disregard for the most basic functions of their jobs; a failure to be honest with the public; layer upon layer of managers, but no one taking charge; and an inexcusable failure to maintain the city’s sewer system. That basic maintenance, the easiest thing to get right, was the primary cause of a large spill in 2006 that led to the audit. For people who opposed amalgamation, there is also the fact that the sewer system started going downhill in 2001, after the new city cut inspections and maintenance.
The city’s original explanation for the 2006 sewage spill was that a mechanical gate had simply jammed. The real story is one of human malfunction. The auditor says the gate, designed to divert sewage into the Ottawa River in times of heavy rainfall, hadn’t been properly maintained for years and the city was aware it was in poor shape.
Even knowing that, city staff didn’t regularly inspect the gate to make sure it was working. They cited a shortage of money, even though the department had budget surpluses of more than $500,000 a year. An alarm system that warned of gate malfunctions was never repaired because the managers being alerted found the frequent false alarms annoying.
Once news of the big spill accidentally became public, the first instinct of now-fired managers in the department was to say the problem was no big deal and hope that it would all go away. This despite the fact that the spill was ultimately equivalent to the entire amount of sewage the city creates in two days. The managers compounded their error by telling their bosses that corrective action had been taken when it hadn’t.
Meanwhile, yet more bureaucrats were trying to figure out why the water quality downstream at Petrie Island was so poor. Where was all that fecal bacteria coming from?
Because of the jammed gate, the volume of sewage going to the treatment plant was about 20 per cent less than normal for 12 days. No one noticed. The only people who seem to have done their jobs were the front line staff who quickly repaired the problem after a technician finally noticed it by chance.
The cast of characters in this little sewer drama reads like a Russian novel. There is a deputy city manager, directors, section managers, program managers, various supervisors and senior engineers. The auditor dryly notes that the city could do with somewhat fewer managers in this area.
After all of this, the taxpayers ended up paying a $562,500 fine for the spill.
It is possible to understand to some degree the lackadaisical attitude of the people running Ottawa’s sewer system. It is, after all, a system designed to put raw sewage into the river. When there is heavy rain, the combined storm and sanitary sewers in the downtown can’t handle the flow. The balky gate is one of several that are supposed to divert the rainwater and sewage into the Ottawa River. That kind of planned sewage dump is regarded as normal system operation. If the gate doesn’t work and the sewage keeps getting dumped once the rain stops, that’s seen as a really bad thing. Kind of a technical difference isn’t it?
The city has been working on a better system of controls for nearly a decade. It was expected to be complete by 2003 at a cost of $9.7 million. Now, city staff say it will be done by 2010 for $20.45 million. Even that won’t completely eliminate sewage spills into the Ottawa. It will take a whole new project and more than $100 million to do that. The auditor cites the always-impending improvement to the system as one of the reasons city staff didn’t make a better effort to maintain the old-fashioned gate system that’s still in use today.
For a municipality, there really isn’t much that is more mundane or basic than making sure the sewage system works properly. To accomplish this, the public depends on the supposed experts the city hires. When the experts aren’t really very expert, the system breaks down.
Only a real optimist would think that the city’s sewer department was an aberration, a single malfunctioning element of an otherwise smooth machine. This fiasco has cost the public a lot of money and some people their jobs, but the biggest damage is to the city’s credibility.
Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com
(C) Ottawa Citizen