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Ottawa’s auditor says incompetent management is one of the reasons a billion litres of raw sewage ended up in the Ottawa River in August 2006.
Alain Lalonde released a 107-page report Wednesday that determined years of neglect of the city’s 50-year-old sewer regulators, which control the flow of sewage and storm water into the river, was also to blame.
Lalonde said a lack of reporting protocols resulted in the provincial Environment Ministry not being notified of the spill for close to a year.
Top city officials didn’t find out about it until last May—almost two years after the fact.
Program manager Barrie King and David McCartney, manager of wastewater and drainage services, have been fired, while section manager Luc Dugal received a 20-day suspension without pay and is back on the job.
Earlier this month, the province fined the city $560,000 for the spill.
“The August 2006 spill was brought about by inadequate preventative maintenance and a lack of proactive management of this equipment,” said Lalonde. “Once the event had occurred, a culture of either not understanding, or disregarding the significance of sewage spills took over and the event was never viewed as noteworthy.”
The report also says the section manager would have been expected to follow up with the ministry about the spill, but he was away at a conference about sewage spills in August 2006.
According to the audit, a 1970 report published by the American Public Works Association says sewer regulators require continuous preventative maintenance, at least once a week and after each storm.
Lalonde discovered that the last assessment of the regulator responsible for the August 2006 spill was completed in 1992.
The next complete assessment wasn’t done until this year, after staff discovered the gate was in poor condition.
Lalonde also found it “very unusual that no one at the sewage treatment plant noticed that for 12 days the volume of sewage reaching the plant was almost 20 per cent lower than the normal daily volumes.”