The Ottawa river Keeper has called on members of Pembroke city council to focus on areas in which they can have an impact in preserving the health of the Ottawa river.
Meredith Brown, who was named the first Ottawa river Keeper about three years ago, spoke to council recently about her role and the international Waterkeeper Alliance, about the current state of the river, and about ways to mitigate threats to its health.
She focused on some areas under the control of municipalities which can help improve and preserve water quality.
“The cost of treating drinking water increases as water degrades,” she said. “What goes into the sewer may go into water untreated. Make it your business to know what businesses put into the river. Sewage treatment plants are not designed to treat pesticides and pharmaceuticals.”
She said many people are surprised to learn that there is no national strategy on waste water, and added that, if human waste were the only concern, it wouldn’t be too significant.
“We are adding pharmaceuticals and cleaning products,” she said. “Many compounds are persistent pollutants which means they don’t just wash away. They stay in the aquatic ecosystem.”
Urban stormwater is rated by the United States Department of Agriculture as the most important cause of water deterioration.
“It washes over roads and fields and goes into the waterways untreated,” she said.
During major storms, untreated stormwater and sewage can combine and overflow into waterways.
“I don’t swim in the river after a large storm,” she said.
She noted that the further you go downstream, the more contaminants are found in fish.
“Some fish in the Ottawa river are not safe to eat for children, pregnant women, or women of childbearing age,” she said. “Beach closures are another indication of deteriorating water quality.”
“There was a time when you could drink a glass of water right out of the river. Those days are gone. My fear is that someday my grandchildren will say ‘You used to swim in the Ottawa river? That’s disgusting!’”
Ms. Brown criticized the piecemeal approach being taken to preserve the health of the river.
“Somebody in government monitors pulp mills, and somebody else sewage treatment plants,” she said. “The people from the pulp mills say they’re not putting out more pollutants than the river can handle. They don’t take into account the stormwater and the pollutants others put into the river.”
She said the approximately 200 dams in the Ottawa river system have a major impact on its ecological health.
“They remove the rapids,” she said. “The area at Beachburg where the whitewater rafting is done and the Deschenes Rapids are the only major rapids left, and rapids are the lungs of the river.
She said flooding is a major issue in the minds of residents.
“There are a lot of complaints,” she said. “The problem is not the dam operators, but that people are living in flood plains.”
One of the river Keeper program’s goals is to pull together information and data so that a realistic picture of the river’s health can be formed.
“To this date, no water quality analysis has been done to find out what happened during last summer’s fish kill,” she said, referring to an event last summer when many dead fish washed up on shore in the reach of the Ottawa river in the Renfrew area. “The data is so scattered. How can you manage something when you don’t have the data?”
She told council that the city of Pembroke is located where it is because of the river.
“It’s important to remember that the river belongs to the public and the health of the river is tied to the health of the community,” she said.
She commended the city for the recent completion of its sewage treatment plant, which is much more effective than the primary treatment facility in use until then.
Mayor Ed Jacyno commented that it’s hard to believe that prior to 1968, Pembroke dumped raw sewage into the river.
“We’ve come a long way,” he said.
When asked where the Ottawa river stands in relation to the other 160 rivers in the river Keeper system around the world, Ms. Brown said she feels pretty lucky.
“At conferences I’ve met river keepers from rivers you can light a match to,” she said. “It’s difficult to answer that, but I’d say that on a scale of 1 to 4, we’re in the 2 range. We are very fortunate that we’ve got headwaters that are virtually uninhabited.” The Ottawa river is part of the Great Lakes – St. Lawrence system, which is the largest freshwater ecosystem in the world, containing 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water.
mzettler@thedailyobserver.ca
The daily observer