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The mix of snow melting and the weekend rain has forced 6.2 million litres of sewage to spill into the Ottawa River.
City councillors received a memo yesterday on the latest sewage spill which totals about 50 million litres over the last months.
From last Friday to Saturday, 2.8 million litres of sewage flowed into the river, while an estimated 3.4 million litres of sewage spilled into the river from Saturday to Sunday.
The city says it has informed the Ministry of the Environment’s Spills Action Centre, the Public Health department and municipal water system operators.
Last week, city crews noticed a leak outside a raw sewage pumping station in Richmond Village.
The city said two bolts that secured a coupling between two sewage pipes rusted, so the pipe failed and raw sewage spilled into the ground.
With the help of some financial aid from both the provincial and federal governments, the city is installing real-time controls at five downtown sewer discharge locations that will help staff better monitor and report overflows.
The real-time control systems are expected to be in operation by the fall.
Ottawa’s combined sewer system allows the sanitary sewer operation to provide capacity for storm water runoff when volumes are high, particularly during a rainstorm.
Normally, raw sewage from area homes and businesses flows through a dedicated pipe to a treatment plant.
But in a heavy rainfall excess storm is mixed in with the sewage, and when levels are too high for the system to handle, rather than letting it back up onto city streets and into homes, the mixture enters a bypass that overflows into a nearby waterway.
Copyright 2009 – SUN Media