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Mayor Larry O’Brien plans an investigation into how city staff handled a large raw-sewage spill into the Ottawa River in 2006, a move Somerset Councillor Diane Holmes criticized yesterday as expensive and unnecessary.
Ms. Holmes made the comment shortly after the investigation was announced yesterday afternoon. She said the city has its own auditor who could have done an investigation, but it’s already clear what happened: The city manager has a handle on the situation, and a protocol for informing the public about such events in the future is currently being developed.
“It sounds unnecessary to me,” Ms. Holmes said.
”(The city manager) can easily find out exactly what happened and went wrong with the communications and fix it,” she said.
Mr. O’Brien said the investigation into the spill of nearly 960,000 cubic metres, or about 350 Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth, of raw sewage and storm water into the river in August 2006 has shaken the public’s confidence in the city’s staff, and that needs to be fixed.
“We want the people of Ottawa to feel comfortable that all the necessary steps are being taken to avoid something like this in the future,” Mr. O’Brien said while surrounded by councillors from the east end. Petrie Island Beach, on the Ottawa River at Orléans, was affected by the spill.
Mr. O’Brien said an investigator will be announced next week and a budget for the investigation will be put before city council in the coming weeks.
City staff detected the spill after two weeks and reported it to the environment ministry and immediate supervisors, but senior bureaucrats and councillors only learned of the spill by chance last weekend.
© “The Ottawa Citizen 2008’:http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/city/story.html?id=81640fcd-bdd2-4ccd-b7ce-a143727d5ac2