Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
City workers said Friday they have stopped a sewage spill at the notorious Keefer Regulator in New Edinburgh.
A spill at the Keefer regulator began at 12:45 a.m. Friday and city crews worked through Friday afternoon to close the regulator and stop the flow, according to a note from city officials to elected councillors.
They were still trying to determine the amount of the spill, but as a precaution, the city said it was closing Petrie Island beaches for the weekend. They’re the only ones downstream of the Keefer regulator’s outflow.
The city has been rocked in the past two years by problems with its sewage system, with large spills into the Ottawa River due to old, malfunctioning equipment.
The Keefer regulator — so called because it’s at Keefer Street in New Edinburgh — is the same one that jammed open in 2006, allowing a multi-day, billion-litre sewage spill. That incident didn’t come to light until two years later, when it emerged that the city had failed to report the spill to the province and that workers had subsequently lied to cover up both the spill and the failure to report it.
In newer parts of Ottawa, sanitary sewage (from toilets and other such sources) and stormwater are carried in separate pipes, with sewage going to a treatment plant in Gloucester and stormwater being funnelled into creeks and rivers.
In older parts of town, a single set of pipes handles both kinds of waste, and during heavy rains they can become overwhelmed. Rather than sending all the mixed rainwater and sanitary sewage to the treatment plant when there’s more than they can handle, the pipes are designed to send the excess directly into the Ottawa River.
Occasionally the gates in the system that control the overflows jam. In 2006, and again this week, the Keefer regulator gate opened to allow such an overflow but then didn’t close again when the water level dropped, letting raw sanitary sewage run into the river.
The city is planning to install new gates with modern monitoring equipment to reduce the number of these incidents, and to build cisterns within the sewer system that can hold excess rainwater until it can all be sent through the pipes to the city treatment plant.
© Copyright The Ottawa Citizen