Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
If anyone would know about the Ottawa River’s nastiness, it’s the Ottawa police marine unit.
“We’re basically diving in hazardous material here,” Const. Brent MacIntyre said yesterday while tethering a colleague submerged in the river near the Rideau Canal.
“I wouldn’t dive in this water, I wouldn’t swim in this water, I certainly wouldn’t drink from this water,” MacIntyre said.
When divers come out, they’re sprayed down with a disinfectant and fresh city water before they even take off their dive suits.
MacIntyre, who has been a police diver for eight years, said that part of the river is a common training place for the squad.
Police pulled out steel barriers, beer bottles, drug paraphernalia and a bike yesterday during the annual TD Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup.
Last year’s cleanup collected nearly 90,000 kg of shoreline litter across the country.
Matthew Fortier, regional manager of the TD Friends of the Environment Foundation, said most Canadians feel environmental protection is an important issue but they don’t know what to do about it.
“We’re not going to solve climate change individually but what we can do is clean up where we live and how we live and use best practices,” Fortier said.
LITTER CAN KILL
Eric Solomon, a Vancouver Aquarium vice-president who was at the Ottawa River cleanup, said litter can kill animals.
“Garbage is not just something that’s ugly to look at,” Solomon said. “It’s dangerous to animals that pick up cigarette butts and ingest them and get the toxins from that, or starve to death from a stomach full of cigarette butts.”
Cigarettes are the most common kind of litter picked up during the cleanup, followed by food wrappers and containers, bags, caps and lids, and beverage cans.
More information is available at www.vanaqua.org/cleanup.
(C) Ottawa Sun