Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
Rain on Thursday caused sewer overflows of about two million litres of mixed raw sewage and rain into the Ottawa River, according to city staff.
The provincial Ministry of the Environment’s spills action centre, the public health branch and downstream water-system operators have been notified, and all regulators are now working properly, wrote Dixon Weir, the city’s general manager of environmental services, in a memo to councillors.
Ongoing work is almost finished at the Cathcart, Rideau Canal and Keefer regulators (gates that trip when the sewage system is overloaded with rain) on a monitoring system meant to maximize the use of pipes before any sewage is released into the river. The work has already resulted in a lower volume of overflows into the river, according to Weir’s memo.
The formula used to come up with the estimated overflows hasn’t been adjusted to reflect the amount of sewage being directed to treatment by the new construction, so they are overestimated, the memo says.
Earlier this year, council approved a five-year, $251.64-million plan for an underground storage system intended to almost eliminate discharges of raw sewage into the river.