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OTTAWA – The August 2006 spill of almost a billion litres of sewage into the Ottawa River and the subsequent non-reporting of the event was the result of “incompetent management” that treated the spill and several others as routine, the city’s auditor general has found.
In a report released Wednesday morning, Alain Lalonde concludes if several managers did their jobs even remotely well, the spill – and 16 other smaller ones dating back to 1998 – could have been avoided.
He found there was “almost a complete lack” of maintenance on the sewer gate that got jammed open and spilled the untreated sewage, even though the recommended maintenance standards are close to 40 years old.
Mr. Lalonde found inspections of the gate, and four others like it where spills have occurred almost routinely in the last 10 years, were “woefully inadequate.” In the report, he said a malfunctioning alarm system was disabled on purpose because managers got tired of false alarms, and that legal requirements to report spills to the provincial environment ministry were ignored.
“The August 2006 spill was brought about by inadequate preventative maintenance and a lack of proactive management of this equipment,” Mr. Lalonde said. “Once the event had occurred, a culture of either not understanding, or disregarding, the significance of a sewage spill took over and the event was never viewed as noteworthy.”
Indeed, the report says that during the audit the sewer program manager, Barry King, who has since been fired, said the sewage spill was “Not a big deal in 2007, but became a big deal when it hit the papers.”
The leak of 960,000 cubic metres of sewage occurred because a large swath of the city’s downtown core has combined sanitary and storm sewers. Under normal circumstances, the sewers carry their contents to the city sewage treatment facility. But when it rains, the system is overwhelmed, and the city pumps storm water and raw sewage into the Ottawa River through five pipes.
An overflow pipe near 24 Sussex Dr. got stuck open during a large rain storm on July 31, 2006, and continued to dump raw sewage into the river until the problem was detected on Aug. 15 and fixed.
The report found the only city staff who performed their duties correctly were the front-line workers who repaired the gate within hours of finding the problem. Despite this, the leader of this group, Jean-Pierre Boisseau, was the first person fired in connection with the spill. (He is grieving the move.)
The spill wasn’t reported to the environment ministry, as required by law, until the spring of 2007. City council, senior municipal bureaucrats, and the public learned of it by chance a year later when a community group and councillor touring the municipality’s sewage treatment plant were told of it.
This led to charges against the city under the provincial environment act, to which the city pled guilty and was fined more than $500,000, the firing of two senior waste water managers, and the suspension of another.
In the conclusion of the report, the auditor makes six recommendations such as implementing maintenance and safety standards, a review of the reporting system, and better monitoring of the sewer system. He also recommends the city look into filing misconduct complaints against the managers (all engineers) with the profession’s association.
The city’s management agrees with all the recommendations.
The city has taken several steps since the spill became public knowledge to ensure a similar event won’t happen again.
“We take this very seriously,” said the city’s water and sewer director Dixon Weir in response to the report. “This is a go forward day for the city. This confirms we have the steps in place that will reduce this possibility in the future.”
(C) Ottawa Citizen