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Not to minimize the magnitude of the 2006 sewage spill into the Ottawa River, but do we really need investigations by city staff, the city auditor general, the provincial Environment Ministry and the federal Environment Department? It was a sewage spill, not Chernobyl.
Now Conservative MPP Norm Sterling wants a public inquiry. Does anyone detect the distinctive odour of politics?
Perhaps the reason city staff and Environment Ministry officials didn’t get too excited about the sewage spill was because it was simply a larger version of the kind of sewage leaks that are routine downtown. The sewer gate that stuck open and let the sewage into the river is designed to open during storms, to handle the excess flow that heavy rain puts into the downtown’s combined storm and sanitary sewers. In this case, the gate didn’t close, but in a normal year, the city discharges nearly half the amount of the controversial leak and no seems to care. There were 45 smaller sewage overflows into the Ottawa River in 2006.
The multiple investigations are proceeding even though we seem to know the main facts in the case. A sewer gate stuck open, staff who knew about it didn’t immediately tell their bosses or the Environment Ministry, then someone lied about it, now that person is a former city employee. The main thing yet to be determined is what the fired employee’s bosses knew about the problem and why they didn’t act. City manager Kent Kirkpatrick is likely to get to the bottom of that, and if he doesn’t the auditor general will.
Admittedly, it says something about either the quality of our river water or the quality of our bureaucratic thinking if it was considered likely that 960,000 cubic metres of dirty water could be discharged into the Ottawa River and no one would notice.
That just might have happened, though, were it not for the city beach at Petrie Island, which acted as a collection point for the sewage.
While councillors were scratching their heads and wondering why there was so much bad stuff floating up at Petrie, the city employee or employees in the know didn’t see fit to raise their hands and offer up the answer. That’s not acceptable, but it’s not a federal or provincial problem.
Although the leak was bad for the river, it’s proving to be good for politicians. It’s pretty safe to oppose sewage spills. The best way to avoid being tagged with the responsibility for the misbehaviour of the organization one heads is to call immediately for an independent investigation. Mayor Larry O’Brien was quick off the mark in doing so. The mayor knows from painful experience that it’s important to be on the right side when the brown stuff hits the fan or, in this case, the river.
Environment Minister John Baird joined in Thursday, promising to “use all the resources and authorities of the federal government to get to the bottom of what happened.”
O’Brien cheered Baird’s move, and offered the opinion that the resources of the federal and provincial governments and the city’s auditor general ought to be enough to determine “who knew what when.”
Quite likely so. Perhaps the United Nations could help as well. This stuff must have eventually flowed into international waters.
One did have to smile when the mayor promised to “bring about the appropriate governance changes” to create a new era of accountability at City Hall. It wasn’t immediately clear who should be held accountable for what, but it is fair to observe that the sewage spill guy has been fired and the politician who didn’t deliver the promised tax freezes is still around.
It’s good to see all these governments displaying so much concern for the water quality in the Ottawa River, but the real scandal is not the accidental spill, but the routine discharge of polluted water into the river. The city is spending up to $25 million to improve controls that divert water from overflowing sewer pipes into those with more capacity. That will reduce the overflow problem, but it won’t eliminate it.
Overflow from combined storm and sanitary sewers in older, urban parts of major Canadian cities is common. In Ottawa’s case, the water going into the river is not pure sewage, but a mixture of sewage and runoff from the streets, itself a soup of various contaminants. Solving the problem altogether would mean separating sewers and increasing capacity, a project that could hit nine figures. The federal government has a program for that kind of work, but the city and the province would have to pay as well.
The federal government is finally addressing the sewage problem, but major Canadian cities are still routinely dumping raw or inadequately treated sewage into bodies of water. That’s the real scandal, not this one-time event at the city.
Contact Randall Denley at 613-596-3756 or by e-mail, rdenley@thecitizen.canwest.com