In this rainy summer season in the nation’s capital, every time it rains it almost always means raw sewage pours into the Ottawa River.
With rain in the forecast for the rest of the week, there’s no end in sight.
It seems city staff took the wrong time to decide to alert council every time human fecal matter gets into the river.
The alerts come with such regularity, several councillors admit they often just delete the constant flow of warnings.
The most recent came just yesterday, with the news that on Saturday about 15,000 cubic metres of sewage was spewed into the river.
“These e-mails are just staring you in the face,” said Alta Vista Coun. Peter Hume, chairman of the city’s planning and environment committee.
It takes as little as 5 mm of rainfall to trigger the flow of raw sewage into the river.
On July 30, rainfall caused just under 6,200 cubic metres to flow into the river from the combined sewer system.
Two days before that, an estimated 11,000 cubic metres went into the river.
On July 25, it was less than 2,000 cubic metres and the same on July 23.
Dixon Weir, director of the city’s water and wastewater services branch, said staff would have preferred a hot, dry summer.
“It’s rained about 50% of the time,” Weir said of the past couple of months.
The only good news is despite the number of days it’s been raining, the amount of overall rain is no more than in an average summer.
With heavy rainfall expected overnight, Weir said the relatively average amount of summer rainfall could change quickly and with each warning, city staff advise councillors of the same thing.
‘OVERFLOW EVENTS’
It looks like the rush of sewage into the river isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
“Combined sewer overflow events occur as a result of rainfall events. The intensity and duration of the rainfall event affects the number of sites at which combined sewer overflow events occur as well as the volume and concentration of discharge from each site,” the memos, generally sent out by Weir, read.
“Instrumentation and equipment does not currently exist within the collection system to provide this information as events occur.
“As a part of the Real Time Control program, staff will be able to monitor and report on events as they occur. At this time, we do not anticipate the Real Time Control reporting information to be available until fall 2009.”
(C) Ottawa Sun