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If they aren’t there already, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his family may want to head to Harrington Lake for the holiday weekend to avoid an unpleasant sewage spill near 24 Sussex Drive.
Raw sewage ran into the Ottawa River at the Keefer regulator, a component of the city’s sewer system just east of Rideau Falls, from 12:45 a.m. until city crews were able to stop it at 4 p.m., city officials said in a Friday afternoon news conference.
The city is upgrading the regulator, which is meant to allow waste to run into the river only when there’s too much to handle, so that such needless spills don’t happen. But somehow a steel plate got stuck in a large steel shaft that brings waste down to a sewer line that runs on to the city’s sewage-treatment plant in Gloucester. The sewage then went into the bypass, directly into the river.
An estimated 6,500 cubic metres (6.5 million litres) flowed into the river by 2 p.m. and then a large quantity, undetermined by late afternoon Friday, flowed in the two hours between 2 and 4 p.m.
Dixon Weir, general manager of environmental services at the city, said it was too early to say how the accident happened.
The city’s top managers, already under pressure this week over criticism that the city was too slow in responding to last Friday’s west-end flood, delivered the news sombrely.
Medical officer of health Dr. Isra Levy said the two beaches at Petrie Island, downriver from the spill, will be closed for the weekend. He also advised boaters not to swim.
“It would be imprudent to be in the water until we know what’s going on,” said Levy. “It would be unwise to have full body contact with the water.”
Levy said there is no problem with the city’s drinking water, which is drawn upstream of the spill site.
The city has been rocked in recent years by problems with its sewage system, with large spills into the Ottawa River due to old, malfunctioning equipment.
The Keefer regulator — so called because it’s at Keefer Street in New Edinburgh — is the same one that jammed open in 2006, allowing a multi-day, billion-litre sewage spill.
That incident didn’t come to light until two years later, when it emerged that the city had failed to report the spill to the province and that workers had subsequently lied to cover up both the spill and the failure to report it. The city was fined $562,500.
The federal government has recently been helping the city cover costs for upgrading the equipment to prevent spills.
In newer parts of Ottawa, sanitary sewage (from toilets and other such sources) and stormwater are carried in separate pipes, with sewage going to a treatment plant in Gloucester and stormwater being funnelled into creeks and rivers.
In older parts of the city, a single set of pipes handles both kinds of waste, and during heavy rains the pipes can become overwhelmed. Rather than sending all the mixed rainwater and sanitary sewage to the treatment plant when there’s more than the system can handle, the pipes are designed to send the excess directly into the Ottawa River.
Occasionally, the gates in the system that control the overflows jam.
The city is separating the sewer lines where it can, installing new gates with modern monitoring equipment to reduce the number of these incidents, and plans to build cisterns within the sewer system that can hold excess rainwater until it can all be sent through the pipes to the city treatment plant.
With files from
David Reevely
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