While Olympic ads are pitching Canada to the world as a land of vast beauty and pristine waters, a damning internal government report describes a country that’s full of crap. Literally.
Hard to imagine in the 21st century, but a federal environmental study has found almost 400 cities and towns across the country are flushing their raw sewage directly into lakes, rivers and the ocean.
The issue isn’t just about tourists holding their nose on the Halifax waterfront as they watch what the sewage industry calls “floatables” drift merrily by.
The water communities are using as an open sewer is what they — and hundreds of others — use for drinking, bathing and food preparation.
On both coasts, Canada’s stewardship of the oceans, fish stocks and protection of marine life includes huge sewer pipes spewing the output of a few million city toilets.
And that’s just the worst 399 offenders.
The federal environment ministry has also identified another 550 sewage systems across the country — including 106 in Ontario and 46 in Alberta — that will ultimately have to be fixed or replaced.
The alarming federal study of municipal sewage dumping is part of a federal campaign to force cities and towns to clean up their act.
‘Not acceptable’
Environment Minister Jim Prentice recently announced new federal regulations are in the works, adding the obvious: “It is not acceptable that we continue discharging untreated waste water into our waterways.”
The regulations would give the worst polluters 10 years to fix their sewage problems, and others up to 30 years.
While Prentice’s plan seems more of a nudge than a crackdown, the feds are clearly hoping municipalities will simply be shamed into action.
For decades, cities and towns have quietly flushed away their sewage treatment problems, opting instead to spend tax dollars on hockey rinks and other more politically sexy projects.
Even among all the mega-billions being handed out during the federal government’s great infrastructure giveaway, the amounts being invested in sewage treatment are a drop in the toilet.
By far the largest number of offending municipalities are in Newfoundland and Quebec.
The federal study also lists three in Ontario — Owen Sound, Cornwall and Brockville, although the latter is currently constructing a state-of-the-art fix.
There are two in Alberta, although no one at Environment Canada could say which ones.
Manitoba, New Brunswick and P.E.I. have no facilities requiring emergency attention.
Quebec has 33 sewage disasters in progress with Quebec City, Montreal, Laval and Longueuil all pumping raw sewage into the St. Lawrence.
On the West Coast
Finally, there’s “supernatural B.C.,” host of the Olympics, home to some of the most acute environmental smugness on the planet, and site of eight of the most polluting wastewater systems in the country.
Picture-perfect Victoria is hoping to stop flushing its toilets into the sea by 2016. Sweet.
How bad are the worst 399?
Apparently they are even more polluting than the nation’s capital, and Ottawa’s record is truly disgusting.
In one incident, the city released over 700 million litres of raw sewage into the Ottawa River just in one nine-day period.
Ottawa isn’t even on the list of the country's worst offenders.
It’s time the poop hits the fan and not the nearest river.
Canada is full of crap
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Time to end raw sewage in waterways
By Andy Willner, Blue Ridge Press
POSTED: May 7, 2009
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Almost no one ever asks the unseemly but important question: Where does my waste go when I flush? Certainly most of us assume with confidence that it flows to a municipal sewage treatment plant where it is disposed of properly. After all, this is the United States. This is the 21st Century!
The truth is less savory: After a hard rain, the human excrement of roughly 40 million Americans in 772 communities in 31 states goes untreated straight out the pipe into local rivers, lakes and bays, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
We aren't talking about small-town polluters either. These are places like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City, Omaha, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle. Medium-sized and small cities also are at fault. There are 105 communities in Indiana alone that flush raw sewage into waterways without treatment after a storm.
And don't think that just because you don't live in one of the offending cities you aren't impacted. Waterways like the Hudson, Potomac, Mississippi and Columbia rivers and the Great Lakes can be flush with sewage after as little as one inch of rain.
The reason for this national embarrassment is something called the Combined Sewer Overflow. CSOs are primitive systems designed in the 19th century that move raw sewage and stormwater together through the same pipe. That system works fine in dry times. But in wet weather, the rush of stormwater overwhelms sewage treatment plants and they must be bypassed, so sewage is flushed directly into waterways.
The U.S. Clean Water Act of 1973 mandated the cleanup of CSOs, but unfortunately little has happened. Municipalities have long pleaded poverty for not solving the problem, while the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned a mostly blind eye to CSO violations.
Strangely, the EPA, which has failed for more than 35 years to enforce the law, agrees that CSOs are a major source of waterborne microbes that can cause diseases ranging from swimmer's itch, stomachache and throat infection, to hepatitis A, salmonella or cholera.
While recreational swimming is rarely banned near CSOs after a storm, it should be, since beaches can come alive with dangerous disease-carrying bacteria. Take, for example, the rush of sewage coming from 450 New York City CSOs, amounting to 27 billion gallons annually. This onslaught not only threatens the health of swimmers and boaters, but also significantly harms commercial shellfisheries throughout the region.
Granted, the CSO solution proposed in past by most engineers has been daunting. They suggest the construction of giant underground storage tanks where stormwater can be held temporarily until sewage plants catch up. Such a proposed New York City end-of-pipe system would cost taxpayers a staggering $2.1 billion.
Now some cities - including Chicago, Seattle and Portland, Oregon - are implementing a better, potentially cheaper, more beneficial solution called Low Impact Development, or LID. This isn't an end-of-pipe answer, but instead heads off stormwater before it ever enters a storm drain. LID uses green roofs, permeable pavement, rain gardens, rain barrels and other simple techniques to catch stormwater and then release it slowly.
In Portland, LID technology already includes 43,000 downspouts connected to rain gardens or rain barrels, keeping 1.1 billion gallons of runoff out of combined sewers each year. Chicago's green roof program started with a 20,300 square foot demonstration project atop city hall. This green roof not only reduces stormwater runoff by 75 percent during a one inch storm, but the building is also an average of ten to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit cooler than neighboring structures with black tar roofs on the hottest summer days. There are now over eighty green roofs in Chicago, totaling more than one million square feet, producing less than half of the storm runoff of conventional roofs.
LID not only helps solve the CSO problem, but also greens up urban centers, making them more livable. More trees and vegetation mean more shade, which means cooler streets and homes, and lower energy bills for residents and businesses. Greener cities also mean reduced street flooding, more open space for recreation, more wildlife habitat and a significant offset against the expected rise in temperature from global warming.
Engineers note that LID isn't the total solution to America's CSO raw sewage problem, but it could curb the bank-breaking costs of end-of-pipe solutions and help transform our cities from asphalt jungles into healthy green communities.
Adoption of LID by U.S. cities is still slow. So for the foreseeable future, falling rain will mean more millions of gallons of sewage flushed into waterways and rolling up onto our swimming beaches. It's an uncivilized, unhealthy travesty that shouldn't be sanctioned by the EPA or municipalities, especially when there is an effective solution available now.
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Copyright 2009 Blue Ridge Press
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Andy Willner was one of the founding members of the Waterkeeper Alliance and served as the NY/NJ Baykeeper from 1989 to 2008. He lives in Keyport, N.J.
Time to end raw sewage in waterways
By Andy Willner, Blue Ridge Press
POSTED: May 7, 2009
Save | Print | Email | Read comments | Post a comment
Email: "Time to end raw sewage in waterways"
*To:
Almost no one ever asks the unseemly but important question: Where does my waste go when I flush? Certainly most of us assume with confidence that it flows to a municipal sewage treatment plant where it is disposed of properly. After all, this is the United States. This is the 21st Century!
The truth is less savory: After a hard rain, the human excrement of roughly 40 million Americans in 772 communities in 31 states goes untreated straight out the pipe into local rivers, lakes and bays, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
We aren't talking about small-town polluters either. These are places like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Kansas City, Omaha, Sacramento, Portland and Seattle. Medium-sized and small cities also are at fault. There are 105 communities in Indiana alone that flush raw sewage into waterways without treatment after a storm.
And don't think that just because you don't live in one of the offending cities you aren't impacted. Waterways like the Hudson, Potomac, Mississippi and Columbia rivers and the Great Lakes can be flush with sewage after as little as one inch of rain.
The reason for this national embarrassment is something called the Combined Sewer Overflow. CSOs are primitive systems designed in the 19th century that move raw sewage and stormwater together through the same pipe. That system works fine in dry times. But in wet weather, the rush of stormwater overwhelms sewage treatment plants and they must be bypassed, so sewage is flushed directly into waterways.
The U.S. Clean Water Act of 1973 mandated the cleanup of CSOs, but unfortunately little has happened. Municipalities have long pleaded poverty for not solving the problem, while the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned a mostly blind eye to CSO violations.
Strangely, the EPA, which has failed for more than 35 years to enforce the law, agrees that CSOs are a major source of waterborne microbes that can cause diseases ranging from swimmer's itch, stomachache and throat infection, to hepatitis A, salmonella or cholera.
While recreational swimming is rarely banned near CSOs after a storm, it should be, since beaches can come alive with dangerous disease-carrying bacteria. Take, for example, the rush of sewage coming from 450 New York City CSOs, amounting to 27 billion gallons annually. This onslaught not only threatens the health of swimmers and boaters, but also significantly harms commercial shellfisheries throughout the region.
Granted, the CSO solution proposed in past by most engineers has been daunting. They suggest the construction of giant underground storage tanks where stormwater can be held temporarily until sewage plants catch up. Such a proposed New York City end-of-pipe system would cost taxpayers a staggering $2.1 billion.
Now some cities - including Chicago, Seattle and Portland, Oregon - are implementing a better, potentially cheaper, more beneficial solution called Low Impact Development, or LID. This isn't an end-of-pipe answer, but instead heads off stormwater before it ever enters a storm drain. LID uses green roofs, permeable pavement, rain gardens, rain barrels and other simple techniques to catch stormwater and then release it slowly.
In Portland, LID technology already includes 43,000 downspouts connected to rain gardens or rain barrels, keeping 1.1 billion gallons of runoff out of combined sewers each year. Chicago's green roof program started with a 20,300 square foot demonstration project atop city hall. This green roof not only reduces stormwater runoff by 75 percent during a one inch storm, but the building is also an average of ten to fifteen degrees Fahrenheit cooler than neighboring structures with black tar roofs on the hottest summer days. There are now over eighty green roofs in Chicago, totaling more than one million square feet, producing less than half of the storm runoff of conventional roofs.
LID not only helps solve the CSO problem, but also greens up urban centers, making them more livable. More trees and vegetation mean more shade, which means cooler streets and homes, and lower energy bills for residents and businesses. Greener cities also mean reduced street flooding, more open space for recreation, more wildlife habitat and a significant offset against the expected rise in temperature from global warming.
Engineers note that LID isn't the total solution to America's CSO raw sewage problem, but it could curb the bank-breaking costs of end-of-pipe solutions and help transform our cities from asphalt jungles into healthy green communities.
Adoption of LID by U.S. cities is still slow. So for the foreseeable future, falling rain will mean more millions of gallons of sewage flushed into waterways and rolling up onto our swimming beaches. It's an uncivilized, unhealthy travesty that shouldn't be sanctioned by the EPA or municipalities, especially when there is an effective solution available now.
---
Copyright 2009 Blue Ridge Press
---
Andy Willner was one of the founding members of the Waterkeeper Alliance and served as the NY/NJ Baykeeper from 1989 to 2008. He lives in Keyport, N.J.
"It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him." - Arthur C. Clarke
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Cherry Kelly
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Floods do cause problems for sewage getting into waterways. However, that does not mean the cities are deliberately dumping raw sewage.
The EPA does monitor these waterways. If and when they find a problem, they tract down the sources.
Amazing how often they find the problem not connected as much to sewage plants as to dump sites where people have dumped trash.
The EPA does monitor these waterways. If and when they find a problem, they tract down the sources.
Amazing how often they find the problem not connected as much to sewage plants as to dump sites where people have dumped trash.
