Over 90 million litres of raw sewage dumped...so far

[farsider]

Over 90 million litres of diluted raw sewage has been dumped into the Ottawa river so far this year.

 

The good news is it won't be recorded in Ottawa's annual statistics because it happened outside of their reporting period between April 15 - Nov. 15.

 

Yum!

 

http://www.ottawasun.com/2014/04/14/sewage-overflow-highlights-need-for-tunnel-city

 

Cheers,

Mark

[Gallie]

Wow, build the damn tunnel already!

[jedimaster]

I thought this was about the sens rebuilding again.

[gino]

I thought this was about the sens rebuilding again.

:rofl2:

[muskymatt]

I thought this was about the sens rebuilding again.

Flush twice Ottawa, it's a long way to Toronto!

 

Seriously though, what an embarrassment that a historic, heritage river is being allowed to be mistreated this way. I have been on the water after one of the spills and it ain't pretty. Putrid, brown slick on the water, naturally we left in disgust. Kinda like a mass exodus after a laff game lol

[BillM]

I thought this was about the sens rebuilding again.

 

Lock it up folks, this thread is done! LOL!!!!!

[nancur373]

As a guy who works in the field I feel the need to chime in here. In a nutshell, Older cities have some combined storm/sanitary sewers. This meaning that rain/melt water from your weeping tiles is drained into the sanitary sewer along with some down spouts. This was the cheapest solution back in the day before environmental laws. They only needed one set of pipes in the ground to take both systems away. And It was designed for the treatment plants to go in by-pass mode during heavy storm conditions. Treating sanitary sewer takes time and you can't effectively treat it at a high rate of flow. Too much volume and flow will disturb the media beds and the live organic treatment process. A while back they went to two separate systems and nowadays have three (sanitary, storm, and flood drain control). But the old systems are still combined and even the new bigger plants still can't handle extreme flood conditions. One solution is to expand the current plants to be so robust to handle the flow but that would not be practical nor economical at the costs in the millions+++ Don't think this happens only in the river, it happens in every major city.

 

Dilution is the solution to the pollution.

[nancur373]

Also 'raw' sewage is over 99% water

[12 Volt Man]

yup. I also work in the field. Raw sewage is 99.9 percent water at full strength. contrary to the chocolate pudding like stuff they show in the comedy movies LOL.

 

with rain effect high flows, its super dilute with rain water.

 

fact is, municipalities cannot build treatment plants with the tankage to handle the few big rain events we have per year. doing so would cost a fortune as mentioned (not to mention land use etc) and for most of the year that capacity would not be in use. in addtion, certain treatment process steps are a 'bottleneck' and can only handle so much flow through at a time.

 

at our plant, we only 'bypass' a few times per year (either heavy rains or rain events with snow melt)

 

typically, bypass flows only occur when our plant flow are 3x our normal capacity. so we have 3x as much water trying to come through the system at these times compared to what the plant is designed to handle.. its insane. and busy lol.

[moxie]

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

[captpierre]

Ottawa should have it's municipal water intake downstream from the sewage plant effluent site,

 

like in a lot of cities in Europe and Alberta, I believe.

 

That would change things I would think

[farsider]

Ottawa gets a "heavy storm condition" or "rain effect high flows" whenever it rains 2.5 millimetres an hour or more.

Does that not seem like an incredibly low threshold?

 

Granted, it is a national shame that it happens all too often in other communities as well and Ottawa is not as bad as Newfoundland or Quebec is in regards to pumping untreated sewage right out into the water body but, this is our Capital that has been dithering for years to make the long overdue investments for this Heritage river.

 

Cheers,

Mark

[outllaw]

I heard they parliament had a full sitting every mpp attended. that backflowed the sewage system.

solve the problem. remove most mpp.s and theres less effluent overflow.

[highdrifter]

mmmmm food for the zooplancton!!

[bigugli]

You should see what many Canadian and American cities dump straight into the ocean every day. Storm event overflows are a non event in comparison.

[lew]

You should see what many Canadian and American cities dump straight into the ocean every day

 

I remember back to my Navy days in the 60's and we used to toss most of our garbage into the ocean everyday.

 

Food scraps would become fish food and I'm sure the salt water took care of tin cans and whatever, but I honestly don't remember if we tossed paper & plastics overboard.

 

And if my old mind remembers correctly, I seem to recall barges hauling alot Halifax's garbage out to sea to be dumped overboard.

[pics]

Hamilton has built some very large underground overflow tanks that handle a lot of the excess overflow.. the incident rate is much lower than in the past. All cities should have to fix their sewage infrastructure before being able to expand urban boundaries. Our wastewater rates have gone up quite a bit but the waterways are getting dumped into less and less as a result..

[aplumma]

With the new techniques we have to manage and treat waste water we have come a long way. In 1972 the clean water bill was interduced here in the US and the water quality has improved dramatically. The Potomac River has the waste storm and sewer system combined with some sections so old they still have the wooden ducts in place. The river at that time was so nasty with chemicals and waste that it would catch fire and the "fairy lights" could be seen at night on the right combination of chemicals. The river now through treatment and strict guidelines has become a place of recreation and outstanding clean fish for all to enjoy. The save the Chesapeake Bay foundation has been instrumental in making this possible through legal and grass roots means.

 

 

Art

[Twocoda]

Now that the Harpocrite has unprotected our waters you can expect more of these types of situations...the missing 3.1 billion could possibly go along ways to solving the problem...ever notice how crap gets dumped and emails get deleted during transitions of Gov