Proposed composting site should be moved: critics
Opponents of the site that was chosen by the city to build one of its municipal organic waste treatment centres say the bird strike threat due to its proximity to Trudeau airport should alone prompt the city to find a different location.
In fact, businessman Youssef Nakhoul, whose manufacturing plant abuts the site that Montreal expropriated for the future organic waste facility on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard West in St-Laurent, two kilometres from the airport, said he doesn’t understand how the city settled on the site in the first place.
“We don’t understand how this thing happened,” Nakhoul said on Wednesday. He also said he wonders why the higher levels of government, notably Transport Canada and the Quebec Environment Department, have not blocked the plan.
Nakhoul was reacting to a report in the Montreal Gazette that the city isn’t heeding some of the safety precautions that Aéroports de Montréal recommended in 2012 to reduce the risk of bird-plane collisions around the facility. He joined the city’s monitoring committee for the St-Laurent facility as a representative of the public this year, but the committee hasn’t met in more than a year.
The newspaper reported that some of the ADM’s precautions are absent or partially addressed in the specifications that are in the call for tenders the city launched a year ago to award the contract to design, build, operate and maintain the future centre.
The city maintains it has followed the airport authority’s recommendations.
The Henri-Bourassa location is on the edge of what’s categorized as the primary bird strike zone around the airport.
While the composting centre is to be enclosed, the airport authority is concerned about avoiding odours and waste that could attract gulls and other scavengers.
For example, one of the ADM’s dozen demands concerning the StLaurent facility called on the city to ensure that trucks and truck tires are washed before each vehicle leaves the facility.
However, the contract specifications, which are contained in a call for tenders package of more than 5,000 pages, don’t impose an obligation on the future builder/operator to ensure trucks and truck tires are washed before they exit.
Instead, the specifications call for the winning contractor to install a pressure washing system with flexible retractable hoses and spray guns in each unloading bay to “allow the truck tires to be adequately cleaned.”
And the specifications call for the winning contractor to “actively promote the use of these devices by drivers.”
“There are no specs that will force them inside the building to do that,” Nakhoul said. “They’re not forcing the truck to be washed.”
City officials told residents and businesspeople who are concerned about odours that truck tires will be washed before vehicles exit to allay concerns about odours, Nakhoul said.
They also said initially that only wood and grass would be transported to the St-Laurent facility, he said.
“If it’s only wood and grass, then why do you need to wash the trucks?” he asked.
“When we ask the question and get two different answers from different people, then we know something is wrong.”
Nakhoul and resident Anne Klein, who is spokesperson for the committee Citoyens SaraguayCartierville contre l’usine de compostage Saint-Laurent, have suggested that Montreal only needs one composting plant, and that it should be off-island.
“When we asked questions about the decisions — why the location was selected — some people said it’s the only place (to put the composting centre),” Nakhoul said. “But there are other places that nobody explored.”
Meanwhile, the city’s specifications call for the composting facility to have a green roof.
The city paid $18.46 million to expropriate the site at 9091-9191 Henri-Bourassa Blvd. W. from a numbered company.
The property has a municipal valuation of $11.08 million.
The one-million-square-foot site is double the size the city needs for the composting centre, one of the civil service reports on the project has said.
The city originally looked at industrial properties near highways in the West Island, including in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, to build the west-end composting centre.
However, the city chose a site on Aviation St. in Dorval, next to the Dorval golf course. Later, the Dorval site’s owner, the ADM, withdrew support for the location because it was so close to Trudeau airport.
In 2012, the city under thenmayor Gérald Tremblay and thenexecutive committee chairman Michael Applebaum, chose the Henri-Bourassa site as an alternative. The city put a reserve on the site while Applebaum was briefly interim mayor in 2013.
A ruling on the final price to expropriate the Henri-Bourassa property came in 2016, while Denis Coderre was mayor.
The Coderre administration also approved the city ’s purchase of additional vacant land next to the site just north of Henri-Bourassa for $370,000 plus tax to build an entrance to the composting centre from Pitfield Blvd.
However, the Henri-Bourassa location is only 600 metres further from the extended line of one of the airport runways where planes land and take off than the site on Aviation that caused the ADM to balk.
And while planes are on the ground near the Aviation site, they’re at an altitude of around 500 feet when they ’re in proximity of the Henri-Bourassa site, which experts say is well within reach of large birds.
Transport Canada’s 2017 annual report on wildlife strikes at Canadian airports said 1,941 “wildlife strikes” were reported to Transport Canada’s Flights Standards Branch; last year, 1,871 were bird strikes. There were another 136 near misses involving birds.
The number of reported bird strikes has been on a nearly steady upward trend in Canada since 2005, when there were 1,250 such reported events.
Trudeau airport reported the fourth-highest number of bird strikes in Canada in 2017, with 105 incidents. The airport had a so-called strike rate of 4.33. The strike rate is the number of strikes per 10,000 movements of aircraft.
Toronto Pearson airport, Vancouver airport and Calgary International airport filled the top three spots on the list of the top 20 airports, in that order. Toronto, with 240 bird strikes, had a strike rate of 4.86.
Quebec City’s Jean Lesage airport was near the bottom of the list of the top 20 airports with bird strikes. It had a reported 21 bird strikes in 2017, and a strike rate of 2.56.
In the incident reports that indicated the phase of the flight, the majority of the strikes occurred during landing (31 per cent) and takeoff (29 per cent).
More than three-quarters of the incident reports didn’t indicate the altitude of flight when a bird strike occurred. But of those that did, the majority occurred at 200 feet and below, while 31 occurred at 201 to 500 feet.
When we ask the question and get two different answers from different people, then we know something is wrong.