The dirty secret of our waterfront
Elevated E. coli levels are common in our inner harbour — and no government agency is doing any regular testing
It is Toronto’s front door, a glistening image that defines this city to the world.
But Toronto’s downtown inner harbour, luring tens of thousands of summer tourists, boaters, sailors, kayakers and canoeists, routinely contains E. coli bacteria well beyond public safety standards, according to testing by environmental charity Lake Ontario Waterkeepers (LOW).
In recent weeks, those levels have soared higher than ever — as high as 30 times beyond federal guidelines for boating and 300 times beyond provincial guidelines for swimming.
The dirty secret of Toronto’s bacteria-laced harbour remains well kept because no publicly accountable government agency — at the municipal, regional or provincial level — routinely tests for E. coli in the inner harbour, a Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found.
“The fact that no government body is coming forward to take responsibility is alarming,” says Krystyn Tully, co-founder and vice-president of LOW, a registered charity that raised money online and through sponsorships to begin testing inner harbour water last summer.
The City of Toronto has not routinely tested for the bacteria in the downtown harbour since 2009, directing its testing resources to the city’s beach areas.
“That particular monitoring was discontinued because it was not telling anything we didn’t already know,” says Frank Quarisa, the city’s director of waste-water treatment. “We know that severe weather events lead to high E. coli (discharges) for a short period of time after the rain.”
Toronto Public Health manager Mahesh Patel says his agency’s water-monitoring mandate is limited to the city’s beaches.
“(The harbour) is not in our mandate. We don’t have the resources to deal with that.”
The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority also does not test water quality in the inner harbour, says Scott Jarvie, associate director of environmental monitoring and data management.
“I’m not aware that anybody does that regularly and formally,” he says. “We don’t have the capacity to do it . . . That’s not to say people don’t paddleboard and kayak in the inner harbour and islands, which they do. But it’s difficult to monitor conditions from a storm water system that cranks out contaminated storm water during storms.”
The city tests for E. coli bacteria daily at Toronto beaches from June to Labour Day. If E. coli levels are high enough, the beaches are closed or warning signs are posted by Toronto Public Health. The information is also available on the Toronto Public Health website.
Of Toronto’s 11 beaches, eight had posted blue flags — indicating water quality safe for swimming — as of September 2016.
A few kilometres away, in the city’s inner harbour — home to yacht clubs, boating clubs, windsurfers and paddleboarders — elevated E. coli levels are considered common by city health and environmental officials.
“It’s a known,” says Jarvie. “With high rain flows, it tends to exceed the capability of the system to treat storm water.”
Provincial health officials, in response to a freedom of information request seeking E. coli data on the city’s inner harbour, say they stopped testing those waters nearly a decade ago.
“(The Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change) has not conducted water-quality monitoring for E. coli in the Toronto inner harbour since 2008 due to the high variability in water-quality conditions that can result from rain events, runoff and impacts from combined sewers,” reads a written response from Jim Martherus, a supervisor with the ministry’s environmental monitoring and reporting branch.
Beneath the millions of feet sauntering the city’s boardwalk is a war- ren of sewer pipes that date back to the 1800s. It’s an antiquated system that is often inadequate for handling the city’s growing discharges.
“You get plumes, lighter-coloured plumes coming out of the Don River after the big rainstorms as well as a few spots along the waterfront here,” says David Corrigan, owner of the Harbourfront Canoe and Kayak Centre. “After a heavy rainstorm, that is when it (the lake) is most polluted.”
This past weekend, Corrigan cancelled two paddling classes because of heavy discharges in the water.
“If anybody goes down (to the inner harbour) on a summer day, there’s 50 kayaks and canoes out there. It’s definitely being used recreationally.”
Bacteria levels in the past few weeks have been higher than any tested by LOW over the past year.
For example, all of the 72 samples collected between April 5 and May 3 at Pier 4 Marina (at the foot of Rees St.) showed E. coli concentrations designated as “too numerous to count.”
“It’s not unusual to see provincial standards (breached),” says LOW’s Tully. “But it’s unusual to see all samples collected in one location hit the threshold of ‘too numerous to count.’ We’ve never had a situation where all of them were too numerous to count.”
Based on testing LOW did last summer, Tully says E. coli spikes in the inner harbour are often triggered by as little as five millimetres of rainfall.
“(City officials) make it sound like these overflows are extremely rare and . . . it’s only during freak storms. But in actual fact they are happening once a week,” says Tully.
The City of Toronto’s Quarisa says five millimetres of rainfall “in the most inopportune part of the city could trigger such a discharge. And in a different part of the city it might be 10 or 15 millimetres.”
The city’s double standard for water-quality monitoring — a vigorous program for beaches but no routine testing of the inner harbour — is reasonable, he says, because the harbour is not a recreational area.
“It is a boating area, but there is a distinction between boating and recreational usage,” he says. “Somebody swimming at Woodbine Beach is not the same as someone boating.” Not so fast, says Tully. “When you think of standup paddleboarding, unless you’re excellent, you’re going to end up in the water. If you’re kayaking, part of the training is learning how to flip over. We were seeing people in these sewage areas with no knowledge of the health risks which is why we started doing this.”
LOW raised $20,000 through its online campaign and sponsorships to conduct the testing last year. This year’s projected budget is $25,000.
A charity should not have to shoulder the burden of testing for public health risks in the country’s largest city, says Tully.
“The responsibility rests squarely with the City of Toronto. They manage the sewage pipes that put this bacteria into the water. They should be advocating and fighting for increased protection for public health. In fact, they’ve been the least receptive to public concerns.”
The city has been aware of the issue for more than a decade.
In 2003, city council adopted the Wet Weather Flow Master Plan (WWFMP), which aims to reduce the impact of wet weather flows and storm water pollution over 25 years.
According to a city report last month, the city has invested roughly $624 million into wet weather flow management projects to improve water quality along the lake’s shorelines. The next10 years of the implementation are expected to cost close to $3 billion.
Tully agrees that infrastructure changes take time and money.
But there is much the city could be doing in the meantime to increase public awareness, help Torontonians protect themselves and engage in a public debate.
“There is no excuse for hiding this information. Educating the public about this problem will only make them more understanding when it comes to talk about investing in this problem. If they would be honest with the public about the true state of affairs, the public would understand and would be supportive and would rally to solve the problem.
“It’s not rocket science.”
“It’s unusual to see all samples collected in one location hit the threshold of ‘too numerous to count.’ ” KRYSTYN TULLY LAKE ONTARIO WATERKEEPERS