Costly waste water upgrades receive low priority
In the years before Romila Verma dedicated her life to water, it could have killed her. Growing up in Calcutta, Verma contracted a series of water-borne and water-linked diseases: malaria at age 10, typhoid at 14, hepatitis at 21.
Malaria, she said, “racks your body. They had to put a spoon between my teeth or I would bite my tongue, the shivering was so intense.”
Verma survived the illnesses, which flourish in urban areas where sanitation and water management is poor. Soon after she recovered from malaria, it killed her neighbour’s four-year-old son.
Speaking earlier this year in Bhuj, a town in the northwestern Indian state of Gujarat, Verma remembered sitting with the mourning mother of the dead child.
“She would just cry and I would sit there. I thought about running away, because I was so scared — this could have been me. It just kind of hit me: this could have been me.”
“All these things made me who I am,” she said. “I have a reference point for all of this: when we talk about water, safe water, sanitation. I can feel it.”
Verma moved to Ontario in 1994, where she became involved in an effort to protect the ecologically degraded Lake Simcoe, from which six treatment plants draw drinking water. Now an instructor of hydrology and environmental science at the University of Toronto, Verma continues to work on water campaigns in her native India, her home in Canada, and abroad (including an ambitious effort to install a freshwater pipeline across Africa).
Verma travelled through three Indian states in January with a delegation of Canadian and Indian water experts on a program called Water Innovation Lab. A Postmedia reporter joined Verma and the group of about 55 people on a tour of Mumbai’s water infrastructure.
Mumbai, a teeming megacity of more than 20 million, is served by a complex network of 1,900 kilometres of sewer pipes (roughly the distance between Vancouver and Manitoba). B.G. Salvi, executive engineer for sewage disposal projects for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, said after the tour that Mumbai’s water system is so big and so complex, “it takes at least 10 years to really understand the system, to get a feel for it.”
After the tour led by Salvi, members of the visiting delegation, both Canadian and Indian, expressed surprise at how insufficient the water treatment facilities seemed for such a large metropolis.
Jesse Skwaruk, an Alberta-based water professional said, based on some “back-of-the-napkin math” looking at the capacity of the sew- age treatment plant visited and the engineers’ figures for the millions of litres of sewage produced daily, he estimated most of the city’s sewage is dumped into waterways untreated. A 2015 Indian government survey reported around 40 per cent of Mumbai’s sewage is untreated, which caused concern for local residents, but painted a far better picture than a United Nations report a decade earlier that said more than 80 per cent of the city’s sewage was untreated.
Revathy Vattukkalathil, an Indian-born Ontario resident who has worked in municipal water management in both Canada and the Middle East, commented that she found the tour dispiriting. Vattukkalathil said Salvi, the engineer leading the tour, acknowledged the tremendous pressures on their water systems, but he seemed excited to show the infrastructure.
“It was very disappointing,” she said later. “(Salvi) was so energetic. I don’t know if he could see it, but this (system) was not doing the job.”
A report from the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board said Greater Mumbai’s sewage treatment plants are “inadequate,” given the quantity of sewage effluent generated, estimated at 2.7 billion litres a day.
Verma, the U of T hydrologist, said while the pressures on the water systems of India and Canada are vastly different, her January trip to Mumbai caused her to reflect on her long-standing concern about North America’s aging infrastructure, an issue on which she has tried to raise alarms since the 1990s. The gravity was underlined two weeks after Verma’s return to Ontario, she said, when more than 180,000 Californians were ordered to evacuate their homes due to the threat of potentially catastrophic flooding and a spillway collapse at the Oroville dam, the United States’ tallest.
“There is crumbling infrastructure all over the world, and Canada is one of these countries,” she said. “We don’t talk about it enough in Canada. We use Band-Aid solutions. ... It makes me really nervous.”
In Metro Vancouver and other Canadian urban centres, wastewater management systems include several modern features, including new technologies that recycle and repurpose waste. But still, according to longtime Metro Vancouver waste-water engineer Simon So, much of the country’s water infrastructure is in need of upgrade, repair and replacement, and despite the federal government’s recent commitment to infrastructure investment, it’s not always easy to secure funding.
The “huge infrastructure deficit” facing many Canadian cities also applies to Vancouver’s water and waste-water facilities, said So, Metro Vancouver’s general manager of liquid-waste services.
As an example, the 1961-built Lions Gate sewage plant dumps 30 billion litres of sewage waste water every year into the ocean in front of Stanley Park after only primary treatment, at a time when secondary treatment has become the norm across Canada.
Metro Vancouver has planned a $700-million project to replace the archaic Lions Gate facility. Such large infrastructure is generally funded on a “one-third, one-third, one-third basis,” with shared commitments between the federal, provincial and regional levels, So said, and in the case of the Lions Gate facility, the provincial government was the last to commit funding. Politicians in the region have been talking about the need to upgrade the Lions Gate plant since at least the 1990s.
So and his colleagues awaited the release of last month’s provincial budget, he said, but “The budget is kind of silent on Lions Gate.”
Federal funding for the Lions Gate project came through a year ago, in the March 2016 federal budget, So said last month, “so we’re surprised that it’s taking the province this long to provide their share of the funding.”
The announcement came three weeks after the provincial budget, as the provincial election neared, when the B.C. government declared it would provide $193 million for the Lions Gate project. Lions Gate is one of two Metro Vancouver waste-water treatment facilities that provide only primary treatment; Iona Island in
Richmond, a larger primary treatment plant, is also due to be upgraded eventually. The two older plants do not pose any immediate environmental risk to the area, So said, but with the region’s population growing and climate change producing more violent storms, the upgrades to at least secondary treatment are needed.
“The classic problem is that, especially for municipalities, water and sewage is not sexy. It’s something you depend so much on on a daily basis, and yet, it’s out of sight, out of mind, so you don’t pay attention until something goes wrong,” he said. “They don’t really appreciate that, compared to building a new rec centre or a new park or a new swimming pool. So that’s the problem the politicians face every day: how do I make the dollar connection … work to get more votes?”