‘Flushgate’ had no lasting effects, city says
In its post-mortem of Montreal’s internationally publicized sewage dump that resulted in the flushing of 4.9 billion litres of untreated effluent into the St. Lawrence River, the city reported Wednesday that its repair work was successful and the environmental impact minimal, but its communication strategy leading up to the event was bungled.
The head of the city’s communications department said even Mayor Denis Coderre and Chantal Rouleau, executive committee member responsible for water management, were initially unaware of the extent of the volume of raw sewage the city was planning to dump to carry out infrastructure work on a 30-kilometresewage interceptor. It was only after the city’s Info-Travaux department sent notices warning residents to avoid the water and the city’s main opposition party and journalists started asking questions that elected officials and even the city’s communications department became aware of the scope of the project that would come to be dubbed Flushgate.
Experts within the city’s bureaucracy had analyzed the operation and determined the risks were minimal, and didn’t see the need to alert the city’s communications department. Sewage dumps of a similar scale done in Montreal in 2003 and 2005 went unnoticed by the public and unreported in the media.
“Because it was a project that was overseen by the city’s infrastructure department, there was no analysis (by our department) beforehand to evaluate the degree of risk or degree of social acceptability from the beginning,” communications head Louis Beauchamp said. “What was lacking in this dossier was proper transparency” and an understanding of the public’s level of concern.
News of the planned dump of eight billion litres of raw sewage created a wave of negative media coverage. The federal Conservative Party, in the midst of an election campaign, ordered the work suspended pending further technical and environmental impact studies.
The city scrambled to prove it had no choice, and to show that the practice of dumping untreated sewage into waterways was an unfortunate reality across the country due to a lack of infrastructure.
In the end, the city limited the sewage dump to four days and 4.9 billion litres of effluent from Nov. 11 to 14
In its overview, city officials said the degraded nature of 56 circular tunnel support beams removed from the sewage interceptor as well as accumulated sediment and other maintenance showed the work was necessary to offset possible system breakdowns and greater overflows in the future. Water pollution in the St. Lawrence was limited to a corridor about 250 metres wide along the south shore that flowed 10 kilometres downstream.
In Repentigny, five kilometres downstream from the eastern tip of Montreal, there was no change in fecal coliform rates, the city said.
Drinking water was unaffected in downstream municipalities. Water quality was back to regular levels within four to 10 days of the dumping, with the exception of water within the piers of the Old Port, due to reduced flow from the Lachine Canal. Fecal coliform levels there were 30 times the acceptable limits four days after the end of the sewage dumping, but back to normal six days after that.
Rainbow trout in a lab subjected to pollution equal to the effluent flow coming directly from sewage outflow pipes were alive after four days. No reports of dead fish in the water were received, or complaints from citizens, the city reported. Tests on river soil and plants showed no elevated chemical effects.
The work carried out on the southeast sewer interceptor indicates it is in good shape despite its 30 years of age, said Richard Fontaine, head of Montreal’s waste water division. Similar infrastructure work requiring another major dumping of sewage is not foreseen for the next five to 10 years. If there is one, the city intends to give full details ahead of time.
“Without the work of the official opposition, the administration would have likely kept its silence and the population would never have known the scope of the scandal,” Sylvain Ouellet, environment critic for Projet Montréal, said in a statement. Rather than promising to improve communications, the city should be working on contingency plans and creating a committee of experts to avoid the need for future sewage dumps, he said.
Non-profit environmental group Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal said the city must do all in its power to limit future sewage overflows, including tightening dumping laws, building more overflow retention basins, increasing greenery and doing more to protect marshlands.