TORONTO’S WORST RAVINE . . .
Is also one of its best. Tales from the extremes of Black Creek,
When Franca and Natale Nardi look out the front window of their cozy west-end home, they see a park with a large stand of mature trees and mowed grass.
But that idyllic green space hides an unpleasant reality directly behind: a dark, putrid-smelling stew that flows west along an ugly man-made channel, emptying into the larger Humber River. Ducks float along this toxic brew of phosphorus, chloride and industrial runoff, dipping their heads in the water at their own peril.
The Nardis have lived in their Alliance Ave. home in this working-class community near Weston Rd. and Eglinton Ave. W. since 1958, metres away from Black Creek. But they never see the creek as an option for a stroll.
“We don’t go down there,” says Franca Nardi, 65. “It is what it is. What can I do about it?”
Her husband, Natale, 70, a retired grocery store manager, doesn’t expect the problem to ever be fixed.
But a few kilometres upstream, to the north, it’s a different story.
Stroll alongside Black Creek near Finch Ave. W. and you’ll find a wellmaintained pedestrian pathway surrounded by trees and wild brush, where tiny fish such as creek chub flit about in a moderately clear stream. This section is one of Black Creek’s most naturalized portions.
People out for a walk or jog pass alongside squirrels as birds fly overhead. It’s a tale of two creeks. The southern part of Black Creek is where you’ll find a concrete-lined “trapezoidal” channel that begins just north of Wilson Ave., and stretches about 6.5 kilometres south and west down toward the Humber. This channel, the one that runs near the Nardi home, was built as flood protection after Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
The Nardis’ home is in a floodprone area (many houses in the area were built before Hazel) and Natale remembers how the creek water rose past the base of the trees and crept across the park toward his house in July 2013, when nearly 100 millimetres of rain lashed Toronto in two hours.
So he understands the purpose of the channelized creek.
But it’s also an area where some of the most polluted water in the city flows. It’s in a zone that has a sizeable industrial footprint, but there are schools, apartments and scores of homes like Natale and Franca’s nearby.
“When I see this (channel) it certainly emphasizes the worst-case scenarios that we have in Toronto,” says Scott Jarvie of the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority.
Jarvie, a manager of watershed monitoring and reporting, agreed to take the Star on a tour to see the good and the bad of Black Creek.
Struggle for a clean creek
Black Creek, 45 kilometres long, is a smaller watershed that’s part of Toronto’s ravine system. The city and conservation authority are taking a hard look at that system as part of their work to develop a ravine strategy, slated for completion next year.
The result will be a blueprint for maintaining, protecting and funding the public portions of the city’s massive network of ravines.
These portions are managed by the city, while the conservation authority owns the land. Both are striving to make ravines more accessible. But the variability and complexity of the watershed is but one example of challenges in hammering out the strategy.
The creek is highly polluted up in Vaughan, improves near Finch Ave. W., and is bad again down near Weston Rd.
When you’re north in Vaughan, it passes through industrialized zones and railway lands, so all the storm water from those industrial interests — with salt, pollutants, sediments, etc. — gets flushed into the stream. Phosphorus and chloride are among the major threats to water quality.
Phosphorus is a nutrient that can come from leaves and grass clippings as well as animal waste, and industrial uses such as detergents. It contributes to algae growth, which can degrade water quality through undesirable plant growth.
Chloride flows off roads, parking lots and private residences and is typically due to the use of salting to fight ice and snow.
The conservation authority’s latest surface water quality summary is for 2006-10. It shows the average level of chloride at a testing site in Black Creek, near the Hwy. 407 and Hwy. 400 intersection north of Steeles, is 1,297 milligrams of chloride per litre.
That site, which has channelized drainage, has by far the highest reading for chloride of 36 sites tested in the Toronto area, including the Humber River/Black Creek, Highland Creek and the Rouge and Don rivers.
“Chloride is one we have a real big interest in,” Jarvie says.
The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) monitors water quality in partnership with the provincial environment ministry and the city of Toronto.
One of the main threats to water quality at the troubled sections of Black Creek and other watersheds is storm water.
Jarvie says Black Creek’s water quality scores poorly compared to other watersheds because “it’s a highly urbanized watershed.”
“It’s traditionally been channelized in order to move and convey water through and away from the residential and industrial areas, which means the water flows through fairly rapidly and has an opportunity to pick up any storm contaminants, water that comes off the roads and buildings, that is quickly mobilized in the stream and dumped into the Humber River,” he explains.
As Jarvie points out during his tour, it was once the norm for municipalities to try to get storm water off the landscape and down to the lake as quickly as possible to prevent flooding.
The desire now is to keep it on the landscape as long as possible and have it filter naturally into the ground, Jarvie explains, adding that storm ponds, which help treat both the quality and quantity of the water before it gets to the creek, are being designed to retain water, which greatly reduces flushing of contaminants into streams.
Infiltration trenches and “swales” — depressions in the ground that are designed by developers in new subdivisions — are other ways to manage storm water. And homeowners are being required to disconnect eavestroughs from the municipal storm drain system so water flows onto lawns.
“The conservation authority has been focusing over the last 10 to 15 years on storm water as one of the major issues in terms of water quality and aquatic habitat in Toronto’s rivers,” Jarvie says.
The city has been monitoring and doing retrofit work related to an ex- tensive plan to deal with storm water. As it performs maintenance on storm water systems through older parts of Toronto, the city will use different techniques to increase the infiltration of storm water into the ground. (The TRCA has worked with the province to test new products, such as permeable pavement, which allows water to infiltrate into the ground).
Because Black Creek flows through parts of the older city infrastructure, some storm water drains are what are known as combined sewers, meaning they have some form of connection to the sanitary septic system.
So during heavy rain — if water is at a higher volume than what can be conveyed in either the storm water or septic system — the water can combine, resulting in more direct release of septic sanitary sewage into the creek. That has also been an issue in the Don and other watersheds, but is particularly acute in Black Creek.
There are six such combined sewer locations along Black Creek, a result of council decisions dating to the 1880s and1890s, when it was deemed too expensive to have separated systems for sanitary and storm water, says Lou Di Gironimo, general manager for Toronto Water. This has affected older parts of the city, including the neighbourhoods near the southern portion of Black Creek.
During the 1950s and 1960s, having one main pipe for sanitary and one for storm water to serve Toronto neighbourhoods being built became the norm, Di Gironimo notes.
To address the combined sewers and problems with basement flooding after heavy rains, the city has a 10-year plan to build a much largervolume sewer, which would be tunnelled underground for about $200 million throughout the former city of York, including Black Creek. The project’s complexity, given it would serve a very built-up area, has caused delays, Di Gironimo says.
Ano-channel universe?
In the pleasant part of Black Creek, in the Finch Ave. W. area, the natural features of the section — trees, rocks and the meandering course of the water — help collect and filter out sediments.
In addition, local engagement in cleanup and restoration dates back decades, says Gaspar Horvath, president of the Black Creek Conservation Project, a volunteer organization formed in 1982.
Students and teachers from local schools, community residents and others have supported the organization’s work over 34 years, including planting 100,000 trees and shrubs along the creek, installing 500 habitat structures such as bird and bat boxes, and creating gardens for 25,000 wildflower plants, Horvath says.
But Horvath’s group is disbanding for lack of money and volunteers.
“We’ve given our inventory and supplies to partners such as local schools and a couple of community groups,” Horvath says. “The city of Toronto parks department and the conservation authority will now have responsibility, and it will be up to them to look after Black Creek . . . To what level they’re going to do that remains to be seen.”
Meanwhile, fixing problem areas of Black Creek, such as the smelly channel near Weston Rd. where the Nardis live, would be no easy feat, says Jarvie, the manager with the TRCA.
“Part of the problem is the old infrastructure in some of these areas is so constricted that it’s tough to do something,” he says. “The amount of money it would cost to rip this out and put in a natural creek corridor, that’s the challenge.” Jarvie says he can’t even guess at a dollar figure.
Once you took out the concrete channel, you’d need to replace it with a natural stream corridor, a winding stream that allowed water to move, but also dissipate its energy.
Then you’d need to put in rocks, sand and gravel to allow for habitat yet prevent erosion, he says.
Natale Nardi takes a stoic approach, saying he realizes there’s no way to stop the water flowing through the creek near his house.
And the chances of any level of government cleaning up the water to the point that he’d ever consider going for walks down there are slim to none, he believes.
So having given up, Natale doesn’t spend too much time thinking about what’s behind that large stand of trees he sees out his front window.