A CRAPPY situation

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(Ruth Bonneville / Winnipeg Free Press)

If there's one aspect of urban life most city-dwellers rather wouldn't think about, it's what happens to all their urine and excrement after they flush.

Sewage simply isn't sexy, unless you're unusually dispassionate or an engineer or both.

So when something goes wrong with sewage treatment, forcing us to think about something we'd rather not, it's no surprise to find otherwise logical people reacting emotionally if not outright irrationally.

Last week, when Winnipeggers learned the South End Water Pollution Control Centre has been spewing out half-treated sewage since the Thanksgiving weekend, the most widespread response was a mixture of anger and disgust.

That was the logical reaction, both to the discharge itself and the knowledge engineers chose not to mention it to their superiors for more than three weeks due to a legalistic reading of the plant's environmental licence.

But the illogical reaction was to use the collective disgust to score political points.

Take Manitoba Conservation Minister Dave Chomiak, who expressed legitimate anger about being left in the dark -- but also pointless puffery about the need to conduct Winnipeg sewage-treatment upgrades that are already in the pipe.

Then there was Doug Chorney of Keystone Agricultural Producers, Manitoba's largest farm lobby, who also expressed legitimate concern before he trotted out the dubious argument provincial officials only blame farmers for Lake Winnipeg's eutrophication woes.

Forgive my cynicism, but I'm surprised the lunatics on the left have yet to posit conspiracy theories about Veolia's involvement in the bioreactor malfunction -- and the equally insane folks on the right feign outrage about some imagined misuse of tax dollars.

The fact is, we all need to pay more attention to our poo. That's because the largest, most ambitious and most expensive project undertaken by the City of Winnipeg so far this century involves a massive sewage-treatment overhaul.

Back in 2002, when a catastrophic failure at the North End Water Pollution Control Centre sent raw sewage into the Red River for 57 hours, Winnipeg received its waste-water wake-up call.

The following year, the provincial Clean Environment Commission decided it was time for the city to clean up its sewage-treatment act, primarily to reduce the loads of phosphorus and nitrogen that flow into Lake Winnipeg, where those nutrients promote the growth of algae, which in turn die and deprive the lake of oxygen.

At the time, the Lake Winnipeg Stewardship Board determined Winnipeg was only responsible for about six per cent of the nutrient loading in the Lake Winnipeg watershed. But since it will take every single septic field, toilet, effluent outlet and manure pile from Alberta's Rocky Mountains to Minnesota's Boundary Waters to help restore Lake Winnipeg, the province ordered Winnipeg to reduce its share of the blame to four per cent.

The resulting sewage-upgrade plan initially came with a $1-billion price tag, spread over nearly 30 years. That figure has since risen to $1.8 billion, when you take into account the total cost of upgrading existing facilities at all three of Winnipeg's sewage-treatment plants, building new gizmos to remove dissolved phosphorus and nitrogen from the back end of those plants and replacing some of the city's combined sewers.

Those combined sewers, as many Winnipeggers have learned the hard way, carry both surface-water runoff and household sewage. During extreme rainfall events -- 22 times a year on average -- our combined sewers overflow into the Red or Assiniboine rivers and may also back up into homes.

What many Winnipeggers do not realize is the city has yet to decide on a plan to replace these sewers. The options on the table, as I reported 22 months ago, will cost the city another $900,000,000 to $3 billion, on top of the $1.8 billion already in the massive upgrade plan.

For $900,000,000, we could get wider pipes that can hold more sewage, which will reduce but not eliminate outflows into rivers.

For about $1.5 billion, we could bury 40 massive underground storage tanks to temporarily hold rainwater-diluted sewage, which would be treated with chlorine and then released.

For about $2 billion, we could build a 34-kilometre network of underground storage tunnels, which would work like the storage tanks but have more capacity.

And for the low sum of about $3 billion, we could replace every combined sewer in the city with separate pipes for surface drainage and household sewage. This "Cadillac" option would eliminate river outflows as well as threat of basement backups for good.

For most people, the latter option would be the most desirable. But the Cadillac option also offers the least scientific bang for the very same taxpayer's buck, as the immense expense would actually do little to reduce nutrient loading over the cheaper options.

Right now, river outflows from combined sewers in Winnipeg are responsible for 0.2 per cent of the annual nutrient loading into Lake Winnipeg, according to stewardship board figures. The city plans to reduce that figure somewhat -- but reaching zero would cost $3 billion.

Science, of course, often takes a back seat to politics. City and provincial leaders, who know ordinary people can't stomach the idea of any feces floating in the river, may not let the experts make the right call.

The collective squeamishness displayed by Winnipeggers this past week does not exactly bode well for the careful consideration of science in future political discussions about our collective crap.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 6, 2011 A8