Interactive map: Raw sewage in Winnipeg’s rivers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/01/2016 (3546 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Senior officials from the city’s water and waste department said Thursday steps are in place to prevent a repeat of this month’s sewage spill, but the city’s own data reveals the antiquated combined storm water and sewer system is in a constant state of disrepair.

The city’s combined underground water and sewage system, which combines the flow of storm water and sewage through the same lines, provides for the discharge of untreated sewage into the Red and Assiniboine rivers from most of its older neighbourhoods during times of intense rainfall or snowmelt. The city has a long-term plan to separate its sewage and storm water lines, at a price tag of about $1 billion.

There have been four spills of raw sewage into the Red River this month alone, with a total of 31 spills of raw sewage over the past 12 months, pouring several millions of litres of untreated sewage into the Red and Assiniboine rivers.

Many of the incidents reported on the city’s website fail to disclose how much sewage was spilled or for what duration.

Too many others, however, detail incidents where hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage are spilled into a river, sometimes in a matter of 25 minutes, as a result of a variety of problems ranging from power failures, pump failures, hydrant leaks and system malfunctions.

The map below displays reported incidents, between Jan. 1, 2015 and Jan. 21, 2016, of interruptions in routine sewer-system operations that resulted in a release of raw sewage into Winnipeg’s river system.

This data does not include incidents of combined sewer outflow due to heavy rainfall or snowmelt. This type of combined sewer overflows occurs, on average, 22 times during the year; the city reports that data in a different manner.

Click on any marker on the map to learn more details about the incident, including the estimated amount released (usually in ML or megalitres: a measure of 1 million litres), the duration of the event, its cause and a description of how the situation was discovered and what was done to fix it. Use the zoom tools at bottom right to zoom in and out of the map. 

Can’t see the map below, or having difficulty using it?  Try viewing the map in a new window, or view this data in a text table.