Status quo a lousy option

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/05/2024 (672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Getting regular automatic emails about untreated sewage overflows in Winnipeg might not be a normal person’s idea of a good time.

For anyone who’s interested in the environmental health of Winnipeg’s rivers, and the downstream health of Lake Winnipeg, the emails are both a regular wake-up call and a reminder of the staggering disrespect the City of Winnipeg and the provincial government have for Manitoba’s waterways.

So far this year, there have been 26 days that have triggered emails about untreated sewage spills. Some are small, others larger, and some are so large it’s difficult to draw comparatives.

Some are the result of the catastrophic and unpredicted collapse of aging city infrastructure, and others are because of something as simple as … rain.

Lots of rain, to be sure, but still, rain.

The last two weeks have been an example of that, with more than six overflow reports in just 11 days.

It’s couched in a delightful neutral bureaucratic prose on a web page called “Reports on untreated sewage” — and uses a scale of numbers that you might not even recognize, the megalitre.

Here’s an example.

“On May 16, 2024, at approximately 7 p.m., our Wastewater Control Centre received a high-level alarm from the D’Arcy Pumping Station, indicating that the bypass pumping system was not keeping up with incoming flows, due to heavy rainfall at the time,” city reporting says.

“The levels continued to rise, and, at 7:54 p.m., a pump turned on at the D’Arcy Pumping Station to divert some of the flow directly to the Red River, to prevent flows from reaching levels in the system that could cause basement flooding in the southwest area of the city. To minimize the overflow, only one of the three pumps at D’Arcy Pumping Station was activated.”

Intermittently, over 10 or so hours, mostly on the 17th, 14.24 megalitres of untreated sewage and storm water was released into the river. Between the 16th and 18th, 21 megalitres was dumped. (A megalitre, by the way, is one million litres.)

So far this year (the reports are slightly confusing and occasionally overlap), it appears that, as a result of equipment failures and days when rainfall overwhelmed the sewage system, the City of Winnipeg has dumped something around 245 megalitres of sewage into the rivers.

That’s a lot of sewage, an amount closing in on 100 OSPs. (That’s a measurement we just plain made up, referring to the number of Olympic swimming pools of waste it represents.)

It is, frankly, no wonder that a variety of Indigenous groups have decided enough is enough. They’re taking the City of Winnipeg, the province and the federal government to court, arguing that sewage dumping in rivers has violated existing laws for years, and that the dumping has done significant damage to the ability of Indigenous peoples to maintain traditional lifestyles.

Ten First Nations are seeking $10 billion in damages from the three levels of government.

In the process, they could well be doing all of us a favour.

Why? Because fixing the twin problems of aging city infrastructure and combined sewers that carry both wastewater and storm water (so that heavy rainfall can overwhelm the system) comes with a huge price tag.

Having the risk of a huge lawsuit hanging over the heads of municipal, provincial and federal governments might help to convince the powers that be to take care of something that should have been obvious all along. What’s that, you say?

Well, that dumping raw sewage into rivers is a terrible solution for anything.

A terrible solution we use on an all-too-regular basis.