Contrary to last week’s CATCH report city officials say correction of illegal sewer hookups will continue despite council’s rejection of staff recommendations to make permanent the effort to reduce fecal contamination of local streams. Staff warn, however, that only a tenth of the sewer system has been inspected it will take many years and additional initiatives to complete the cleanup originally ordered by the Ontario government more than fifteen years ago.
At issue is an effort launched in 2009 to find and correct illegal connections that push sanitary sewage into local streams via stormwater pipes. A staff appeal to make permanent a successful two-year-old pilot remediation program ran into opposition from east mountain councillor Tom Jackson who deemed the request “presumptuous” and voted against it.
The widespread problems were flagged between 1995 and 2002 by citizen groups including Environment Hamilton and researchers from McMaster, and led the provincial ministry of the environment to impose orders on the city in 2001. That was followed by several years of testing outfall pipes and then trying to determine where the high levels of e coli bacteria in streams were coming from.
A pilot remediation project was originally set up in 2009 by the city, but during its first five years without dedicated staff it was only able to find 131 locations where sewage flows from a home or business had been improperly connected into the city’s stormwater pipes that empty into local streams, and was able to fix just 113 of those. In 2012, an Environment Hamilton study again found extreme bacteria levels in Red Hill Creek, and the following year the construction of a waterfall viewing platform on Chedoke Creek drew attention to the sewage odours in that waterway.
In March 2014, in response to a motion from then ward one councillor Brian McHattie, staff proposed ramping up the search and repair project by hiring two additional staff dedicated to the project. Council agreed and the project is now finding and correcting mis-connections at nearly five times the previous rate. But the positions were deemed temporary and remain that way after councillors turned back staff advice to make them permanent.
Jackson led the opposition, asking “why can’t we just keep it temporary for now?” and arguing that his constituents couldn’t afford higher costs. Staff replied that the costs were already part of the budget and pointed to the amount of required work as reason to make the project permanent or even expand it.
“We’re estimating that it’s going to take at least eight years for us to video inspect the entire sewer system and we do recognize that we’re going to need to go back and do some additional work after those initial rounds of inspection, investigation and correction as well,” explained Nick Winter. “So there is going to need to be a lot of work that’s got to go into this program.”
Winter also said that while the program can continue with just temporary positions, the resulting staff turnover could result in project setbacks.
“People come in and they’re looking for a career and some sense of stability, and people do move on because of the temporary nature of positions to other positions that provide them with that. And every time we have that, we do encounter some setbacks to the program.”
Winter explained how Hamilton got into this mess: “The only thing that prevents this is a robust inspection process at the time the home is built ... but historically there wasn’t a requirement for sewer laterals to be dye tested in order to make sure that they were properly connected.”
That wasn’t changed until last year when a new bylaw forced homebuilders to complete dye tests to confirm that pipes are hooked up correctly. The legacy is an average of one cross connection for every 500 metres of storm sewer and a long remediation process at the current pace.