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George Boutilier, a former Pierrefonds city councillor, near drainage pipe spilling raw sewage. Dario Ayala, The Gazette
Raw sewage flowing into river from Pierrefonds
Bad pipe connections to blame: city; Alarming jump in water’s fecal coliform levels
Max Harrold
The Gazette
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
George Boutilier, a former Pierrefonds city councillor, near drainage pipe spilling raw sewage. Dario Ayala, The Gazette
Residents on nine streets in Pierrefonds/Roxboro are believed to be the sources of raw sewage that is spewing into the Rivière des Prairies, and the borough is now grappling with how to fix a web of wrongly connected plumbing in still unidentified homes.
Water coming from one culvert near Rive Boisée St. was tested June 22 as having 6,000 fecal coliform units per 100 millilitres of water, an alarming 60 times more polluted than what city of Montreal officials consider good quality water.
The bacterium, associated with human or animal feces, can cause infections, diarrhea and dysentery in humans.
As of Monday, the Rive Boisée culvert was by far the most polluted of the 120 spots gauged regularly by the Réseau de suivi du milieu aquatique, a city agency responsible for testing water quality at shores around the island.
George Boutilier, a former Pierrefonds city councillor who lives near the Rive Boisée culvert, said Pierrefonds officials suspected there was a problem for years, if not decades, but they chose not to act.“We wouldn’t accept this if it was pollution in the street,” said Boutilier, 72, also a retired high school teacher. “We must stop treating our rivers like an open toilet.”
Bert Ward, a city councillor from Pierrefonds/Roxboro, told The Gazette that 100 homes must be checked for improperly installed plumbing that might be flushing waste water into storm drains – and directly to the river – instead of to a water treatment plant.
The borough received a report from engineers in the past month that confirmed that two underground sewage pipe junctures in the area “are contaminated,” Ward said. The report came after tests conducted in 2008 and 2007 had been analyzed, he added.
The junctures link pipes from 5,400 homes, but only 100 are suspected as possibly problematic and no specific dwellings have yet been identified. “It could be just some of the homes on those streets,” Ward said. “We have to do more testing to find out.”
He did not know when the testing might be conducted.
Sixty of the homes are somewhere on the following streets: Beamish St., Beamish Pl., Purcell St. and Hudson Cr. Forty more homes are somewhere on Perron St., Joron St., Taillefer St., Bastien St. and Bedford St.
Ward said the city of Montreal has only been tracking wrongly connected plumbing for about two years and it now spends $560,000 a year on discovering where it is. In Pierrefonds, the suspected streets have homes on them built 25 to 30 years ago, so figuring out who is to blame – and who will pay for
repairs – will be complicated.
“Whatever we do, we’ll be fair about it,” Ward said. “And we won’t wait forever.” He added that the borough might consider some kind of public funding of repairs for homeowners who are unable to pay or unwilling to pay if they aren’t the ones who connected the pipes wrong. “We have to repair the problem” in the near-term, he said.
Ward added he wants to introduce new borough regulations requiring home builders and contractors who renovate to obtain a certificate of properly installed plumbing. “I hope the other boroughs will see Pierrefonds as a model. This should go city-wide.”
Testing pipes involves flushing popcorn or food colouring through toilets while other workers check to see which pipe – sewage or storm drain – the coloured water went into.
Last year, the city of Montreal said it had spent $120,000 to correct pipe mix-ups in 48 households in 20 buildings on Nuns’ Island. Repairs for individual households have been estimated to range from a few hundred dollars to about $5,000.
Ariane Simon-Fortier, director of the non-profit Comité ZIP Ville-Marie, which advocates for sustainable use of the waterways around the western part of Montreal Island, said the Rive Boisé culvert is a stain on the otherwise clean waterways in the area.
“All the more reason for them to find a solution and complete the picture,” she said.
On the Web: Track river or lake water quality around Montreal
Island at www.rsma.qc.ca.
mharrold@thegazette.canwest.com
surprising water quality at WI marinas
Visiting the RSMA water website, I clicked on the map, then moved my mouse over the coloured dots where samplings had been taken. Most surprising was the varying levels at some of the West Island's marinas.
For example, the reading for the Marina Pte Picard in Dorval (a military dock with mostly sailboats), the coliform fecal count was 3, which is very low. At the Royal St Lawrence Yacht club it was 8. And at the Baie d'Urfe boat club it was 28!
This begs the question, are boaters at the Baie d'Urfe club emptying their bilge or holding tanks into the river, rather than having the sewage pumped out?
Frederic in Montréal