Montreal will begin its controversial dump of 8 billion litres of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River at midnight on Wednesday, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre announced Tuesday.
Coderre’s announcement came hours after Canada’s new minister of the environment and climate change gave a conditional go-ahead to the plan, provided municipal authorities met several conditions imposed by the federal government.
In a conference call from Paris on Monday, Catherine McKenna called the city’s decision “far from ideal,” but said a planned discharge before winter presented fewer risks for long-term environmental damage than an accidental and uncontrolled discharge due to infrastructure failure, which is in need of urgent repairs.
No good choices
“The operation is aimed precisely at limiting the unplanned breakdown of strategic equipment, to increase our future capacity to treat wastewater and to reduce wastewater from overflowing into the St. Lawrence River,” Coderre told reporters at a news conference in Montreal.
“What is important to mention today is that certainly we are not making this decision lightheartedly, had there been other options we would have taken them but there was no other option.”
(Listen to excerpts of Mayor Denis Coderre’s press conference explaining details of the sewage dump)
Municipal authorities says they need to discharge a third of the sewage produced by the city’s 1.65 million inhabitants into the river in order to conduct urgent maintenance work on a major sewage collector pipe and a snow chute.
The release of raw sewage could last up to seven days. Richard Fontaine, the director of Montreal’s wastewater treatment plant, said Montrealers and residents of downstream communities should not smell or see anything different because the release will be done from underwater pipes located on the riverbed, about 50 metres from the shore. Coderre said municipal authorities will increase their inspections of water quality and tests of effluent coming from industrial sites during the wastewater release, in keeping with requests made by the federal environment ministry.
Watch what you flush down
They are also asking Montreal residents to do their part by not flushing down their toilets diapers, female hygiene items, cigarettes, syringes and food oils.
Coderre said the city wants to use this opportunity to improve its ability to treat wastewater. Municipal authorities have already invested $250 million to upgrade the city’s wastewater treatment infrastructure including new retention basins and implementing ozone treatment technologies to deal with discharges that were not treated previously.
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