Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
"It's a huge problem," Robinson, founder of Norton Engineering, said in an interview on CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's The Morning Edition. "We get blockages in sewers, we get fatbergs, pump stations shut down and all that material ends up at the sewage treatment plant." Robinson, who used to work for the City of Kitchener, said people have been known to flush things down the toilet because of a lack of immediate access to a trash can.
Venturing into an unfamiliar section where he did not typically work, Keays saw an illegal device known in the industry as a “magic pipe.” From his marine studies in Glasgow, Scotland, Keays knew exactly what he was looking at. Several feet long, the pipe stretched from a nozzle on a carbon filter pump to a water tank. Its magic trick? Making the ship’s used oil and other nasty liquids disappear. Rather than storing the highly toxic effluent and unloading it at port, as the ship was legally required to do, the pipe was secretly flushing the waste into the ocean, saving the ship’s owner, Carnival Corporation, millions of dollars in disposal fees and port delays. Keays used his cellphone to take shaky video and pictures of the pipe, as well as photographs of the engine-room computer screen that showed how discharges were being manipulated.
A team of engineers is in Manitoba to test some equipment that could be a game-changer for small, remote communities. The RivGen Power System generates emission-free electricity from river currents, and its first testing site in Canada is set to be installed near the Seven Sisters Generating Station near Pinawa, Man. Engineers arrived about a week ago and installed the turbine, pushing it into the Winnipeg River on Thursday. Over the weekend, the system will be moved upstream and installed on the mooring system at the University of Manitoba's Canadian Hydrokinetic Turbine Testing Centre.
The proposed flow of 250,000 gallons/second represents a lot of water. Converting it into a more normal engineering unit, this would represent about 32,000 cubic feet/second (CFS). That happens to be about the same rate of flow as passes through the generating turbines at Hoover Dam at full capacity. In the original letter, this flow was correctly calculated as the amount of flow necessary to fill Lake Powell in one year. Even at today’s record low level, Lake Powell is not empty. Lesser flows could reduce the costs and difficulty of the project while still providing significant benefits.
A highly decorated Ontario Public Service employee living in Brampton has been named a Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award winner. Indra Maharjan is a wastewater professional and the current director of innovation, technology and alternative delivery at the Ontario Clean Water Agency. Born in Nepal, Maharjan has been creating innovation solutions for the Canadian water and wastewater industry since moving to Canada more than 10 years ago. “My current role is to promote innovative solutions around energy, climate change and resource recovery,” he said, in a release announcing his win. “It involves working with stakeholders to demonstrate new technology and implementation models that reduce the cost of operating the system making it more sustainable and resilient.”
A Windsor-based engineer said climate change is taking a toll on the health of the Great Lakes and this could in turn have an impact on the quality of drinking water for millions of people. Saad Jasim, who is also president of the International Ozone Association, said the impact of climate change on the Great Lakes is quite visible in the form of harmful algal blooms. "But it's not just the way it looks, these algal blooms produce some fatal toxins … there are different species of those toxins [and] unfortunately only one of the species is regulated by Health Canada," Jasim told CBC Windsor.
A Memorial University professor says the Newfoundland and Labrador government is taking a big risk by building a mental health and addictions facility in an area that has flooded repeatedly over the past few decades. The location of the new mental health hospital, near the Health Sciences Centre in St. John's on a flood plain, has drawn criticism from many, including Joseph Daraio, a hydraulic engineer and MUN associate professor. "It's not a really good idea to put any building in a flood plain," said Daraio in a recent interview. "Especially something that would include such a high risk to so many people in a flood plain."
The Town of Hay River will be receiving federal funding to cover half the cost of a feasibility study on the potential construction of a replacement water treatment plant and identification of other water treatment options. The federal government will provide $225,000 for the project under the Investing in Canada Infrastructure Plan. Another $225,000 will come from the town. The federal funding was announced on May 6.
“They cut corners every day, every day,” said Justin Gee, vice-president of First Nations Engineering Services Ltd. Gee said he encountered these recurring problems while overseeing the work of a construction firm, Kingdom Construction Limited (KCL), building a water treatment plant 10 years ago in Wasauksing First Nation, along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay, about 250 kilometres north of Toronto. “You have to be on them every step of the way,” said Gee, who was the contract administrator on the project. “You can’t leave them on their own.”
The taps to Winnipeg's drinking water were first turned on in April 1919, but as the city celebrated its engineering feat and raised glasses of that clear liquid, another community's fortunes suddenly turned dark. Construction of a new aqueduct plunged Shoal Lake 40 into a forced isolation that it is only now emerging from, 100 years after Winnipeg's politicians locked their sights on the water that cradles the First Nation at the Manitoba–Ontario border. "The price that our community has paid for one community to benefit from that resource, it's just mind-boggling," said Shoal Lake 40 Chief Erwin Redsky.
