GRAND RIVER, OUR NATIONAL HERITAGE RIVER, CRAPPED ON AGAIN

Well as my friend Dr. Henry Regier likes to say "The designated deniers are at it again.". It was relatively small, the river was flowing fast and heavy rains helped dilute the sewage. 860,000 litres of raw, totally untreated sewage went into the Grand River. As serious as that is, what I find so scary is that isn't considered a big deal by our regional authorities. In fact from January to November 2012, 2 million litres of sewage from the entire Region went into the Grand river from spills and bypasses.

Yes there was a storm and yes the power went out repeatedly. We can put men on the moon but we haven't found a way around keeping backup generaters and pumps going when there are repeated power failures? This is global warming folks. This is the future right now. More violent storms, heavy rain and power outages. What I find so frustrating is that Regional Council (& the province) can find hundreds of millions of dollars for LRT trains but have no problem with delays in upgrading our municipal water and sewage infrastructure. This pumping station is scheduled for upgrades including emergency sewage storage for 2014 and 2015.

Getting back to the alleged lack of damage done to the Grand River due to heavy flows; I wonder how Colonial Creek fared. The raw sewage hit it first and from there flowed into the Grand. Last November 26/12 I posted here in the Advocate about a number of other spills and bypasses into the Grand River. This is also the reality of neverending population growth and I'm not talking just about births versus deaths. The world is overpopulated and spreading that problem into towns and cities here gives us predictable results. When all the costs are taken into account, including massive infrastructure updates continually being required, the results are not pretty. Even treated sewage is not good for the Grand or any other water receiving body much less raw sewage. If our federal governments insist on flooding the country with new immigrants during lean times as well as good; then at least ensure that lower tiers of government are keeping up to date with water, sewage, garbage and other vital infrastructure.

Yesterday's Waterloo Region Record has this story "Sewage spill was "relatively small".