City blames massive sewage dump into Red River on equipment malfunction at North End plant

The federal and provincial government are investigating after two malfunctioning bypass gates at the updated North End sewage treatment plant released nearly 10 million litres of partially treated sewage into the Red River early Monday.

The gates, which are not fully operational and supposed to be opened manually during ongoing testing, opened automatically overnight, spilling 9.8 million litres, said Tim Shanks, the city’s director of water and waste.

“It’s a very complicated process, but unfortunately, there has been an issue here, and we’re working to investigate why it happened and prevent it from ever happening again,” he told reporters Tuesday afternoon.

The spill occurred from about 1:10 a.m. to 3:47 a.m. Shanks said the partially treated sewage posed no immediate risk to the public.

The gates would not be typically part of day-to-day water treatment, and are in place to provide a bypass in “very rare” scenarios, which is why they are among the last pieces of equipment at the plant to be commissioned, which would likely have occurred sometime this month, Shanks said.

There are no alarms installed on the gates because of how rarely they would be used, Shanks said, and the bypass went unnoticed until an alarm at a different part of the plant sounded. He said the gates will now be alarmed.

The provincial and federal government have been notified, and staff from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans are already investigating at the facility.

Enforcement measures are a “possible outcome” of those investigations, Shanks said.

“We’re co-operating fully with their investigations, and we’ll work with them to implement any instructions or corrective action that they have,” he said.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Mike Moyes said the province’s environmental compliance and enforcement branch will review the city’s report on the spill and see what measures are being taken to prevent future occurrences.

“From there, we can determine whether there are any compliance or enforcement implications,” he said in an email. “Incidents like this reaffirm our government’s significant support for the (plant) upgrade project, as part of our commitment to protect Manitoba’s lakes and rivers.”

The city’s water and waste department completes weekly testing of the water quality of the river, and held supplementary followup testing Tuesday.

“Obviously, we’re not happy about this. We’re disappointed,” he said.

“This is a serious thing… (we’re) working very hard to bring this plant online and complete these upgrades, so it is a concern that we had this incident at the plant. But the second part of the answer would be that, commissioning large, complicated, automated systems does present challenges.”

Shanks said the gates have operated without incident since the upgraded facility opened in August. While the investigation is underway, the gates have been physically locked.

“We’ve corrected that much, but we’re still investigating as to how this came about to happen,” he said.

Shanks compared the impact of the spill to the shutoff of ultraviolet treatment equipment at the plant to complete the first phase of upgrades.

“We did enhance monitoring that time, too, so we don’t expect a long-term issue to the water quality in the river,” he said.

In June, storm-related power outages resulted in the release of nearly nine million litres of untreated sewage into Winnipeg’s waterways.

One recently elected official in a community that borders Lake Winnipeg, in which the Red River flows, called the spill very disappointing, noting the lake’s health was an issue residents brought up while on the campaign trail.

“It’s a serious issue and it weighs heavy on my heart as a mom of three,” Rural Municipality of Gimli’s deputy mayor Zoe Bailey said.

Joining the five-person council after being voted in on Oct. 28, Bailey said the spill and its impact would be a topic of discussion in the community of nearly 7,000.

“We have industry that depends on it. We have a huge fishing industry and our tourism industry. A lot of us are raising our families here,” Bailey said of Lake Winnipeg’s importance. “We want our kids to grow up and to go swimming in the lake and appreciate this lake that we enjoyed when we were kids.”

She said it was important for conclusions of any investigation to be shared with the RM and other communities affected by the spill.

— With files from Joyanne Pursaga and Morgan Modjeski

malak.abas@winnipegfreepress.com