(Montreal) For years, a Montreal elementary school has been inadvertently discharging raw sewage into a nearby river.
Although the City identified the problem in 2021, it is only now taking steps to address it.
The Lester B. Pearson School Board has announced the temporary closure of two bathrooms at Terry Fox Elementary School in the Pierrefonds-Roxboro borough because wastewater was mistakenly flowing into a storm sewer instead of a sanitary sewer.
This has contributed to water contamination at one location along the Rivière des Prairies, north of the island of Montreal. The storm sewer empties into the river near a public park, where fecal coliform counts regularly reach levels 60 times higher than the city’s pollution threshold.
The city administration has known about the pollution since at least 2008, but says it didn’t identify the source until 2021. The school board, however, says it only learned about the sewage problem in a letter from the city on June 26 — after The Canadian Press began asking questions about the contamination.
Darren Becker, Lester B. Pearson’s director of communications, said the city requested an action plan by July 29. He said the school board will hire an engineering firm to change the plumbing connections and hopes to have the work completed before children return to school in August. He’s not sure why the school board didn’t know about the problem sooner.
“I don’t want to put the blame on the city,” he said. “Ultimately, the repair work will be done.”
Becker said the two bathrooms were added to the school during an expansion in 1966. It’s unclear whether sewage has been flowing into the river over the years.
A well-known problem for years
Kim Nantais Desormiers, a spokesperson for the City of Montreal, did not answer questions about why it took three years to inform the school of the problem. She did, however, provide a timeline of steps taken to resolve the issue since 2008, when the city conducted an “initial exploration” of the area.
According to that timeline, the city conducted dye tests between 2009 and 2011 to identify where sewage was flowing into storm sewers, but failed to find the source of the problem. Another round of testing in 2015 also failed to identify the source.
Finally, a third round of testing in 2021 revealed cross-connections – pipes that connected to a storm sewer instead of a sanitary sewer – at a residence and the school.
In the meantime, water pollution near the storm sewer outlet has continued unabated. City of Montreal data dating back to 2012 shows that fecal coliform concentrations near Parc de la Rive-Boisée in Pierrefonds-Roxboro regularly reached 60,000 per 100 millilitres and even reached 370,000 per 100 ml.
The Quebec government considers water with a fecal coliform count greater than 200 per 100 ml to be unfit for swimming and water with a count greater than 1,000 per 100 ml to be polluted. Out of nearly 500 measurements taken between May 2012 and June 2024, the water quality at the sampling point near the storm sewer was below the pollution threshold on only 66 occasions.
This year, the highest fecal coliform count ever recorded at the sampling point is 56,000 per 100 milliliters, from a sample taken in May. At that level, a child playing in the water could easily suffer “diarrhea and stomach cramps for a few days,” and the effects could be much worse, said Daniel Green, co-president of the environmental group Society to Overcome Pollution.
There is no beach at Rive-Boisée Park and swimming is prohibited there.
Two nearby sampling points show much lower pollution levels.
Still, Green says contamination of the river near the park has been a “well-known problem” for years and the city has been “extremely slow to identify the culprits.”
“I think the City of Montreal is acting dishonestly,” he said. “It’s easy to find [les sources] if we get started.”
Green said signs should be put up in the park to warn people about the contamination.
On “political procrastination”
Sewer cross-connections are a long-standing problem, but they can be difficult to resolve. Repairs often involve digging up streets, and there can be disagreements over who is responsible. Mme Nantais Desormiers said that the City takes care of the work when the connection is on public property between the property and the sewer.
Mr. Green said the city is often slow to address these issues because of administrative hurdles.
“They need to be publicly shamed so that they will act, because they will not act if they are not publicly humiliated,” he said. “It is a sad observation, but that is what I have seen.”
There have been other high-profile cases involving cross-connections in Montreal. In 2022, the city buried the last 200 metres of the Saint-Pierre River, which once flowed from Mount Royal to the St. Lawrence River.
The last stretch of the river ran through a golf course in Montreal’s west end, but a court ordered the city to divert the waterway because of contamination from poor sewer connections in two nearby neighbourhoods. Environmentalists decried the decision.
The city estimates that 450 to 500 properties still have cross-connections to the sewers, or about 0.1% of the properties on the island.
David Fletcher, vice-chairman of the Green Coalition, said developers had never been “particularly scrupulous” about sewer connections.
“It’s only since people started wanting to use the coastline that the problem has become real.”
In the 1960s, when Terry Fox Elementary School was expanded, most of the city’s wastewater was being dumped into waterways untreated. Montreal’s wastewater treatment plant didn’t open until the 1980s.
But today, Mr Fletcher says, the failure to solve the cross-connection problem often comes down to “political procrastination”.
“I think it’s been long enough now. At some point, somebody has to take the bull by the horns, spend the money and do it.”