Now you can know when city dumps sewage — if you sign up

The Vermilion River Stewardship is praising the city's decision to give real-time alerts to the public when effluent is being discharged into area waterbodies because the sewer system is overloaded.

"They should be proud of themselves," said Stewardship chair Linda Heron. "It's a dirty secret that a lot of municipalities try to keep, because they think it's showing they're not doing their job. But the only way to correct it is to shine a light on it."

Sewer bypasses occur when the city's drainage system is overwhelmed, meaning raw or partially treated sewage is dumped into rivers or lakes. In addition to letting the public know when they happen, the alerts will also help raise awareness of the problem of illegal hookups to the wastewater system, Heron said, a significant factor leading to sewer bypasses, along with equipment failure and heavy rains, such as the city experienced last week.

"We have a lot of illegal downspouts that are hooked up in Sudbury that are causing a lot of infiltration into the wastewater treatment facilities, and they can't handle that extreme volume,” she said. "It is illegal and it's causing a problem.”

The system was approved in November at one of the last meetings of the previous city council. It's based on a similar system used in Kingston for several years.

The alerts will be especially important for people like her who live on the Vermilion, where about 13,000 residents get their drinking water. Some residents draw water directly from the river, using their own treatment systems or not treating the water at all.

"And we have nine wastewater treatment facilities that are releasing effluent into the Vermilion,” Heron said. “It's become more and more of a problem with our extreme rain events that we have ... In the summertime, we're in there swimming. And we don't want to be swimming with contaminated water."

Blue green algae blooms have also appear on the Vermilion, she said, and the blooms feed on nutrients contained in the sewage. With an increase in weather extremes in recent years, the system is getting overwhelmed more often.

There have been two alerts issued this month, the most recent on April 10 when there were four sewer bypasses, the largest at the Azilda treatment plant, when 928 cubic metres of partially disinfect effluent was discharged because the plant was overwhelmed by heavy rains.

"These bypasses are happening not just this time of year — and we've had several bypasses just in the last week — they're happening throughout the year," Heron said. "So we want to be notified for the sake of our health."

The alert system also helps raise public awareness that the city's wastewater management system is being overwhelmed on a fairly regular basis and is in dire need of investment.

"People should be aware of what's going into our waterbodies, when blue-green algae blooms are becoming such a problem," Heron said. "It helps the taxpayer to understand that more of our tax money needs to start going to our wastewater treatment facilities."

People who sign up will be notified as soon as a city staff member sends out the alert.

"City staff, they all have cellphones, so now all they have to do is tweet it out," she said. "When we sign up for the bypass alerts, we get an immediate email about the bypass and at what facility. You can't ask for anything better than that."

Anyone who wants to receive the alerts can go here to sign up.