3 million litres of diluted sewage pours into Assiniboine River

The largest disruption to Winnipeg's wastewater system in more than two years allowed more than three million litres of diluted sewage to be emptied into the Assiniboine River earlier this week.

Beginning Sunday night, an estimated 3.26 million litres of stormwater-diluted raw sewage poured into the city's waterwaysfor three and a half hours, the City of Winnipeg reported on its website tracking the release of untreated sewage.

The dischargeoccurred at the Aubrey Wastewater LiftStation,located at 1016 Palmerston Avenue in Wolseley, and was due toa power outage.

It is the largest spillthe city has recorded since five million litres of raw sewage leakedinto theRedRiver in early 2016. Other releasesmay have beenhigher since but the city's website lists some incidents with unknown discharge amounts.

The city was alerted to the most recent leak Sunday night at 11:44 p.m. when a staff member at the McPhillipsControl Centre received notice by alarm of a power failure at the Aubrey station, according to the city's website.

Standby crewsrushed to the facility where they got astation pump operational by 1:10 a.m. on Monday.The station returned to normal operation shortly before 6 a.m. once Manitoba Hydro restored power.

The Aubrey station had two hours of stormwater storage capacity, but the power failure prevented the lift station from taking advantage of this capacity, city spokesperson Tamara Forlanski said.

"If a rainfall event had not occurred during the power outage, it is likely we would have been able to prevent untreated sewage from entering the river," she said in a statement.

Power failure at same site

The fourth worst discharge of the year happened on June 14 because of a power failure atthe same lift station. The city's website says 2.4 million litres of sewage poured into the river in four hours.

Brian Mayes, chair of the city waste and water committee, said another discharge of untreated sewage is unsettling but unavoidable.

"We continue to have spills and we're going to continue to have some spills for decades to come, but we are working to improve the situation," he said. "Minister [Rochelle] Squires, one of the first thingsshe said to me is, 'We've got to do something about this.'"

Last year, the province orderedthe cityto cut back on combined-sewer overflows from its antiquated system by 85 per cent by 2045. Winnipeg officials pegged the cost of replacing enough of these sewers,which cancarry bothstormwaterrunoff and raw sewage and overflow, at more than $1 billion.

"The work's going to continue, the work's going to accelerate," Mayessaid."This is one file where we seem to be working pretty well with the province, I'll just say that."