The 'Big Pipe' makes a big stink in Pickering

Malodorous consequences of shipping York Region's sewage downstream for treatment leaves neighbours to the south steaming mad

ANTHONY REINHART 
(Globe and Mail)
February 28, 2009

They've always said it flows downhill, and no one is more sure of that old truism than the people of Pickering.

For years, the lakeside city east of Toronto has served as the unhappy terminus of a sewer system, known locally as the Big Pipe, that brings in waste from neighbouring York Region. Now, thanks to explosive growth in York, the Big Pipe is getting bigger, along with the list of complaints from the poor souls downstream.

To them, it's irksome enough to have to play receiver while York blithely flushes its troubles away, but even worse that their uphill neighbours seem to think theirs doesn't stink.

At least that's how a group of steamed Pickering residents felt this week when their own municipal officials in Durham Region insisted that a new odour-control plant, needed to vent the enlarged sewer, will work non-stop to reduce York's offerings to nothing more sinister than a spring breeze.

They aren't buying it.

"It's going to smell, let's face it," said Margaret Tsetsakos, a married mother of two who lives near the proposed plant site at Altona Road and Finch Avenue East. "You're not going to tell me that this thing is going to work 24/7, and you're not going to tell me that it's not going to smell."
Ms. Tsetsakos was among 70 people to cram a meeting room in nearby Whitby on Wednesday afternoon, as Durham officials tried to stem a tide of dissent that has risen steadily since mid-2007, when residents caught their first whiff of the odour-treatment plan. Many complained that they hadn't been properly notified along the way, and some said they only learned of the plan in recent months.

"We all got our tax-increase notice but nobody got this," Ms. Tsetsakos said, adding that she lives about three kilometres, by road, from the site - beyond the reach of some of the official notifications.

Speaking of taxes, she pays more of them than her relatives do in odour-free York.

"I pay a lot more taxes than my mom, and my mom has a gorgeous house in York Region," she said. "Her home has appreciated double since she got it, and I don't think mine has." The odour plant, she fears, won't help that to happen any quicker.

Nor does Devi Gopalan, a 29-year-old lawyer who moved into her home on Sunbird Trail last Oct. 24.

"I moved in, and two days later I got a flyer saying there's an odour-control facility coming down, up the stream from you," Ms. Gopalan said.

She has since learned of problems with similar facilities in Edmonton and Ottawa, and is thus skeptical of the Pickering plan. She is also miffed that Durham has so willingly made itself "York's waste receptacle."

Ms. Tsetsakos, a 35-year-old law clerk who, like many of her neighbours, commutes to work in Toronto, agreed.

"They have a lot of land out there [in York], and not very far from the proposed location," she said. "The facility should be in their backyards and not ours."

The reason it isn't, at least in part, stretches back decades, to when the Ontario government was planning for the growth that has long since sprouted across the suburbs that ring Toronto.
Because York Region was landlocked, the province felt it best to send its sewage down through Durham for treatment at Pickering's Duffin Creek treatment plant, on the shores of Lake Ontario. To achieve this, Ontario shelled out $300-million to build the Big Pipe in the late seventies and early eighties.

While the Durham communities of Pickering and Ajax also tie into the pipe, the current expansion - a new "south east collector" sewer, three metres in diameter - will carry only York waste. As it passes under Pickering, it will take a downward tilt, and "this drop of grade is the source of sewer odours," said John Presta, director of environmental services for Durham. "That's why you need the odour-control facility."

Fitted with back-up power, a duplicated treatment process and a benign-looking, house-like facade, the plant will eliminate, not cause, the odours that residents fear - odours that would otherwise escape and befoul the neighbourhood if the plant weren't built, Mr. Presta said. "But I know that basically will not appease the residents, based on what we heard" at this week's raucous meeting, he added.

"I think eventually, once it's up and running and it's working, the issues will die down."
Much as she might wish for the same result, Ms. Tsetsakos is not holding her breath, given the late stage of the process. Instead, she's holding her nose.

"I think this is just going to move on, unfortunately," she said. "There's little that we could do."