Hamilton Mayor Fred Eisenberger insists the city has not been withholding information about a 24-billion-litre spill in Chedoke Creek and unanswered questions about a 2013 Red Hill Valley Parkway friction report.
During an interview with Global News Radio 900 CHML, Eisenberger said the city wants to be as “open and transparent” as it can with municipal issues after host Bill Kelly suggested there was a “pattern” of city coverups.
“All the conspiracy theories that we’re trying to withhold things from the public, that’s certainly not the case. That’s certainly what’s not my mission in life in terms of, you know, how we manage and deal with our city, ” said Eisenberger.
The mayor says the city didn’t tell the public about the magnitude of a massive sewage spill into Chedoke Creek because “the damage had already been done,” adding that the city had received legal advice not to disclose details about the spill.
“But at the same time, there are issues that also need to be dealt with in terms of investigations that they sometimes have to be kept confidential,” Eisenberger said, “And I think that that, unfortunately, happens on many occasions when it comes to legal issues or the ramifications of some of the issues that we deal with.”
Last Wednesday, the City of Hamilton revealed in a press release that 24 billion litres of sewage spilled into Chedoke Creek between January 2014 and July 2018.
City crews say they discovered that one of the city’s combined overflow tanks had been compromised due to an open bypass gate in the sewer overflow tank.
“I wish we could undo it, but we can’t. And so, we were left with a reality that was really looking at how do we mitigate any other damages that might occur as a result of this,” the mayor said.
The general manager of the agency that handles the city’s environmental assets says a “glitch” in its automation process is likely the reason billions of tonnes of sewage leaked into Chedoke Creek over more than four years.
City of Hamilton Public Works boss Dan McKinnon says staff — along with a monitoring system public works has been using for the last 25 years called SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) — are supposed to work in combination to detect anomalies like the open bypass gate in the sewer overflow tank that caused the 2014 leak.
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The city says the discharge was a combination of stormwater runoff and sanitary sewage.
The only notice residents received about a potential problem was a city release on July 12, 2018, which advises the public to stay out of Chedoke Creek and Cootes Paradise due to contamination. The release said the cause was “unknown.”
City staff have been working with Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks in an investigation and cleanup of the waterway since summer 2018.
In a statement to Global News, the Ministry of the Environment confirmed the city reported the discharge to the ministry’s spills action centre on July 18, 2018.
“On Aug. 2, 2018, we ordered the city to, among other things, quantify the amount of sewage and what was in the sewage discharged to the creek,” ministry spokesperson Gary Wheeler said.
“While the city submitted information to the ministry as required by the order, we issued a second order on Nov. 14, 2019, requiring clarification and confirmation of impacts, recommendations for remediation, mitigation and monitoring.”
On Monday, the ministry issued new orders requiring Hamilton councillors to come up with a plan for the remediation and future monitoring of Chedoke Creek by Feb. 14, 2020.
During a regular city council meeting on Wednesday, two councillors — Ward 1’s Maureen Wilson and Ward 3’s Nrinder Nann — will present a motion to publicly release “any and all reports” and “issue a formal apology” to residents.
When the spill came to council’s attention in 2018, a majority of councillors reportedly opted to keep it under wraps as per recommendations from legal counsel.
Wilson and Nann, in a joint statement on Friday, said they were bound as councillors during an in-camera session not to divulge what was said about the leak.
“We have struggled with whether we ought to have violated the rules of procedural confidence against releasing this information to the public,” said the statement. “It continues to weigh heavily on us.”
Meanwhile, the province received some flack over the news of the spill as Hamilton West-Ancaster-Dundas MPP Sandy Shaw pointed a finger at Premier Doug Ford’s government, questioning why it took a year for the city and province to reveal the episode to the public.
Minister of Energy Greg Rickford fielded that question and said it was “inappropriate” to discuss the topic due to the province’s investigation.
Burlington Mayor Marianne Meed Ward told Global News she found out about the spill the same day most of the public did — through an online admission on the city’s website.
“This is a shared watercourse,” said Meed Ward.
“We have the Royal Botanical Gardens, which is shared with Hamilton. You know, we want to be good neighbours, and good neighbours talk to each other when there’s a problem.”
A spokesperson for the Royal Botanical Gardens says the spill has still set back the effort to clean up the wetland by years.
Tys Theijsmeijer, part of the group tasked with managing Cootes Paradise, into which Chedoke Creek flows, says the spill essentially “undid” years of restoration efforts for the 600-hectare wildlife sanctuary, which is also a fish nursery for Lake Ontario.
“The marsh looks like it had an eraser go over it, and all that recovery was just shut right down,” said Theijsmeijer. “You’re kind of back to ground zero.”
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