Sludge Watch ==> Jim Poushinsky's open letter to the City of Ottawa

[Maureen Reilly]

March 12, 2008


With all the community groups now aware of sewage spreading
in their localities and uncovering  problems with the way
government departments have handled this issue, there is
certainly a lot to be revealed and questioned in a Public
Inquiry. Also, as this has been happening over a succession
of governments at Queen's Park, no one political party is to
blame. Therefore it is in the best interests of all political
parties to get behind a Public Inquiry into the actions
(or lack thereof)  of  the non-elected public officials
responsible for this mess, so they can be held accountable,
and so a consensus can be reached on the part of our political
leaders about what to do with sewage.

I recently heard Elizabeth May say the Green Party is
opposed to spreading sewage on farmland.  That's a
beginning, but why stop there? There's good reason
for every Party to oppose it.  We just have to get the facts
out there, and a Public Inquiry would certainly do that.
Let's keep calling for one at every opportunity.

Looks like Spring spreading is going to be delayed due to all the
flooding from the record snowfall. That gives us more time
and puts pressure on the spreaders to get it on the fields
before they are dry, in violation of the Guidelines.  We know
they're going to disregard the rules because they aren't enforced,
so with more people aware and watching we should have
opportunities to catch them red-handed and report violations
right across Ontario.

Of course there's always the possibility the government will
simply take decisive action to stop the Spring spreading by
imposing a moratorium before it happens. We elect politicians
in the hope they'll provide leadership in protecting our health
and the environment.  There's always the possibilty Queen's
Park or City Hall will actually do this on behalf of the people.

Cheers,
Jim

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Dear Councillor Wilkinson,  Mayor O'Brien  and Ottawa City Councillors,


The following is a critique of the City Staff position regarding the
potential conflict between promoting local farmer's markets as safe
and Green food for Ottawa residents, while encouraging farmers to
use the City's 45,000 tonnes of annual sewage sludge as fertilizer for
local foodland. Staff points are in blue or indicated with an > , and
my response is below.

    There is, in the Provincial guidelines, a 12-15 month waiting period 
after
using biosolids, before any small fruit or vegetable can be harvested, to
ensure that there are no pathogen's
present.  link to guidelines (see table 7):
http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/envision/gp/3425e.pdf


Thanks Derrick,  for the web reference to the provincial sewage spreading
Guidelines. The 12 to 15 month waiting period gets us through a winter,
which takes a severe toll on bacterial pathogens, but viral pathogens are
able to form crystals which survive freezing.  For example polio viruses
are referred to in the Ottawa U Study entitled "The efficiency of the
anaerobic digestion process in reducing the pathogen content of treated
sludge or biosolids" by C. Charet, R. Sharma, S. Springthorpe, &
S. Sattar - September 1995" and can survive many years in the
environment. Likewise  BSE prions are not harmed by waiting periods
and persist indefinitely. The scrapie prions from diseased sheep accidently
released into Ottawa's sewers from a government testing lab over  a 5
month period wound up being spread on farmland above the aquifer
that I draw well water from around Edwards, southeast of old Ottawa.

Also, while bacterial pathogens can be killed off with freezing and
composting, warm summer temperatures  can cause an explosive regrowth.
And while there is a year waiting period to grow vegetables, treefruits can
be harvested  3 months after spreading, animals can be pastured on it two
months after spreading sewage, and hay taken off after only 3 weeks of
waiting.  No expert or official or scientist has ever been able to show a
scientific basis for believing these measures are protective of human and
animal health, and factual evidence is mounting that they are not.  If you
can produce scientific facts to back up your belief that the Guidelines
"ensure that there are no pathogens present" I'd like to see it.

Everything I've seen in 8 years of investigating this indicates the
Spreading Guidelines don't work.  I sat on the EA Assessment Public
Advisory Committee that did the 5 year Review of the initial spreading
of sewage on Ottawa farms, the Review that City Staff are now claiming
to be following in their recommendations to Council.  But somehow the
overwhelming opposition of the public to building storage sites for
sewage has been erased from official awareness, and such sites are
now the key central point of today's sewage disposal planning -
how did that happen?

Likewise the burial of sewage in engineered landfills was given equal rating
for City consideration by the public with spreading it on farmland,  yet
City officials have never evaluated landfilling and subsequent recovery
of biogas energy  from waste as as an option, even though concerned
people have asked for this repeatedly since the original Review, and
despite the apparent savings of 1 million dollars or more annually that
would ensue.

Finally there has been no indication whatsoever that the City is
investigating the use of a plasma torch like the one being demonstrated
at Trail Road to reduce the 100,000 potentially harmful chemicals from
industry and household wastes and dump leachate, along with all the
bacteria, viruses, prions, and parasites in sewage, - to inert black glass.
Ottawa's cake sewage is likely ideal to feed into the Trail Road Plasma
Torch in a mixture with garbage, yet the City seems to be passing up
the opportunity to use this hi-tech plasma furnace to eliminate both solid
and sewage wastes at the same time.  If this is a bureaucratic turf war
problem, then change the structure of the sewage and solid waste
departments to enable such a joint experiment. That's the sort of
management flexibility that enables progress to happen.

    One of the benefits of shopping at a farmer's market is that the people
selling the produce know how it was grown.  If someone has a concern
such as this, they can ask the grower before purchasing.


Most city people wouldn't ask because they do not know that the pathogenic
and toxic wastes flushed down Ottawa's sewers from homes and industry are
being promoted by the City of Ottawa as a free fertilizer for growing every
crop except tobacco.  This has been a best-kept secret since 1995.  It is a
tabou topic that the news media will not cover,  just as child sexual abuse
and wife abuse were covered up and officially didn't exist in decades past.
How can we discuss a topic that is a repulsive 4 letter word for an act that
isn't polite to talk about?

The City itself takes great care to keep rural residents who discover and
object to what's going on from being heard.  The last time the Planning
Committee considered staff recommendations in a public meeting, they
kept us waiting for 9 hours, by which point most of those who wanted
to speak had to leave, and the Councillors present could no longer listen
and were paying more attention to a hockey game. After that meeting we
were dropped from the list of public organizations to be notified about
future meetings considering the topic, and only recently realized this and
supposedly are now back on the official list.

It's clear from the sewage spreading industry's own manual that the public
will not tolerate the growing of their food in sewage sludge, and the
continuation of this practice depends on keeping this secret from
widespread public awareness. In this regard the City of Ottawa has
done an exemplary job.  The original study of pathogens in the sewage
commissioned by Regional Government (referred to previously) was
withheld from the Biosolids Committee studying the matter. City
Councillors were told "all pathogens are killed in the sewage plant" so
unanimously approved the initial program.  While serving on the EA
Assessment Public Advisory Committee,  the chief scientist in charge
of the Technical Committee told me the public need not worry
"because all pathogens are killed in the sewage treatment plant".
He was stunned  when I produced the Ottawa U study and quoted
the high pathogen loadings including  1.5  million e-coli  and 6
billion coliforms per 1/2 cup (100ml) sample, and all the other
pathogens including viruses and parasites that survive the digester
treatment process.

Likewise the director of a private lab recommended by government that I
took water samples to for analysis tried to tell me there was no point
analyzing them because everybody knew that all the pathogens in
sewage were killed in the treatment plant. He was surprised that we
did indeed find pathogens in the tile drains under a field being spread
with Ottawa's sewage. The loading tripled from 2 e-coli to 6, but the
City officials saw that as insignificant because a count from 1 to 9 e-coli
only counts as 1 by their scientific methodology.  However they had to
admit that a neighbouring farmer was correct in complaining that the
City's conformity to the spreading Guidelines failed to prevent a pipe
they didn't notice from leaking sewage into the municipal ditch, which
flowed into a creek just upstream from where he watered cattle.

This is not surprising, as every spread we have investigated has been in
violation of the Guidelines, and the MOE and City Health doesn't respond
until it's way too late to prove anything, as happened to the North Gower
family sickened and forced to temporarily close their business due to the
fumes from City sludge stored on an adjacent farm.

Clearly if people in Ottawa knew what rural people have discovered about the
contamination and health problems and risks arising from spreading sewage
on farmlands, there would be a quick end to the spreading program.  Do we
have to wait until there is a body count like at Walkerton?   Do we have to
fill City Hall to the ceiling with studies conclusively proving the health
risks, as Dr. Cushman pointed out was required before action to stop
smoking?

Or do people have to start picketing food stores and farmers markets to
make people aware of the problem?   It would be so much simpler if the
City just stopped spreading sewage and landfilled it at Trail Road and/or
LaFleche while investigating the plasma torch as a final solution.  It would
be so much simpler if we the people didn't have to fight City Hall to have
our sewage disposed of in a safe way where it isn't harming our health and
the environment and contaminating the food chain.   That would be a win-win
for everybody.  How do we get City Staff to consider this? They seem to be
right out of public control on the matter of spreading sewage in rural
Ottawa.

    Regardless of this waiting period, I do not know of anyone producing 
fruits
or vegetables for human consumption in the Ottawa area that are using
biosolids at all.


There was a case awhile back about carrots on the Quebec side that caused
health problems following the application of  wastes there. It is permitted
to do this and its free, so why wouldn't farmers use it?  Carrots are an
interesting crop because they concentrate cadmium 5 fold. So carrots can
have 5 times the permissible level of cadmium in sewage sludge.

According to an official at Guelph defending the spreading program,
cadmium toxicity through such concentrations is not considered a fatal
illness because cadmium poisons the kidneys, and kidney failure does
not cause death because we have kidney dialysis machines.  No body
count so no problem! She claimed you have to balance the few cases
of kidney failure caused annually by the sludge spreading, against the
convenience of disposing of city sewage by spreading it on farms. As
Ottawa's MOH  Dr. Cushman put it,  "even if every rural well in
Ottawa was contaminated with sewage sludge and you all got sick,
that wouldn't constitute an epidemic because rural people are less than
5% of  the City population."  What a horrible excuse for government
inaction!

This reminds me of another University of Guelph professor I met at a
Parliamentary Committee Hearing about whether or not to label
genetically modified foods. I asked him what the main crops were that
had been genetically modified in the Ottawa area. He said "50% of
the corn and 15% of the soybeans". I said that corn was the primary
crop being fertilized with sewage sludge. "A double whammy!" the
Committee Chairwoman exclaimed. The professor laughed in delight -
"so you see, you'll never be able to tell if problems are caused by
the genetic modification or by the sludge!!!"  So much for academic
neutrality.  The Committee was ordered by the mulltinational
corporations NOT to require labelling, despite polls showing
90% of Canadians wanted such labelling. The people lost, there
is no labelling. A sad day for Canadian sovereignty.

In any case I remain optimistic that Ottawa can change in the best interests
of all the people. I would like to see this happen with a minimum of
unpleasantness, meaning the fewer people who have to think about
what's happening with sewage the better. So why doesn't the City take
protective measures by burying the sewage biosolids  instead of spreading
them on farmland?  I can't think of anyone who would object to that, so why
isn't it happening?  Why do we all have to worry out here in the country
about where the sewage storage and sewage trucks will be going, and
whose field is going to be spread next?

This is the opposite of progress, this is the destruction of the rural
environment, and the contamination of our best farmland for generations
into the future. Why are City staff, the Mayor, and most Councillors
promoting this nightmare, why aren't you advocating a safe alternative?
You won't put it on the Experimental Farm or in the City flower beds
and Parks,  but you'll put it on a field next to rural communities and
hospitals  and schools and senior care centres without a second thought.
This is offensive and wrong.

    There are numerous certification criteria for Certified Organic in 
Canada
alone, let alone in other parts of the world.  While in North America,
Biosolids use is not permited under any organic certification, I am not
as certain that organic produce from less developped countries would
follow the same standards.


There has been a persistent and growing demand from the sewage spreading
lobby to have sewage certified as organic in North America.  The fact that
dried sewage is bagged in mixture with soils sold for home gardens at
large chain stores like Canadian Tire without any requirement to label
it as an ingredient because mixed soils are classified as 'products"
means many people are using it in their gardens and potted plants
unknowingly.   It would be wonderful if Ottawa stopped engaging in
such unsavoury practices - case in point, what happens to all that
sewage sent to Quebec at great expense to be made into compost
which still contains all the chemical contaminants and is perfect
for the regrowth of pathogens  - does it remain as "Mount Ottawa"
or does it  get spread on farmland,  or mixed and bagged as home
fertilizer?  The whole matter is shrouded in official secrecy, eh?

I have stopped buying bagged organic salads from California since
learning that sewage water is now being used to irrigate these crops,
which explains the cases of food poisoning in spinach and lettuce that
adsorb pathogenic bacteria inside the plant through the roots where
it can't be washed off.  I do agree about organic produce from Mexico
being suspect, I avoid it as well.

I believe our sewage disposal policies need to be based on scientific
research to determine the facts, and on rational use of those facts
to decide the best course of action for protecting human and animal
health and the ecosystem of our planet. The sooner City Hall takes
this approach to dealing with our sewage wastes, the better for
everybody.  I'm available to discuss this matter further, and have
been waiting to do so for the past 8 years.

    I am not aware of any research being done in the City of Ottawa, however
there has been a significant amount of research into this topic by the
province and the University of Guelph amoung others.  I think that
Kemptville College has done some field research on the topic as well.
I have CC"d Dixon Weir and David McCartney, perhaps they can add
some more information if they are aware of other research being done.


City employee Erik Apedaile and myself jointly conducted field research on
the last site spread by the City of Ottawa before the 2 year moratorium.
As I indicated earlier, the e-coli levels were elevated in the tile drains
and surface ditches, but the City did not consider this significant.
However we did find obvious leakage of sewage contaminated water
off the field into a ditch which drained into a creek. Remedial action
included damming the roadside ditch and excavating a huge ditch to
reverse the leakage so it flowed the opposite direction into a boundary
ditch that drains into the North Castor River.  I'm not surprised the City
didn't publish this fiasco, as it gives the lie to the mantra that
"no problems have ever occurred when the fields are spread according
to the Provincial Guidelines". Those Guidelines were followed to the letter
with OCAPS watching and participating in the study.  They didn't
protect the surface waters from sewage contamination. That's not
news to rural peple, as we have been living with the chemical off-gases
and contaminated run-off for  years now, we know the program leaks.

You might inquire about the tile drain problem too - you see OMAFRA's
own research shows sewage toxins penetrate 24 inches into the soil.
Yet the stuff is being spread primarily on tile drained farmland, in which
the tile drains rise to a depth of 16 inches (plough depth) below the
surface. In spite of the obvious potential for contamination, no study
has ever been done to see if tile drain effluent from sewage spread fields
is contaminating the public ditches and watercourses. We pointed this
out 5 or 6 years ago during Ottawa's  EA Assessment to the Premier ,
to OMAFRA, to MOE, to DOH, and to the City of Ottawa. It would
be nice to know how far along this "urgent matter" has progressed
towards actually being studied?

Dr. Cushman in the course of his winter of research into the health and
safety of sewage sludge only found one peer reviewed research study
of farm families in the States, which found no change in health as a result
of sewage spreading.  Since then 2  peer reviewed studies by independent
reseachers have found evidence of widespread health problems in rural
populations living within 1 km of spreading operations, health problems
not shared with those outside this area.  Yet the City staff still insist
Dr. Cushman's earlier conclusion based on  a single study that spreading
sewage does not cause health problems is correct, and ignore the
subsequent research that it is not.  This is not scientific decision making!
Willfull ignorance is no excuse for actions that result in harm, as the
tainted blood scandal proved.  We have to do better, by acting before
there is widespread evidence of harm, in accordance with the
Precautionary Principle. That's what people expect of those we
entrust with our health and safety, and with the care of our environment.

Don't spread City sewage this Spring. Put it in an approved landfill while
the City investigates safe alternatives like energy from waste biogas
production, or rendering it all harmless in a plasma torch.  End this
10 year pollution nightmare for Ottawa's rural folk, before it involves
our city neighbours too.

Sincerely,
Jim Poushinsky
chair, Ottawa Citizens Against Pollution by Sewage
tel. 613-821-2409