R.C. Harris and the East End Sludge Wars
By John Lorinc
Special to the Toronto Star: Sept. 15, 2012.
[http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1257227--toronto-s-costly-sewage-mistake]
A
century ago this year, Toronto council hired Roland Caldwell Harris, a
self-assured 37-year-old, to step in as works commissioner and oversee a
desperately needed modernization push for a booming city facing serious growth
pains.
The
population was pushing out into rural townships barely served by basic
municipal services. Near the lake, overflowing sewer outfalls contaminated the beaches
and deposited a metre-deep layer of sludge on the bottom of the harbour. Meanwhile,
thousands of children died of infectious diseases linked to poor sanitary
conditions and unsafe drinking water.
Yet
the politicians seemed locked in an all-too-familiar dynamic that persists to
this day: decisions about vital infrastructure were delayed or derailed by petty
politics and short-sighted penny-pinching.
Case
in point: in 1913, the year after Harris took office, the City opened a new
sewage treatment plant on Eastern Avenue, near Ashbridge’s Bay. The need for
such a facility, according to a 1995 history of Toronto’s public works by
Catherine Brace, had been first recognized 60 years earlier; council spent 35
years debating the proposal. Yet the plant was obsolete the moment it opened.
Over
the next 33 years, Harris transformed Toronto, building the civic
infrastructure that formed the spine of a modern, healthy city. His career, featured
in an exhibit entitled “The Water Czar” that opens this weekend at The Market
Gallery, was defined by an ability to anticipate the future needs of a
fast-growing metropolis.
His
signature achievements – the Prince Edward Viaduct and the R.C. Harris Water Filtration
Plant, as well as many other bridges, hundreds of kilometres of roads,
streetcar tracks, sidewalks and new sewer lines – all reflect Harris’ focus on
long-term city building, as opposed to short-term constraints, like cost.
Even
though Toronto voters in 1912 rejected a rapid transit plan as too costly, he equipped
the new viaduct with a subway deck, which wouldn’t be put to use for six
decades. With the water plant, he ordered his engineers to build what we could
now call a scalable facility. Seventy years after its completion in 1941, the architecturally
stunning facility still purifies 40% of Toronto’s drinking water.
Like
many reformers of that era, Harris was also keenly aware of the role municipal
infrastructure played in public health. In 1906, he and his wife lost their
six-month-old son, Emerson Clewlo, to complications from an infection. The
city’s medical officer of health, Dr. Charles Hastings, experienced a similar
tragedy. Conservative politicians and editorialists accused both of profligacy
as they sought to improve conditions.
Yet
Harris’ career includes a notable but little known failure: despite years of
trying, he couldn’t convince council to approve a state-of-the-art sewage
treatment plant to replace the one on Eastern Avenue. “His last unfinished
challenge was sewage disposal,” says city historian Wayne Reeves, who curated
the exhibit.
Harris
certainly knew what he wanted, so the fault lies with the politicians and the
voters. But the repercussions of a highly politicized 1940 decision to build
the Ashbridge’s Bay Sewage Treatment Plant – located on 40 hectares of lakefill
just steps from the city’s best beaches – haunts the waterfront still. Indeed,
the story of how council ignored its experts’ advice in favour of a cheap
alternative stands as object lesson in how short-term thinking begat decades of
environmental, health, and financial headaches.
* * *
As
the Market Gallery exhibit reveals, water preoccupied Harris from the day he
took office. Early on, he moved quickly to begin planning for a new filtration
plant, to be located at Victoria Park, in the Beach. Yet Harris understood that
the push to improve drinking water was inseparable from the goal of treating
the sanitary sewage and industrial run-off that poured into Lake Ontario. The
new Eastern Ave. facility had open settling basins to remove some of the
suspended solids. But millions of litres of the plant’s partially treated
sewage ended up in the same lake that was the source of the city’s drinking
water.
In
the mid-1920s, Harris had made significant headway in getting council to
approve the new water filtration plant, later dubbed the “palace of
purification.” At almost the same time, he was contending with another mounting
problem: dealing with the sewage produced by the rapidly growing neighbourhoods
in North Toronto. In 1926, Harris hired engineer George Nasmith (the man who
introduced chlorination to the city a decade earlier) and a Boston engineer,
Harrison Eddy, to develop a plan to treat North Toronto’s sewage.
Nasmith
and Eddy recommended a cutting edge technique, known as “activated sludge
aeration,” that involved forcing compressed air into the waste water to
accelerate the decomposition of organic material. The liquid would be filtered
and left to settle. The sediment was then dried to create “sludge cakes,” an
odorless substance similar to low-grade fertilizer. Testing showed the treated
waste water had very low levels of bacterial contamination.
Persuaded
by his consultants’ analysis, Harris took the plan to council and got approval
to build the North Toronto treatment plant deep in the Don Valley, south of
Laird Drive. Decked out with buildings designed to resemble an English village,
the North Toronto plant opened in 1929. The city doubled its capacity a few
years later, and the facility has been operating smoothly ever since.
With
the North Toronto plant open, Harris turned his attention to Eastern Ave.,
which overflowed constantly because it was designed to serve a population half
the city’s size. The facility stunk up working class neighbourhoods in what is
now Leslieville. It also generated dozens of lawsuits from aggrieved residents.
In one case, the judge lectured the City from the bench, opining that Council
should halt all “beautification” projects until a modern treatment plant is
built.
In
1931, Harris hired consultants to come up with options for a new, modern plant,
to be built anywhere but the Ashbridge’s Bay area. He again turned to Nasmith
and Eddy, eager to replicate the North Toronto plant’s success.
Two
years later, Nasmith and Eddy unveiled a game-changing idea: they proposed building
a state-of-the-art activated sludge plant at the mouth of Highland Creek,
several kilometres east. The city’s wastewater would be collected by large
“interceptor” sewers and pumped through a long pipe to this new facility, which
would be built to satisfy the eventual needs of a city of 1.5 million people.
It
seemed like an elegant, environmentally friendly, long-term solution: Highland
Creek was far from the city’s neighbourhoods. And the sludge cakes could be
sold to Scarborough farmers for use as fertilizer. The downside: the long pipe
would add $12 million to the cost, bringing the total to $25 million.
Canada
in 1933 was in the throes of the Great Depression. Harris had already talked
council into spending millions on an ornate water treatment plant, and aldermen
like Sam McBride, who often sparred with the powerful bureaucrat, weren’t
interested in another lavish project.
Within
a year, the aldermen on the works committee had totally re-engineered the
debate. The Ashbridge’s Bay site, for one thing, was back in contention,
despite warnings from both Harris and Eddy that it made little sense to put a
huge sewage plant near busy beaches and the city’s new water filtration plant –
by then under construction.
There
were other concerns, too. Unlike Highland Creek, there were no farmers near
Ashbridges Bay who could use the dewatered sludge. Instead, the aldermen
insisted, it could be incinerated on site. Yet Harris’ consultants, in a 1935,
report, wrote, “We are not
convinced that the sludge from the Ashbridge’s Bay plant can be incinerated
with economy and with assurance of freedom from offensive odors.” It would
prove to be a chillingly prescient forewarning.
Despite
mounting public concern, council was deadlocked. The city finally appointed five
technical experts to take a fresh look at the whole problem and come up with a
recommendation. But that process also foundered, and the panel couldn’t come to
a consensus. In a final report released in 1939, four of the five urged the
city to build a $9.5 million plant large enough to serve 700,000 people, with a
“complete” treatment process based on the technology successfully in use at
North Toronto.
Yet
one expert, an engineer named W.D. Redfern, loudly disagreed, and made his case
in a “minority report.” In his view, there was simply no reason for the city to
completely treat its sewage water because the bacterial contaminants that
remained after settling would be diluted once dumped into the lake. It was an
old and long-discredited notion. “By taking advantage of this natural resource,”
Redfern insisted, “the cost of the treatment plant is reduced considerably as
well as the annual operating expenses.” His “partial treatment” solution cost
just $5.6 million.
In
1940, city council and voters backed Redfern’s cheaper option.
The
city, Reeves says, couldn’t begin construction for four years because of
wartime shortages of steel. Meanwhile, some politicians turned their guns at
Harris, establishing a public inquiry into his management of the works department.
In 1943, council even passed a bylaw requiring future commissioners to be
engineers (Harris had no formal training). “He had been under incredible
pressure for five years,” Reeves says. Harris died of a heart attack in 1945.
“I think it’s really the thing that winds up killing him.” The plant finally
opened in 1951.
* * *
Anyone
in the east end who’s ever soaked up the stink wafting off the Ashbridge’s Bay
sewage treatment plant can thank W.D. Redfern and his cost-conscious political
backers. R.C. Harris, as ever, had the correct instincts, but he simply
couldn’t persuade a council determined to avoid raising taxes.
Ironically,
Toronto politicians, in the decades since, have spent hundreds of millions of
dollars trying to solve the plant’s many failures and reduce its noxious impact
on the local environment.
It’s
a long rap sheet: The chimney leaked pungent sewer gas. The harbour waters
nearby showed excessive levels of toxins. And a generation of politicians and
residents lobbied to close the incinerator, which the city finally did in 2003.
Despite all the fixes and retrofits, the city is still in court, battling a
lawsuit over a 2008 incident when untreated sewage from the plant poured into
the lake for three days.
With
the benefit of hindsight, Toronto paid a steep price to save $4 million.
