November 3, 2003
You haven’t heard a peep about it out on the municipal election campaign trail. The $23 million the City of Toronto paid for the fire razed Ashbridges Bay pelletization operation went down with hardly a stir. Proving once again that what you don’t know can hurt you, the tale of the failure of the city’s sludge operations is all but a well-guarded secret.
Nor was the death of a driver less than one week on the job hauling Toronto’s sewage to Michigan dumpsites given much media attention, even though his death came in the middle of the municipal election campaign.
Jovan Sarovic, 38, of Kitchener was killed when his 70,000-pound (32-tonne) load spilled on him as he was emptying the massive truck into a landfill trench.
Only two days on the job, Sarovic was knocked into the trench by the tailgate of the truck in which he had transported biosolids produced by Toronto’s Ashbridges Bay sewage treatment plant.
He had been working for LDM Transport, an Ontario firm that is a subcontractor for Terratec, the company that has the contract to remove sewage sludge from Ashbridges Bay. Terratec is owned by American Water, a New Jersey based company.
Stinky sludge, called `biosolids’ by artful city bureaucrats, is the human waste that has been applied as fertilizer to the fields of Ontario’s farmlands.
You don’t hear much about it when election campaigns are underway, but Ontario municipalities have been quietly dumping human sewage on farmer’s fields for some time. While the practice may be largely unknown and controversial, it is legal. It may never cross your mind when you’re at the supermarket, but in Ontario foods from strawberries to steak may be fertilized by human excrement.
Terratec trucks, which continue to haul sludge to farmlands, have been hauling tonnes of Toronto sludge to Michigan for the past two years.
Back in 1996, the then Oakville-based company received city council’s blessing to handle biosolids in a pilot program. Shortly after, Terratec trucks hauled sludge directly from the main sewage plant at Ashbridges Bay to farmer’s fields.
By the end of the year 2000, Toronto expected to send all the sludge from its main treatment plant to rural Ontario to nourish crops.
Somewhere along the way, city planners who changed the name sludge to biosolids, changed sludge to sludge pellets.
Their pellet plan was doomed from the outset.
"There was no market for the sludge pellets," respected environmental expert Maureen O'Reilly told Canadafreepress.com. "The Toronto Parks Department wouldn’t use them due to their poor quality (low levels of nutrient, high levels of metals) and wrote a memo to Mike Price in Public Works to that effect."
Enter a new company called UsFilter Canada, to which the city pays $13.35 per tonne to haul the pellets away to market. That way Toronto could say it isn’t actually selling the pellets. But USFilter Canada wasn’t selling the pellets either.
It seems a strange way to run the pellitization operation to more than outspoken environmental activists.
USFilter Canada is currently under investigation. It is alleged that the company fraudulently provided an invoice to the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, making it look as if the pellets had been sold.
Problem Numero Uno is that pellets do not meet the requirements of being `fertilizer’ unless they are actually sold. If pellets are not sold, they are considered waste under provincial regulation 347.
The pellet problem is exacerbated when storage is factored in. Because the City of Toronto decided to pelletize our sludge, there are a lot of pellets. Pellets require storage.
"They have gone into spontaneous self-heating in every storage facility, I am aware of," says Reilly.
The spontaneous self-heating of pellets has created fires at the Toronto Ashbridges Bay silo, at Clarington farm field, and at Couse Corp. of Tillsonburg. All fires had to be doused by the staff of local fire departments.
Couse Ltd. is now suing USFilter Canada for $2 million as a result of the self-heating pellet fire. When the Toronto pellets were self-heating in the McCleary storage facility at 1281 Old Thorold Stone Road, the Thorold Fire Department had to be called in.
The raging fire at the Toronto Ashbridges Bay silo was a $23-million misadventure for local taxpayers.
It will go down in the Book of Municipal Politics as the irony of ironies that Bob Pickett, the city official responsible for biosolids, happened to be attending his retirement ‘roast’ the night of the Ashbridges Bay inferno. Pickett got wind of it when his cell telephone rang at 11 p.m. This was soon followed by all the cell phones in the entire room going off, with the party having to be cleared out for the much bigger roast. There are those who contend that it was a truly suitable retirement send-off roast for the stuffed shirts of the municipal realm.
Environmental activists know there were plenty of warning signals in the prelude leading up to the $23 million Ashbridge’s Bay fire.
The plant hadn’t been run properly. The City, which had planned to take it over, hadn’t done so--yet had already ponied up most of the $23 million for the faulty plant.
During its lifespan, the plant was in shutdown mode more than it was up and running. In fact, the plant had remained shut from March to July in 2003, due to problems with a heat exchanger.
Only about 4,000 tonnes of pellets were made last year. Yet, city staff repeatedly claimed that half (25,000 tonnes) of the sludge was land applied and half the sludge (25,000 tonnes) was pelletized. Environmental experts says this is untrue and claim the misleading math is an effort on behalf of staff to make city council think the program is working.
Long before the night of the fateful fire, the local fire department had been called to the site on several occasions because of problems with pellets. Reasons included self-heating pellets in storage and organic dust explosions on truck loading.
"I personally met with the Ontario Firemarshall’s office with Ed Gulbinas and Mr. Mailvaganam in mid-July to ask them to review the safety of the plant and impose fire prevention requirements," Reilly told CFP. "They wouldn’t."
Toronto is not the only municipality to have its sewage treatment plant razed by fire. The Windsor plant is closed due to a $5-million fire last October.
Reilly believes it is possible that USFilter Canada did not have fire insurance on the Ashbridges pelletizer operation at the time it burned down, and wants to know why.
"The Toronto biosolids program," she says, "is not working."
"All the sludge is not being diverted onto farmland as originally planned. From 1996 to the present day, Terratec was to be taking as much as 25,000 dry tonnes of sludge to farm fields, (that’s about 75,000 wet--or real--tonnes). But in 2002, seven or eight years into the program, only about a 5,000 dry tonne equivalent actually went to Ontario farms."
One big reason is that farmers and rural communities in Ontario do not want it.
"It stinks, there are unresearched health risks and water contamination issues," says Reilly. "People don’t trust the hauler, since they have a record of environmental violations.
"There is no Ontario storage for Toronto sludge, since its mismanagement led Halton to kick it out of the Halton storage lagoon.
Welcome nowhere, Terratec dug an unlined pit the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools, and to the horror and dismay of local residents who were overwhelmed by the stench and undrinkable water from their contaminated groundwater wells, filled it to overflowing capacity with Toronto sewage sludge. The Toronto sludge pit is located at the Bill Johnson Biosolids facility in Oakville. Neighbours, including Al Eagles, a police officer at 52 Division and his wife, Laurie are suing Terratec and the Region of Halton for millions of dollars, due to illness and distress caused by the gargantuan pit.
"Terratec has bungled the land application program, delivering about 20 percent of what they promised, and instead is being paid a premium to haul sludge to Michigan," said Reilly.
Reilly says it is her understanding that Terratec isn’t hauling any Toronto sludge.
"The hauler, Elgin Cartage is subcontracted. So why would the City pay Terratec a premium price? Why not just hire Elgin Cartage to haul it?
"The City of Toronto staff-touted pelletization was never a quality fertilizer, and there is no market for it.
"The City failed to look at the heavy metal and nutrient characteristics, or they would have known that Toronto sludge makes poor fertilizer," said Reilly. "All they had to do was dry some sludge, test it and consult farm organizations and the CFIA. They didn’t. Instead they committed $23 million (plus huge annual contracts) of public funds to spending about $100 per tonne of pellets that they can’t even get $1 per tonne for."
Meanwhile, Toronto doesn’t really have a "biosolids" program. It never really did--only a maximim of 18 percent diversion.
"It does have a landfill program and the silver lining is that the landfill is a good place for Toronto sludge to be," says Reilly.
Meanwhile, while it seems that some skeletons in the City of Toronto closet may not be visible to the human eye, they sure do reek.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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