[Editor’s note: this story is one of five Coast articles selected as finalists for the 2010 Atlantic Journalism Awards. All five stories are collected here.]
“It’s a frustration,” allows Peter Kelly. Throughout a
half-hour interview in his City Hall office, Kelly seems genuinely
pained by the course of events related to Halifax’s failed sewage
treatment plant, and does his best to get ahead of the single issue
that has come to define his third term as mayor.
“When times were good and the plant kicked in and was operational,
the water quality came back fairly quickly, we were able to enjoy the
harbour to swim and do all those other things that we bragged about,”
he says. “And here we are, less than a year afterwards; it’s
frustrating. And it’s a bit on the”—he pauses, searches for the
words, shrugs—“embarrassing side, or on the hurtful side.
“But the fact is, things happen.” A less refined mayor would say
shit happens.
“You have to deal with it,” he continues. “You can’t run from it.
And that’s what’s happening—not a day goes by when I’m not over there
asking what’s going on, and not a day goes by when our staff is not
focused on getting this plant back in operation.”
That is undoubtedly true. There’s no indication that Kelly or Carl
Yates (manager of the Halifax Water Commission) or anyone else at city
hall isn’t working diligently to get the sewer plant fixed as soon as
possible.
But the plant can’t be fixed until it’s known what went wrong with
it in the first place; any successful repair job depends on making sure
the same thing doesn’t happen again. And naming what went wrong is, by
extension, assigning fault—first to machinery or employees, but
secondarily, to engineering and construction standards or operational
procedures at the plant. Ultimately, knowing what went wrong will
necessarily lead to assigning fault to the city and/or the two major
contractors involved in building the sewage system—Dexter
Construction and Degremont Ltee.
And that’s a discussion Kelly doesn’t want to have.
Kelly continues to defend the decision to keep secret a preliminary
report of what went wrong with the plant. That report cost taxpayers
about $100,000—it’s part of a $400,000 contract with CH2M Hill, a
Colorado-based engineering firm hired by the city to investigate the
sewer plant failure.
The preliminary report was given to Kelly last week, on June 15, and
he admits to reading it. “It points in a direction of cause,” is the
most he will say of the report’s contents.
It’s a good bet that the failure of the $54- million plant will
eventually end up in court, with Dexter, Degremont and the city
battling it out, either directly or between their respective insurance
companies. Kelly said last week that the report can’t be made public
because it involves potential litigation, legal issues being one of the
justifications for secrecy in Nova Scotia’s Municipal Act.
“We have lawyers involved with this,” said Kelly last week. “These
issues are deemed to be sensitive, until we come to a conclusion.”
But Kelly acknowledges that the report has been given to the other
“stakeholders” in the plant—that is, to Dexter and Degremont.
Got that? Dexter and Degremont, the corporate entities that the city
will likely face in a courtroom, were given the report because they are
“stakeholders.” But the public continues to be denied access to the
report because the city might end up in court…against Dexter and
Degremont, which already have the report.
At least, that was the justification last week. This week, Kelly’s
reason for keeping the preliminary report secret from the public has
changed: The report is secret because it is preliminary.
“You wouldn’t go to a doctor,” he explains with an analogy he uses
three times in the interview, “and, hear the doctor say, ‘it could be
this, this or this,’ and put you over the edge in terms of thinking
it’s some terminal disease or something else—you would want him to
state the fact, rather than just say, ‘it could be this, this or this.’
You would want him to deal with what is, not what could be.”
I raise the obvious objection: Actually, I’d want my doctor to keep
me fully informed all through the process. I’d want her to tell me that
it might be this, it might be this other thing or possibly a third
thing, and we’re going to do these tests to find out which. Being part
of the process of investigation will keep me more involved in the
treatment, which can only be a good thing.
“Right,” responds Kelly, “and that’s what we’re doing now.”
But the report is secret, and so the public isn’t part of the
process, I point out.
“We are there,” says Kelly. “The staff is there, on behalf of the
public, to make sure that process is maintained and done.”
This is the very definition of a paternalistic government. The
information is just too frightening for the public’s childlike ears. If
we get anything other than the complete, final story, contextualized
and message-managed by a horde of communications specialists, it might
send us “over the edge,” rioting in the streets, perhaps, or into a fit
of messy participatory democracy. And Kelly doesn’t want that,
evidently.
Good enough. If Kelly can’t trust the public to handle information
about the sewer plant, then he owns it—all of it. Not just the
report, but the events themselves, the causes, the mistakes, the
breakdowns, the whole ball of wax.
It’s Peter Kelly’s sewer plant failure.
Harbour No Solutions
The sewer plant was just one piece of the $333-million Harbour
Solutions project, which aimed to address Halifax’s centuries-long and
shameful practice of dumping raw sewage directly into the harbour.
Building a sewage system in an older city like Halifax is no simple
matter, because the city was built with no thought for sewage disposal.
Before the 20th century, sewage from toilets was routed to storm-water
sewers, and that was the end of it—rainwater and toilet water ran out
the same pipes to the harbour. Modern cities (and Halifax’s suburbs)
have two sets of pipes: one to carry rainwater straight to the harbour;
the other set taking toilet water to a sewage treatment plant.
The ideal solution to Halifax’s problem would have been to dig up
every street in the city and put down two new pipes, one connected to
the sanitary sewers coming from houses and businesses, the second
connected to the gutters and storm drains that carry rain. But the cost
of installing two sets of pipes over the entire city would have been
very large—several billion dollars, likely.
Instead, as the plans were developed around 2005, city officials,
engineers and environmental regulators decided upon a less costly,
compromised system.
At the time, several dozen pipes carrying both human sewage and
rainwater dumped into the harbour. It was decided to plug each of those
pipes into one of eight “combined sewage overflows.” The CSOs would in
turn collect the contents of the pipes and shunt it off to a five-metre
wide, kilometre-long tunnel drilled through the bedrock under downtown
that brings the whole mess to the newly constructed sewage treatment
plant at Barrington and Cornwallis Streets.
(A similar system was constructed around a new Dartmouth plant.)
But because the pipes carry toilet water and rainwater, when
it rains, an awful lot of water can enter the system. Harbour Solutions
was designed to handle up to four times the amount of liquid that would
flow through the pipes on a typical sunny day. More than that, and the
excess—including the human sewage component of the pipes—overflows
through outfalls at the harbour shore—overflow is the “O” part of
CSO.
Those who designed the system were comfortable with diverting this
sewage-laden water into the harbour for two reasons. First, each of the
CSOs would have a screen to catch the bigger pieces of it, the
so-called “floatables,” and after the rain ended the screens would be
cleaned to get them ready for the next rain. Second, since the sewage
would only flow into the harbour during heavy rains, bacterial levels
in the harbour would be watered down to acceptable levels.
And it worked, at least for a while.
The sewer plant opened officially in February, 2008 and by last
summer, harbour water was clean enough for Peter Kelly to triumphantly
go swimming at Black Rock Beach.
How was the CSO system working? We really don’t know. Carl Yates
from the Water Commission, which operates the sewage system, told me
earlier this year that there are no records for how many times the
system overflowed, or what volumes of water lapped through the
CSOs.
But councillor Sue Uteck tracks 52 rain events from February, 2008
to January 14, 2009. “And for 51 of them, there was no problem,” she
says wryly.
Shit storm
It’s possible to piece together the broad outlines of what happened
in the early hours of Wednesday, January 14.
A heavy and wet winter storm sent enormous volumes of water through
the system and, as usual, power outages rolled through the city. The
sewage plant lost power at 2:24am, and the back-up diesel generators at
the plant kicked in.
There were no operators working at the plant at the time—officials
insist none were necessary—but an on-call operator was notified and
arrived at the plant within 20 minutes. She restarted all the necessary
equipment, and successfully so, claimed Water Commission spokesperson
James Campbell in a February press briefing.
But Nova Scotia Power’s service to the plant wasn’t restored for
another three hours—not until 5:56am. During that time the plant’s
back-up power system failed.
The large tunnel that feeds sewage from the CSOs to the treatment
plant enters the plant 85 feet below the surface. When operating
properly, five pumps lift the sewage up through a dry well, to the
plant proper, where the sewage is treated.
It’s unclear exactly why, but on January 14, a gigantic valve
failed. The valve is essentially an iron door eight feet in diameter
that was intended to close the plant off from the tunnel. Campbell said
the valve was stuck open about three inches.
With the iron door ajar, the sewage and water quickly filled the dry
well, and then the basement of the plant, where it deluged the plant’s
motor control centre and heating system. All the electrical work in the
basement was shorted out as well.
In short, the plant was a shit-filled disaster scene.
Before they could clean up the mess in the plant, officials had to
stop more sewage from coming in, so they opened the CSOs completely.
All sewage has flowed out through the CSOs ever since—about 100
million litres every day. And after a few months, officials found that
the screens at the CSOs couldn’t operate continuously, so they were
removed. We’re back to floatables in the harbour.
Before Harbour Solutions was built, the sewage came through dozens
of pipes into the harbour, which served to at least spread it out a
bit. Now, however, the sewage is coming through just eight CSOs and so
is more concentrated. And several of those outfalls are in tourist
areas—next to the cruise ship terminal, adjacent to the Maritime
Museum, at Bishop’s Landing, under the casino.
Clean-up of the plant took about two months. Like airplanes, sewer
plants have a “black box” that records all technical operation and can
be used to reconstruct what happened in the event of an accident. The
black box at Halifax’s plant was used by CH2M Hill to conduct a
“forensic audit” of the plant—that is, to write the report that mayor
Kelly refuses to release.
Whatever the results of the forensic audit, we know that much of the
equipment in the sewage-filled plant will have to be replaced. It is
not off-the-shelf equipment, and so each piece will have to be
specially built.
Since the January disaster, Water Commission officials have said
they expected the plant to be up and running again “by spring 2010.”
Last week, however, a report to city council mentions that “staff has
provided a preliminary estimate that the WWTF [Halifax sewage plant]
will be fully operational by late Spring 2010.” The emphasis was
not in the report—besides the insertion of the word “late,” the Water
Commission gave no indication of a changed timeline.
Does the added word “late” mean the date for fixing the plant been
pushed back?
“It’s still spring of 2010,” says Kelly.
Speculation
So why did the plant fail?
The most obvious problem is the failure of the huge iron door to
close off the tunnel. Was the drive for the door too low in the plant?
That is, did the water rush through and up the dry well to short out
the drive before the door could close all the way?
Whatever the proximate cause of the disaster—whatever combination
of equipment malfunctions and/or improper procedures led to the
inundation of the basement motor control centre—there seems to be an
underlying design flaw in the plant. As the sewage filled the dry well,
reaching towards the equipment in the plant basement, why didn’t it run
through a bypass—an opening at the top of the dry well, just below
the basement (imagine the little holes just below the rim of your
bathroom sink)—that would let the sewage escape before reaching the
basement?
Had there been such a bypass, the plant would have been down for a
short period—maybe a few days, maybe a couple of weeks—but could
have been quickly restarted after the problem was identified and
solved. Because there wasn’t a bypass, we have to wait until late
spring of 2010, as officials scramble to rebuild the plant
components.
Yates says the Nova Scotia Department of Environment wouldn’t allow
a bypass in the plant design. For their part, officials at the
Department of Environment say they can’t comment on design issues
because the plant failure is under investigation.
But a regulatory prohibition against a sewage plant bypass makes no
sense. After all, the entire CSO system is itself a plant
bypass—designers clearly placed the eight-foot iron door between the
tunnel and the plant precisely for the purpose of protecting the plant
by being able to stop sewage from flowing into the plant and instead
divert the sewage through the CSOs to the harbour. From an
environmental protection standpoint, what difference would it make to
put a bypass in the plant itself?
The political disaster</p
Regardless, we don’t really know what went wrong because Kelly won’t
release the CH2M Hill report.
The refusal to make public that report is part of a pattern of
secrecy that has characterized the city’s response to the crisis from
the beginning. Officials didn’t hold their first media briefing
concerning the January 14 disaster until February 7, and still won’t
allow the press into the plant.
On May 27, the city submitted another report on the sewer plant
failure to Environment Canada. Citing an ongoing investigation, federal
officials declined to release the report. I asked Kelly to make that
report public, and he likewise declined.
Worse still, Kelly is keeping the forensic audit—the CH2M Hill
report that has already been given to Dexter and Degremont—secret not
just from the public, but also from the rest of city council.
“I don’t know by what authority one member of council, the mayor,
can see secret documents, and the rest of us can’t,” says Uteck. When
that issue is put directly to Kelly, he becomes elusive, finding again
the circular argument that the report is preliminary, so while he can
read it, council can’t.
“When I met with staff a week ago or so,” says Kelly, “I had asked
for a copy of the report. I felt that I needed to see it. Staff
indicated at that time they still needed more information, but I still
wanted to have the chance to read through it, and I did. And clearly,
it does point out that there is additional data needed to come to a
more conclusive outcome. And with that, it is in our hands, and is
coming back to council next week, and council will be given an overview
at that time.”
Kelly says the final report will “hopefully” be given to the public
at the June 30 council meeting as well.
The culture of secrecy that surrounds the sewer issue is not of
Kelly’s making. Water Commission staff have long worked diligently and
capably below the public radar screen, never before having to deal with
high-interest public concerns like a lemon of a sewer plant. They
didn’t, and still don’t, understand the need for full public
participation. The city’s legal staff, too, has a knee-jerk response to
making information public: Everything is confidential unless there’s
some reason for it not to be. The presumption is secrecy, not
openness.
But Kelly could rise above the culture of secrecy, using his bully
pulpit to insist that all documents be made public, that officials
speak with candour, that the public be informed and involved. “We trust
the public,” he could say.
Instead, he takes the equivocating politician route. Last week he
issued a half-hearted “apology” for “doing a bad job in communicating”
with regard to the sewer plant issue. Owning up to mistakes is
laudable, but if the apology isn’t matched with a change in behaviour,
what purpose does it serve? In the week since Kelly’s apology, he has
released no new information, continues to defend on-going secrecy and
has issued no directives to staff underscoring the public’s right to be
involved.
For Kelly, it’s business as usual.
Tim Bousquet is news editor at The Coast.
Related Stories
Halifax council’s secret sewer fixes
Enough of Kelly & Co.
How the sewage plant broke
Contest! Name the sewage plant, win a crappy prize!
Peter Duffy to do something or another for Peter Kelly
Sewage plant failure: design error coupled with electrical configuration problems
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2009.
Fantastic article.
What a great read…this is the first time I actually feel I understand the issue…….. ever….
and
It is all Peter Kelly’s fault but real tired of Uteck playing victim all the time….she aint no different
Wasn’t this plant twice as expensive as a solar aquatics system? Besides being cheaper it was a decentralized solution, far less likely to fail in such a catastrophic way.
Hopefully this will be Kelly’s last term!
it is the tax payer – YOU and I – who is ultimately responsible for getting this mess cleaned-up. WE – the tax payer – have already paid millions for a broken (defective) & poorly engineered treatment plant + we get to WASTE hundreds of thousands more for ‘reports’ – that we are not even allowed to see! and it will likely cost us millions more before this debacle has eventually made its way through the courts and the plant is (finally) operational.
so i say, to hell with Dexter & Degremont vs the city (and their cabal of slimeball lawyers). WE – the tax-paying public – are THE major ‘stakeholders’ in this shitstorm of a mess. WE are the ones PAYING for everything, and as major stakeholders, we have the right to know every detail of those reports and exactly where our money is being spent. how else are we to hold elected officials (and their shady contractors) accountable?
look, these jokers at city hall, Kelly & Co, inept councillors, et al… the whole goddamn lot of them ought to be bitch-slapped silly for their stunning incompetence (and unyielding arrogance)… then summarily FIRED. i want to see fresh new faces and SMART people running our city’s business, for once. we deserve better than what we’re currently getting for OUR money.
i don’t know about the rest of you, but quite frankly, i’ve had enough of our so-called ‘mayor’. c’mon, is Kelly really the ‘best’ our city can come up with?? talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. the man is a classic politician, endlessly evasive, always speaking ‘around’ the issues, constantly deferring to ‘the lawyers’, and as Tim rightly points out, is part of a municipal government that is institutionally paternalistic, and pathologically so. these people do not serve us well.
thank you, tim, for holding Kelly’s feet to the fire on this. i think we can do better than ‘mayor’ Kelly… a lot better.
we don’t just have a crappy sewage treatment plant to fix… we’ve also got a steaming pile of rancid poo at city hall to clean up as well!
Tech cafe for mayor!!!!!!
I concur completely…
furthermore, while they are not responsible for the badly engineered sewage plant, it should also be said, SHAME on NS Power for failing to provide a RELIABLE service.
NSP just can’t seem to keep the power on, especially during the slightest rainstorm.
you would ‘think’ that after all these years, NSP would have *improved* their equipment & service to the point where elementary rainfall didn’t routinely take out parts of the power grid. and lord knows we are paying the bastards enough!
imo, it is time that the province – we, the people – take ownership and control of NSP again. PUBLIC utilities are too important to be left in the incompetent – and greedy – hands of private business.
thanks for the nomination, mcgayle, but i’m not so sure my ‘tactful diplomacy’ would go over all that well at city hall.
heads would roll, i’m afraid to say, if i were mayor. anyway, i would probably suck at the job, just like Kelly.
thankfully, i don’t aspire to such lofty positions of power, BUT i do have a high standard of expectation for those who do *earn the privilege* of serving in public office.
evidently, my standards are a tad too high for some… at least it would seem to be for the current bunch of knobs ‘serving’ at city hall
The one key point in this story is the fingering of the NS Dept of Environment as the root cause. I have heard the same thing, unofficially, from several sources. NS Environment is a bad dept., staffed by a bunch of arrogant technocrats, so this scenario fits them perfectly. Hopefully they will be held to account.
LOL…techcafe…tactful diplomacy is EXACTLY what we need…..
you are right….the tax payer is left holding the bag once again…..we have been doing so since LIBS-Gerald Regan and the 70’s….. when are we going to kick the bag to the curb and say enough….
We give them permission to treat us like we are not smart enough…look how fast we stop talking about Mikey Baker’s ‘ooppps I didnot know I was committing tax evasion and insurance fraud with commercial properties I was calling residential’…..or how about the….’sure it was 7 million for the GAMES BID-give or take’……. they are doing to us what we allow them to do……
IMPEACH PETEY…….
If some of us had lower standards we would have none as a city at all……
Question: Are the 8 outflow pipes (the sections where the grates were) connected (or could they be)?
If so, could the grates be replaced, and each pipe, one at a time, be closed off and its water be sent to the other 7 for long enough to clean its grate? That would take care of the floaties.
the ‘floatables’ should NOT be flushed in the first place… unfortunately, we can’t legislate COMMON SENSE.
if these idiots had to clean their OWN septic tanks, i’ll bet ya they’d know better than to be flushing condoms, tampon applicators, etc.
THINK before you flush!
Mr.Kelly was all too willing to take the credit and photo-ops when the treatment plant was working. Because he doesn’t want to play with other councillors and explain to them what went wrong, then he can take the blame for its failures.
The SS Kelly sails again, Shit & Secercy wil be Kelly’s legecy. As for the 23 members of Regional Council, their continued support of illegal secret meetings and the withholding of Public Documents, should be noted, and remembered in 2012.
The report alone has cost taxpayers $100k. I think we’re (HRM public) the biggest stakeholders and Peter Kelly ought to be falling over backwards to please us and keep us informed. He was never elected to keep secrets from us. No politician is.
Thanks for a great read. This is an other example the mayor cannot manage large projects. After so many failed bids, inability to manage growth, poor record of attracting business, crumbling and neglected downtown, disaster malls at the edge of the city, ridiculous public transportation, it is clear we need someone more able and with a vision. There are no serious plan for any of these issues. I don’t see anyone at city council able to provide leadership for the city. I hope a more wordly and better educated person will come forth.
There is absolutely NOTHING better for the city’s budget to be spent on, this is such an international embarrassment. Our city is better than this. I cannot believe there are not engineers working day and night to fix this problem. 6 months from now is just unacceptable.
I am an embarrassed former Halifax resident now residing in New York-one of the dirtiest cities in the world to be sure, but they have NEVER dumped their sewage into their harbour.
I think Kelly and his entire council should go.
Harbour Solutions: Only one back-up generator? Why was there not a provision in the design to allow effluents to flow directly into the harbour in an emergency situation? Those most competent partisan engineers working for Dexter need to answer here.
I wish there was a very diligent and resourceful media agent [with a spine] that would tally-up the cost of Kelly’s errors and make them public — for all to see.
Why is it that politics is based more on popularity than sound rational judgment?
Popularity only breeds ignorance and deceit.