Work to start as soon as wetland location determined

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Filthy stormwater flowing in to the Coatsworth Cut will get a $20.9 million scrubbing - as soon as city water officials and Waterfront Toronto can nail down exactly where to locate a wetland along the east-end shoreline.

Officials from the city and Waterfront Toronto are currently trying to determine whether the wetland should be located at the north end of the small inlet - a move that would force various boat clubs to relocate - or further south, near the Coatsworth Cut's mouth and just to the south of the Ashbridges Bay Sewage Plant.

If it's determined to be the latter, then the city has the provincial go-ahead to start work immediately.

Late last month, the provincial government rejected three requests for a bump-up on the Environmental Assessment of the project, so all that would stand in the way of the project would be a number of small and routine permits.

"In a way, we're well on our way, because we do have the Environmental Assessment approved," said Ted Bowering, Toronto Water's Manager of Policy and Program Development.

When it goes ahead, the project will provide a gulp of fresh water to an area of Toronto's waterfront that has long been identified as having a major concentration of E. coli bacteria.

That's because it contains the outflow of a large combined storm and sanitary sewer system. The combined system means that sewage from toilets and household runs through the same pipe as rainwater.

During times of low or normal precipitation, all that water goes in to the sewage treatment system. But in heavy rainstorms, the pipes reach capacity and a nasty soup of stormwater and raw sewage is dumped directly into the Coatsworth Cut. Under extreme conditions, some even backs up into homeowners' basements.

The solution that the city is proposing would see a number of measures taking place.

First, the city will be installing small retention tanks along the pipe as it flows down from East York and beyond, and will increase the capacity of the pipes themselves.

But more visibly, the plan as approved in the environmental assessment is to construct an open sluice along the north and west shores of the Coatsworth Cut, leading to a wetland to the south and the west.

Bowering said that plan would allow boaters to continue to use the protected waters in the cut.

"(Locating the wetland to the north) would be a preferred situation from our point of view - it makes sense to put the treatment wetland into the Coatsworth Cut - but when we were doing the environmental assessment we realized that moving the boat cuts was not an option," he said. "We had to keep navigation available to the boat clubs."