The race is won ...

A little while ago I posted this picture of the "loop" wires that were to be installed at the Preston intersection with Somerset. The street was also scheduled to be dug up ... would the street diggers remove the street before the wires got burried, or would the wire people install the wires only to see them dug up the next week ...

The diggers won. Bell and Enbridge are busy doing their infrastructure stuff before the sewer work is done later this month. So the traffic people won't find a street there to put their loop into.

Unless ... Bell patches the street and the traffic folks install it between the Bell work and the sewer work ....

city map, 1895

Double click on the map to enlarge it, and scroll around it for a bit to explore Ottawa in 1895. Notice the area called "Dalhousie" - our community name goes a long way back.

Notice that a number of streets have the same name. The Queensway is still a railroad right of way. Carling Avenue is simply "Macadam road"(Macadam invented asphalt paving). Notice that Gladstone doesn't exist, but many of its segements do, which goes some way to explaining why that street twists and curves the way it does as it connects up bits and pieces of older streets on not-quite-matching grids.

I also like seeing the lost creek that exits Dow's Lake and travels down what is now Preston to Nepean Bay. At some point, this creek was swallowed up into the brick sewer built under Preston Street about 1898. The construction of the Somerset Viaduct just west of Preston raises the ground level enough to prevent the entire Preston basin from continuing to drain towards the River, which resulted in a century of flooding basements during heavy storms.

Sewer lids, access hatches, etc

It probably reflects some deep psychological disturbance in my early childhood potty training ... but I find I notice sewer lids, (wo)manhole lids, catch basins, access hatches, etc on our streets and sidewalks. They do add interest to our quotidian walkabouts ... at least to those who notice them.

The photo above is of a new fancy sidewalk made of interlocks. The stones are cut in an even square around the access hatch, and the perimeter filled in with cement. There may well be practical reasons for this, but it does somewhat spoil the look. I notice that on Wellington Street in front of the Parliament buildings the stones are cut very carefully in curved edges to abut tightly to the (wo)manhole -- this may reflect or Parliamentarians keener interest in matters sewage. The solution on plebian streets is simple: after pouring the cement, a grooving tool should have been used to continue the joint lines onto the cement.

But alas, probably few people will notice and this improvement will be lost underfoot, like my suggestions to the Preston BIA that they get from Rome a donation of a few sewer lids for the street that say SPQR*, these would have been a real treat when the street is closed for Italian Festival, as would a few Beijing sewer lids in Chinatown.

*SPQR: latin, "by the senate, for the people of rome"

Rabid Sewers

The foam caught my eye first. Then I heard the roaring sound of falling water under this access point (aka manhole), where one sewer pipe cascades "water" into a lower pipe.

Now, we've all heard that Ottawa's sewage is cleaner than that in most other cities (due to the NCC buying out most industrial land users, and due to the large amount of relatively-clean storm water we stuff into our sewage-sewers) but I did not expect to find soap suds cleaning the pipes.

Recall all those "raw sewage in the River" stories?

The media has had a field day with stories of raw sewage being dumped into the Ottawa River from ancient sewer control points, a number of which date from the late 1800's. Typically, the focus is on the obvious: raw sewage. Ignored is why those sewage facilities are over a hundred years old. My view is that successive councils have favoured glamorous higher profile spending projects that buy them favour with select voting groups. The go for the glitz, they delay and postpone the core civic expenditures. Hello Walkerton, decades of not-upgraded water works, cosy featherbedding, porkbarrelling, etc.

At the corner of Old Wellington (you know, the mostly closed segments of former-Wellington that runs from below the Garden of the Provinces till it meets Albert at the old Broad St intersection*) and Booth, construction has started to replace one of these old regulator stations. These drain pipes fill up in the Glebe, flow under Preston Street through Little Italy (flooding and backing up in basements there) and thence to the Ottawa River.

Why do they flood into the Ottawa River? Well, they always did, after all the flood overflow mechanisms were installed in 1880! But they probably flood more often in Dalhousie neighborhood because more and more city land gets paved over and built over and drains faster. The City has no regulations to require permeable pavements. More requirements are being put in place requiring new large buildings to "hold" their rainwater, but I am not sure if they apply everywhere (like upstream on the pipe, hello Glebe!) or just on the downstream portions of the sewers, in Dalhousie and LeBreton Flats (which must hold and delay releasing 100% of  rain fall).

What we really need are performance standards or benchmarks, a spreadsheet that every municipality could upload many performance standards for comparisson to all other municipalities. I did this is a businessman, comparing my stats with industry averages, and believe me its hard to hide behind "but we are different/special" whining for very long. Sloppily run cities, just like businesses,  show up in the stats right some quick. But businesses go out of business when they are run poorly. City halls just beg for grants from senior levels of government, and get bailed out, thus their bad behaviour gets rewarded.

No premier's name or mayor's name shown.

Mr Harper's name is also absent.

Workers doing what they do, without a shovel.

First priority, a portable sewage retention pond.

*On internet maps of the City, they persist in showing former Wellington as Wellington, and the newer Wellington going out past the War Museum as Ottawa River Parkway. How does one update the internet?