They’re trying to get the “ew” out of Kew Beach.
A group of neighbours is using this month’s municipal election to press for better infrastructure and waste management in Beaches-East York ward. That’s a polite way of saying the entire city’s poop has flooded into their basements for 20 years, and they’ve had it.
“It’s very stressful and it’s very dirty,” Joanne Dicaire told the Toronto Sun . “It’s unhealthy!”
Part of the issue is geographic. Toronto is shaped almost like a bowl, with the city sloping toward Lake Ontario. When it rains, the water goes downhill to the lake – with a final stop in Kew Beach or another neighbourhood along the shore.
Dicaire’s husband Steve Roberts told the Sun it’s not just the surface run-off.
Their neighbourhood is at a sewage “juncture” on the way to the Ashbridges Bay treatment plant, a little to the west, Roberts said. It’s their understanding the pipes around Kew Beach are among Toronto’s oldest and smallest.
All of this is compounded by development and densification, Roberts added. Before, large front lawns of single-family homes would absorb a lot of rain. Now, much of what sits uphill from Kew Beach is a condo or a townhome – some with no lawns at all.
“In these large storms, it all jackknifes at our street,” he said, “and the whole system just backs up and floods.”
‘How many toilets?’
It happens every two or three years, most recently during a storm on Sept. 2 . They’ve seen waist-deep sewage in their basement enough times to speak matter-of-factly about waste water.
“I want to know just how many condos and how many toilets are flushing now compared to 30 years ago,” Dicaire said.
Roberts mentioned a nearby condo building where a half-dozen houses once stood.
“Those six homes were bought up and turned into 65 condos now, right? So you’ve gone from six bathrooms to 65 bathrooms, 65 washing machines, 65 dishwashers,” he said. “All of that extra water floods in.”
A large retention tank should be rescuing the neighbourhood in a crisis, Dicaire said, but it’s often not emptied ahead of major storms. She also said the gate to the tank is operated manually, so someone at Toronto Water has to go open it. (City Hall denied this in a statement, saying the tank is automated and did its job on Sept. 2, which is to keep Woodbine Beach clean.)
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Three issues at play
Dicaire said what appears to be one issue is, to her, three. One is the city’s infrastructure deficit, another the management of the retention tank.
The third is harder to quantify: It’s the mental and emotional toll on families who know the filth will always come back. Dicaire said she can’t sleep when it rains.
Over the years they’ve tried to get their city councillor to plead their case – first Sandra Bussin, then Mary-Margaret McMahon.
“I even met with Rob Ford,” Dicaire said.
There’s been sympathy, but not results.
After two terms of Brad Bradford, they’ll have a fourth representative, and they want this one to have a mandate of stopping the floods. They made up flyers, met as a neighbourhood and launched a website, kewbeachfloods.ca .
And they may have leverage: The race to become Ward 19’s next councillor is a bit of a free-for-all.
Issue ‘not glamorous’
With 13 candidates, instead of a debate, there will be a meet-and-greet on Monday evening at Beach United Church at 140 Wineva Ave. The event starts at 6:30 p.m., and Dicaire and Roberts hope to make the most of it.
One of the perceived frontrunners, Natalie Johnson, took up the group’s cause in an Instagram post on Sept. 14 . She told the Sun her interest in the issue stems from her work covering the regular flooding as a City Hall reporter.
“It’s clear that the aging municipal infrastructure in that area is simply not keeping up,” Johnson said.
The issue is a tricky one for an aspiring councillor: Any fixes would be expensive, hidden underground and only of real benefit to a very small area.
But Johnson’s not deterred.
“I think some of the biggest and most impactful things that City Council can do are not glamorous,” she said, “and yet they make the biggest difference.”
In a statement, Bradford’s mayoral campaign said flooding was a persistent issue in his two terms as councillor, and his office delivered “common-sense improvements” like a park berm that made a difference at a local level.
His response touched on a campaign promise from a few days ago: He would treat Toronto Water as an “arm’s-length utility,” like Toronto Hydro.
“This is a citywide problem that goes back decades, and it comes down to how the city builds water infrastructure … As mayor, he would put resilient infrastructure first, delivered on time, with honest budgets behind it,” the statement said.
William Shea, the director for collection at Toronto Water, said in a statement that the city knows the repeat floods are “frustrating and stressful for residents in the Kew Beach area.”
City Hall is “studying the area to identify measures to help mitigate flood risk,” Shea added, and residents will get a chance to provide feedback early next year. In the meantime, he recommended the city’s basement flood protection subsidy.
Blame climate or infrastructure?
But Dicaire and Roberts have already embraced flood protection, investing in waterproofing measures to minimize damage and make it easier to pump out the black water when it comes.
That’s not to say life is normal. They can’t get insurance because of the flood risk. They hesitate to travel in the summer, knowing they may have to act fast in a storm.
“We’ve lost our basement,” Dicaire said, explaining it’s just shelves for storage now.
There’s also no getting around the fact that when it floods, there’s a pool of sewage in their home. There’s nowhere to pump it at first – the whole reason it’s in someone’s home is because the sewage system is backed up.
Then they have to sanitize the space.
“It’s not like a swimming pool,” Roberts said. “It’s fecal matter.”
In its statement, the city acknowledged more needs to be done. Extreme rainfall is becoming more common, and that’s straining infrastructure all over the world, it said.
Roberts warned the Sun ahead of time that climate change would be the city’s excuse.
“This is all infrastructure,” he said – and while City Hall blames 100-year storms, “we seem to get them every two years.”
jholmes@postmedia.com