The Ottawa Gas Works on the south side of Lees Avenue was a major contributor to groundwater pollution. Photo from Rick Wallace, “The History of Ottawa East”
John Dance
Ever wonder what those square pipes are that pop out of the ground, particularly near the Lees Avenue LRT station? They’re for monitoring groundwater quality in areas where extensive industrial activity or waste disposal was conducted for many years.
The steel protective casings are the visible parts of groundwater management wells which, as the name suggests, allow for the testing of the quality of groundwater in areas where contaminants are known to exist.
In the case of Old Ottawa East, there were many contaminants produced from intensive industrial and waste management facilities that existed near Lees Avenue in the Springhurst Park to University of Ottawa area.
As well described in Rick Wallace’s A History of Ottawa East, “[A} lasting legacy still lurks just beneath the surface and it will be centuries before this material completely dissipates.”
The “industrial and waste complex at the end of Lees Avenue,” as described by Wallace, included the Ottawa Gas Works, a tar plant, a mammoth garbage incinerator and garbage dumps.
“[T]he city wanted this land to be the centre of future commercial development that connected to the railways adjacent,” Wallace writes. “Another advantage of this location was the prevailing winds that blew from west to east of the city proper. Any pungent odours would simply blow away from the city.”
The essential ingedient for the gas works was the coal delivered by nearby railways. The plant opened in 1920 and converted coal into fuel gas with many by-products including tar which was used by the nearby tar plant which produced roofing and road tar. The gas works, with its 10-storey gas storage tank, dominated the OOE skyline until about 1960 by which time natural gas became available and displaced the more expensive coal gas.
The garbage incinerator was created to be Ottawa’s primary means of waste disposal and operated from 1912 to 1930. While it’s not clear why the incinerator was closed, in its absence, new waste disposal sites had to be found for the garbage. A number of these were in Old Ottawa East or just across the river. “There was plenty of vacant land, good roads and liquid that oozed out of the dump would simply be washed away by the river,” Wallace comments. “Out of sight – out of mind – excellent solution!”
Ever since, the City, developers and others have been trying to cope with the “excellent solution.” When the transitway was built with the Lees station in the middle of the contaminated area, soil had to be removed and a “groundwater collection and treatment system” was built to collect contaminated groundwater and treat it before discharge to the sanitary sewer system. The pumping and treatment station is just to the northeast of the LRT station.
More work was required when the transitway was converted to LRT. “In constructing the O-Train Line 1 Lees Station, approximately 8,000 metric tonnes of impacted soil was removed from the Lees Station area and disposed at a licensed landfill,” says Erin Tait, the City’s program manager of environmental remediation.
The dotted aread in the above map show the extensive land files that were at the end of Lees Avenue. Image from Rick Wallace, “The History of Ottawa East”
“The [contamination] studies have indicated that coal tar impacts remain in the soil and groundwater from the historical industrial use of the site, however the impacts are currently stable and managed in conjunction with the groundwater collection and treatment system,” says Tait.
“Other City lands in the vicinity of the Lees Station have also been assessed by the City’s environmental review unit, with remediation and/or mitigation measures implemented based on the nature of the impacts identified at the site, such as the clean soil cap that was installed over Springhurst Park in 2016,” Tait notes.
The Old Ottawa East Community Association has been prevented from planting trees in the Springhurst Park area because of the City’s concern about disturbing contaminated soil.
On the other side of the Rideau River, a methane venting system was constructed to manage the methane generated by the landfill that was on the location of the Hurdman Station LRT station.
One other recent case of dealing with the legacy of contamination is the new Faculty of Health Sciences building on the uOttawa Lees campus. The university required Ministry of the Environment approval of its plan for dealing with contaminants.
To learn more about the industry activity in Old Ottawa East read Rick Wallace’s “History of Ottawa East” chapter on “Lees Avenue – Gas, Tar and Garbage,” http://history.ottawaeast.ca/HTML%20Documents/Modern_History_after_1907/Lees%20Avenue.htm
