Good news for Au Feel de L'Eau

Aqua Taxi on the Gatineau, last summer

The Aqua Taxi service owned by Au Feel de L'Eau has had some good news this month. They are not only going to be sailing on the Ottawa and Gatineau Rivers this summer. They've also been granted permission to run their electric water taxi on the Rideau Canal.

Du nouveau pour 2014! Nous sommes très heureux d'annoncer que nous offrirons un service d'Aqua-Taxi électrique sur le canal Rideau dès la saison prochaine.

I'm very pleased to hear this. There are already cruises available through town from May to October, up the Rideau Canal to Dows Lake and back, but no opportunity to get off the boat at the far end. Your only option is to disembark at your starting point. The Aqua Taxi will change that. Since there isn't a convenient bus running from downtown to Dows Lake, it's a service Ottawa tourists and residents have needed for years.

I wonder if I shall see them bringing their boat up through the eight locks by Parliament Hill.

Dragon boats on the Rideau

This weekend, unfortunately a grey one, it's the "Tim Horton's" Dragon Boat Festival in Ottawa, and a friend of mine has been paddling in one of the boats, at Mooney's Bay on the Rideau. Her team didn't win, but she sent me the link to a blogpost by Ron Hay, who has written about the training, illustrating his post with several photos of the dragon boat team.

From the Dragon Boat website:

Filling a boat requires 20 paddlers, a steersperson, a drummer or caller, and a few spares. Mixed teams must have a minimum of 8 female paddlers. This does not include the drummer or the steersperson. All women’s teams must have all female paddlers, but may have a male drummer and/or steersperson. A PERSON MAY BE A MEMBER OF AND RACE FOR ONLY ONE TEAM PER CATEGORY.

• The categories are WOMEN and MIXED.
• A steersperson/drummer may paddle for one team and may steer/drum for more than one team.

"On the water at last!"

Au Feel de l'Eau posted a status update on Facebook, I see. It says:

Photo from tourismeoutouais.com

Enfin sur l'eau, sur notre belle rivière des Outaouais, en route pour les quai du casinos. 17 mai 2013

Au Feel de L'Eau is Ottawa's and Gatineau's water taxi company that not only offers a short ferry ride across the Ottawa River from the Rideau Canal locks to the Museum of Civilisation, but also private cruises on the Ottawa and Gatineau Rivers for parties of up to 10 people. They advertise the boat as being "electric powered" and therefore causing "zero pollution" and no noise either. I intend to sail on this boat this summer. She's called "Bes" after the Egyptian God of pleasure.

Raw sludge and what they do with it

It takes a long time to turn raw sewage into clean water that can be channelled into the river without polluting it; ROPEC, the Robert O. Pickard Environmental Centre is the waste water treatment plant in Ottawa that does exactly that. Chris and I had a guided tour of it on the Doors Open day at the beginning of this month. We found it fascinating.

"Thirty-five rain-barrels of sewage per second are collected here, representing 30 million toilet flushes per day," so we were told at the start of the tour by Michel Chevalier, the Managing Director for water treatment in Ottawa, as we stood in the main building where V16 generators can react to a power outage within seconds. In the underground corridors down which we were led were very long parallel pipes carrying this "raw sludge" along the first stage of its journey through the works or fibre optics cables for the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) responsible for the machinery. Every part of the system is automated, to the extent that it only requires two human operators to be present in the control room at any one time.

There are 5000 km of sewer pipes buried in the national capital and they all lead to this site. 100 ft below the surface the sewage is filtered through a small screen 4 inches wide where the larger "debris"––i.e. bits of washing machines, golf balls, toys, people's dentures, vegetable knives, stones, toys, bank cards, you name it––are trapped and retrieved, to be put into a smelly dumpster (skip) that fills to capacity every month, its contents to be buried in a landfill. The rest of the sludge is pumped up to ground level, then "gravity fed" through the plant. The start of this occurs in an open channel where the smaller debris and grit is filtered out, bubbles keeping the particles in suspension.

Holding our noses or trying not to breathe too much, we were guided across a bridge over this channel and then through a pungent enclosed area where big vats stored the interesting mix, with "sampling nipples" on their sides.

Large "settling tanks" covered in concrete receive the sludge where oils can rise to the top as scum to be skimmed off––though people ought not to put fats into the sewage, they do––and the organic mush can sink to the bottom. Now these heavier parts can be dealt with. A process called "anaerobic digestion," lasting from 15 to 25 days, converts some of it into carbon dioxide and methane, the latter of which is retrieved and converted into electricity to power the machinery and heat the buildings. Excess methane is burned off there and then, and it has to stay alight in case of flares. We saw it burning quite impressively, like the Eternal Flame on Parliament Hill. The remaining "bio mass" is centrifuged to separate the liquid from the bio-solids. The solid stuff, being rich in nutrients, can eventually be carted away and used as fertilizer on our fields.

Clean water at the end of the process

By means of aereation (i.e. bubbles of air), oxygen burning micro-organisms can now break down the small particles in the water that remains from the original sewage; our guide spoke of a sour dough recipe as an analogy and called these tanks clarifiers. 

Towards the end of the clarification treatment, chlorine is added to kill any toxins in the water as its flow slows ever more sluggishly through large circular tanks open to the skies. They contain "rakes" that rotate once per hour. Finally, because we mustn't have chlorinated water going into the river, enough sodium bi-sulphate is added to neutralise it, the final bi-product being salt. Then the fresh water runs over a weir (as shown in the photo above), its flow helping to turning the last machine in the process. 

I got that last piece of information in answer to a question I asked about capturing the water's energy but what I should have asked, and only thought of later, is the question about what happens to the chemicals that get into our sewage through medication; there was no mention of this subject. Should we be worrying about it?

Talk of sewage and salt

Should the city's environmental priority be Light Rail or sewage control?—that is the issue in the local news at the moment.

It's raining today and the city's water pipes will be in full use, draining dirty water from the salted roads. What goes down the drain is a subject of hot debate, with the Ottawa Riverkeeper website publishing their opinion on the matter in their blog and on their news page.

"According to Ecology Ottawa, the city discharged 417 million litres of sewage and rainwater into the river in 2011. That’s enough to fill 166—wait for it—Olympic-sized swimming pools. People may differ on whether LRT or the Ottawa River is the city’s main priority, but I think we can all agree it’s time to come up with a new gigantic unit of volume."

Ottawa to Kingston

Flying above Ottawa, as I have mentioned before, it's clear to see how the city's three rivers determine the layout of its infrastructure. In my photo below, the Gatineau River valley can just be discerned in the distance.

Ottawa, looking north from above the Rideau River 

We are thinking of hiking the length of the Rideau River one day, a 305km trek which could take a couple of weeks at least, especially if we had a load of provisions and clothes on our backs. There is a Rideau Trail Association too that organises group walking along the trail in stages.

(My brother-in-law Phil, by the way, a keen hiker in the UK, has just published a mischievous blogpost about people who walk in groups, illustrated by one of his own drawings.)

It would be nice to sleep in comfortable beds while we're foot-slogging to Kingston and there is a choice of possible lodgings on the way, although for some of the wilder stretches they may be distributed rather far apart.

Anyway, no end of possibilities. We could cycle the length of the Rideau too, if we wished, or could rent a boat. I've heard of people who have covered the distance by canoe. Following the Cataraqui Trail, it's also possible to cycle from Ottawa to Kingston. The Cataraqui River at the southern end of the journey flows into the St. Lawrence at Kingston.

Green Island, and the swans

I walked onto Green Island last week, under the semi-circular walls of the Foreign Affairs building at 111 Sussex Drive (formerly City Hall) where a covered walk-way at river level allows a short cut to the Minto Bridges. I was expecting to see sandbags on the steps to the side doors to guard against water seeping into the ministry, but it seems the risk of spring floods this year hasn't been great enough to warrant placing them there.

The path took me past the Unity Tower. Directly under the tower there's a plaque, dated 1993:

Over the years, people from every land and continent have chosen to make Ottawa their home. The Unity Tower looks over Ontario and Quebec, and its symbolism extends to all of Canada. May it stand as an abiding reminder of the richness in diversity that is both our inheritance and our continuing gift to those whom come after us.

Another plaque on the grassy bank beside the tower refers to another kind of inheritance and to what I think is a sad story:

28 June 1967. These swans from the River Thames near Abingdon, Berkshire, the gift to the city of Ottawa of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, commemorate the centennial of the Confederation of Canada.

Off course the Royal Swans don't stay in one place as the Unity Tower does, even though they have their wings clipped and cannot fly away. "These swans" are no longer to be seen anywhere around Green Island; their descendants swim up and down the river between Cummings Bridge and Carleton University during the summer months, these days, and in winter—i.e. for two-thirds of the year!—despite repeated protests to the Ottawa Royal Swan Coalition by the Ottawa Humane Society, they're housed in less than ideal conditions at a facility on Leitrim Road until their new winter quarters can be made available at the Nepean Equestrian Park on Moodie Drive. During the bird flu scare of 2006 the birds were kept at Leitrim Road (aka Swantanamo Bay) all year round.

Last year, they were granted the relative freedom of the river from the end of May till October.

Salty thoroughfares

We've had a good, bracing winter, fresh air, blue skies, sparkling ice, pure white snow, weeks of sub-zero temperatures, but for most people that's enough, now. All week long, the ice caused by the freeze after the sudden, brief thaw on February 18th has been solid and slippery underfoot.

On our walks, Chris and I have avoided the pathways through the riverside parks and kept to the roadside; even on the sidewalks we've had to watch our step across the untreated patches*. Last night we tried crossing the park and found it so hard to balance on the rough ice that we resorted to walking on the snow, not very deep this year. That had a hard crust too.

* We're grateful for the security and convenience that results from the winter maintenance, but where does all the salt go, that's strewn on our icy pavements? Some of it gets stuck to the chassis of our cars, turning them, and our clothes when they rub against it, white—an annoyance that we all tolerate for the duration. As for the run-off, which must ultimately make its way into our rivers, the city of Ottawa claims to have a "salt management program":

The City uses road salt (crushed rock salt- Sodium Chloride) for snow and ice control on roads to ensure public safety. [...] In large quantities, salt can damage roadside vegetation and contaminate surface and groundwater. The Salt Management Strategy provides an approach for engaging a variety of winter maintenance technologies such as establishing a Road Weather Information System (RWIS), forecasting of road-conditions, investigating and adopting technologies such as pre-wetting and anti-icing and researching alternative methods and products. These activities help decrease the quantity of salt used.

Ontario's Ministry of Transportation also keeps an eye on road salt management. Imagine the <600,000 tonnes of salt that's used on Ontario's roads each year and let's hope the Ministry is vigilant.

View from a highrise

Here are two views from a balcony on the 17th floor of 400 Stewart Street, where I was this morning, looking up and down the Rideau. This building, named Rio Vista, has 24 floors in total. It's listed on Ottawa's Skyscraper Page.

Cummings Bridge over the Rideau, showing Cummings Island and Montreal Road

(This island, by the way, has a history; in the nineteenth century, the Cummings family ran a general store on this site, but only trees stand there now.)

The Rideau River, looking upstream (south) from an apartment in Rio Vista 

In Strathcona Park

Cummings Bridge from Strathcona Park

Friday morning, I was the other side of Montreal Road, walking in Strathcona Park with a large group of snowshoers. Strathcona Park has a more urban look to it than some of the other city parks, but at the beginning of the 20th century it was just a field with a bluff at the northern end from which the young men preparing to fight in the Boer War learned how to fire their rifles, Lord Strathcona having offered the army the use of this terrain. The road along the park is called Range Road in memory of this rifle range. Nowadays, it's also familiarly known as Embassy Row.

The park has a riverside path from which there's a good view of Cummings Bridge connecting Sandy Hill to Vanier across the River Rideau. In summer there are outdoor plays in the park: Theatre Under The Stars. Only the squirrels playing in winter, though. We saw a whole family of them leaping around in the tree tops.

Strathcona's Folly with Range Road behind it

In summertime, children can play in and out of a ... structure, not a playground exactly, in the park. This is Strathcona's Folly (1992) created by Stephen Brathwaite from stone and bronze:

Strathcona's Folly is intended to encourage us to consider the cycle of life. It is constructed using real pieces of local architectural history like adult sized toy building blocks. There are pieces of …a convent on Sussex Drive, stone faces from a branch of the Bank of Montreal, balustrades from the Château Laurier Hotel, bits of the Royal Canadian Mint, the Capitol Theatre, the Windsor Duvernay Hotel, the Parliament Buildings, bronze rosettes from the Daly Building, and even one of the old swing seats from the park.

Making the most of the ice

I mentioned the ice-fishing in this blog last month.

Here are a few of the temporary fishing huts on the Ottawa River, viewed from a couple of thousand feet. In the bottom right hand corner (click on the picture to enlarge it) you can see that the fisherman has made a row of eight holes with his auger. This particular cluster of huts on the south side of the river was a small one, but along other stretches, such as the north side, east of Gatineau, as shown in my second picture, the layout is so well organised you could call it a town, with visitors (either on snowmobiles or in vehicles on wheels) zipping along the ice streets. Some huts have little ice rinks in their front "yards."

It isn't only the fishermen who clear away the snow to make skating rinks on the river; shore-dwellers do this too. Here's a home-made rink just off shore by Old Highway 17, probably shared by the nearby homeowners who meet on the river for a game of hockey.

Meanwhile, in the city, sculptors have been playing with ice in a more professional way, etching stylized fish, for example, onto carved blocks, for Winterlude's "Crystal Garden."

New bridge across the Rideau?

It seems there are plans to erect a bridge for the use of cyclists and pedestrians across the Rideau River just south of Strathcona Park from the Overbrook / Vanier district to Sandy Hills. Apparently there used to be a rickety wooden bridge that served the same purpose, crossing the river from the Rideau Tennis Club at Donald Street, across the shallow water there.

If the project goes ahead it would facilitate a pleasant evening bike ride for us, up one bank of the river and down the other, although it is already possible to do that by crossing slightly further upstream on the existing footbridge just beyond Highway 417 (from Lees Avenue to Hurdman Park).

For a list of all the bridges in Ottawa, click here. 

Maple Island

I mentioned Maple Island in the post below. This is a pleasant spot to retire from the crowds in summer and sit on the bank under the trees. Beavers, muskrats, turtles, herons and swans also appreciate the relative privacy of its banks and last summer a family of geese with thirteen goslings chose to make a home there for a while.

If you walk to the tip of the small island you'll find a monument that commemorates the welcome of some 40,000 Hungarian immigrants who came to Canada at the time of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. I have met a few of them. The monument has only stood on the island for the last four years or so, however.

Seeing the light

Well layered in wraps—or should I say, well wrapped in layers?—we walked across the Minto Bridges to New Edinburgh, at minus twenty-something degrees C around 10 o'clock last night, noticing the plumes of steam rising from chimneys and water pipe vents (manhole covers) in the road, but not from the solid Rideau River. The coming snow clouds were beginning to obscure the sky and gather on the south eastern horizon so that they reflected colour from the city lights. Moving away from the street lamps and looking straight up from Maple Island, though, we saw mysterious bright streaks like the reflection from laser beams, but broader, which I'm sure weren't wisps of under-lit cirrus cloud but a faint manifestation of the Northern Lights.

On the Space Weather website I see that someone in Sweden noticed the aurora last night as well, so perhaps we weren't imagining it. On previous occasions we've seen something similar over the riverside parks, beams of light like the struts of a dome, coming and going and tending to converge overhead.

When I came in I had frost all over my eyelashes.

Cold!

The weather report for Ottawa this morning is clear, with a temperature of minus 25ºC which "feels like" minus 39ºC, because of the 30kph wind. In these conditions any exposed human skin will freeze in 10 minutes, so best be careful. We did go out for a walk last night, thoroughly covered in layers, to see the full moon lightly veiled in clouds over the Rideau River.

For this morning's post I found a cold looking view of the Ottawa River's north bank in January 2009 (very similar to now). The steam rises from a lumber factory on the Quebec side. A little "Arctic Smoke" as mentioned in my last post is visible, rising from a patch of open water in the river.

Eyesore or enhancement?

A local building company wants to erect an 8-storey* condominium on Bruyère Street on a fifty-foot lot facing the Rideau River at Bordeleau Park. Claridge Homes already has quite a presence around the national capital but this would be the first such edifice in our own neighbourhood. It would also extend "below grade" to provide parking space for about 110 vehicles. Whether this underground car park would be within the river's flood plain or not hasn't yet been made clear.

It is the city's policy to allow the construction of modern "infill housing in mature neighbourhoods" whenever a reasonable site plan is submitted, in order to avoid too much new construction around the outskirts of the city (although that is tending to happen too).

Yesterday evening I was one of about sixty residents of Lowertown who turned up for a "Bruyère Street Rezoning Task Force" meeting about the possible development, which most people seemed to see as a threat.

Predictably, most of the neighbours weren't happy about the proposed "revitilisation" of our corner, especially as the plan is to demolish existing houses on the site after evicting the 16 families who currently live there. Before this actually happens, however, several stages have to be passed. The zoning amendment would come first, before the site plan is approved, and only after that would a building permit be granted. The city planning representative wouldn't commit herself as to what her department thinks of the proposal and our newly elected councillor wants "to work with all parties" over this issue, so no promises were made either way.

Some of what was said at the meeting:

"This is the most attractive spot anywhere in the city."

"Don't forget the heritage aspect. The houses to be demolished are of historical interest."

"Is this proposal a done deal, or are we going to fight it?"

"As far as the density criteria are concerned, what are we grappling with here? I like the idea of having new neighbours, but why has this thing got to be so high? It would set a precedent."

"How can we get its footprint reduced?"

"Since the neighbourhood came together to reclaim Bordeleau park, we have turned this neighbourhood around. Was this all for nothing?"

"The proposal is out of character ... a slap in the face of the community."

"It's incongruous with the neighbourhood and completely out of scale ... representing overdevelopment."

If the construction goes ahead the problems foreseen are to do with vibration, the cost of the services that will have to be upgraded, the infiltration of water from the river bed and the extra traffic. The new structure will throw a significant shadow over the park, dwarfing the neighbouring properties, especially because not much of a setback from the sidewalk is planned for its façade,


* British spelling is preferred in this blog; I've had dual British-Canadian citizenship since 2005

The Hog's Back

On Monday I was in a car that took me all the way along Colonel By Drive; at the southern end of that ride I went past the Hog's Back Falls, at the point where the Rideau Canal splits from the Rideau River, and caught a glimpse of them from the passenger seat. I always want to stop to take a closer look at these falls; they're less well known by tourists than are the Rideau Falls, some 10km downstream, but much loved by the citizens of Ottawa. Today, having been at a house within walking distance of the Hog's Back I made a special detour to visit them instead of jumping straight on the bus back to town.

The Hog's Back Park near the Falls is being "rehabilitated; the parking area has been closed for the last few months and the buildings fenced off. The construction work was started at the end of last summer and has been abandoned for the winter, but all I had to do on foot was follow the trail of footprints, skirting the fences to the lookout points where I managed to take some photos: