Urban stormwater and municipal effluents: innovative solutions for source water protection

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Stormwater and municipal effluents are important issues requiring action in response to new regulations and identified problems and health risks. In the fall of 2015, 90 000 individuals signed a petition requesting that the City of Montreal stop a raw sewage spill, that was planned in order to maintain its interceptor sewer. Through the numerous national and international media stories, Canadians learned that raw sewage spills are a common occurrence, with more than 45 000 occurring in 2013 in Quebec alone. There is growing public pressure for open and real time data on raw sewage spills, yet few data are available, including on the effects of such spills. The proposal addresses novel technologies for reducing threats to drinking water supplies from urban effluents, including raw sewage spills. The overall goal of this research is to validate novel solutions for protecting urban drinking water sources. The research project will: 1) fill in data and knowledge gaps for contaminant accumulation in sewer sediments that are needed for real-time control of combined sewers and, if unaddressed, could limit the use of new green infrastructure technologies for source water protection, 2) test new next generation sequencing methods for contaminant source identification and compare with more specific source tracking targets, 3) evaluate human enteric viruses as markers of human fecal contamination, and 4) determine how automated high frequency E. coli monitoring can be used to improve drinking water treatment plant design and operation using a promising new technology for continuous E. coli monitoring that has yet to be tested in Canadian waters. Exchanges among project participants will enable the rapid transfer of knowledge to end-users in Canada (e.g. municipalities, policy-makers and government laboratories). The involvement of Environment Ministries will facilitate the transfer of laboratory methods to these groups for more widespread application for water infrastructure decision-making. Highly qualified personnel working alongside our industrial partners will be trained in the areas of emerging environmental contaminants, green infrastructure, metagenomics, new automated technologies for water quality monitoring, and urban source water protection.