PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montreal, September 28, 2020 – In order to continue its efforts to raise awareness among governments and the population about the quality of river water, the Fondation Rivières is taking advantage of World Rivers Day to make public a interactive map of wastewater spills in Quebec.
This cartographic tool, produced in collaboration with the UQÀM Media School, relies on the published data by the Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change (MELCC) between 2011 and 2019. It allows citizens, municipalities as well as all organizations concerned about water quality to quickly obtain a portrait of wastewater discharges on their territory. By hovering over the various options available to users, it is possible to follow the evolution of the situation over different periods. With the new Intensity index developed by the Fondation Rivières, the relative magnitude of spills can also be observed. This intensity is a weighting calculation which takes into account the importance of the structures and the measured spill time. The larger the sanitation work, the larger the spill. Add the duration and you obtain an order of magnitude of the quantity of water released without treatment into watercourses.
Processing information represented a real technical challenge for students in the journalism program at UQÀM. “The raw data provided by the MELCC between 2011 and 2016 included nearly 9.5 million lines of data to process, not including data from 2017 to 2019! The measurement methodology has also changed. For example, spill times, first measured in hours, have been measured in minutes since 2017. Duration is also very fragmented information. For example, we have no information on the duration of more than 10% of the spills that were reported in 2019. Would we accept not knowing the amount of 10 % of public contracts awarded? We must be more demanding with the quality of public data on a subject as important as this. » – Jean-Hugues Roy, Journalist and professor at UQAM.
For the initiator of the project, Fondation Rivières, the time had come to inform the public about the extent of the situation. " Since flushgate In Montreal, the issue of quality and accessibility to water is of great concern to Quebecers. However, wastewater spills occur everywhere and every day! The population must know where the approximately 60,000 untreated wastewater spills per year are located and the evolution in each municipality. The map illustrates the symptom of a worrying disease and above all, it allows us to draw up a list of municipalities where urgent intervention is necessary to plug the gaps. Citizens now have the tool they need to demand that their municipalities and the MELCC tackle the problem. Transparency. This is our objective” – André Bélanger, general director of Fondation Rivières.
Remember that Fondation Rivières made public a less than complimentary portrait on June 1 in which it established that 7 out of 10 municipalities still contaminated rivers. On June 15, in reaction to this state of affairs, 44 organizations subscribed to an open letter intended for the Premier of Quebec, the Minister of the Environment and the Minister of Municipal Affairs calling for a major clean water project. The interactive map is part of this same logic: establishing the facts in order to encourage political authorities to act now.
The interactive map can be viewed on the website foundationrivieres.org.
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For informations :
Geneviève Tardy
Communications Manager
514 424-3556
communications@fondationrivieres.org
