News & Events

For public utility managers, one word serves as a splash of cold water: Walkerton. Seven people lost their lives and 2,300 fell ill after the small Ontario town's water supply was contaminated with manure from a farmer's field.

The E.coli outbreak was the nation's most serious instance of drinking water contamination. And in the eight years since the tragedy, Walkerton has become a watchword for more stringent monitoring of potable water. 

It's a topic that researcher Lynda McCarthy knows well. Before joining Ryerson's Department of Chemistry and Biology, the Associate Professor conducted research at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters, one of the world's leading water-research institutes. As a result, she is very knowledgeable in limnology and ecotoxicology, the respective studies of fresh water and the effects of pollutants on the environment.

Today, Dr. McCarthy and her colleagues Drs. Andy Laursen, Vadim Bostan, and Kim Gilbride of Chemistry and Biology; Mehrab Mehrvar of Chemical Engineering; and Ron Pushchak of Urban and Regional Planning, and Occupational and Public Health are using their collective and multi-disciplinary expertises to develop a real-time early warning system for drinking water systems. The research is being conducted with the Regional Municipality of Niagara, which gets its drinking water from the Welland Canal. The waterway is affected by herbicide runoff from farmers' fields and by chemicals that lake- and ocean-going ships use to remove algae from their hulls.

Before the canal water enters a treatment plant, however, it flows into a river toward a three-day holding reservoir. There, water quality is assessed using the only method available - chemical analysis - but the procedure isn't perfect, says Dr. McCarthy. "It's costly, it takes at least 24 hours to get results and it doesn't detect all chemicals. In fact, out of the billions of combination of chemicals that are out there, we might look for 10,000."

To narrow down the options, Dr. McCarthy thinks indigenous aquatic organisms can stand in as the "miner's canary." By placing cameras and probes in the river, the researchers can monitor the behaviour of several plant and animal species, including green algae and water fleas. If the organisms show changes in, for instance, their swimming pattern or oxygen output, it may indicate the presence of a particular class of pollutants. The treatment plant will then be shut down until chemists and water engineers can fix the problem.

Dr. McCarthy's three-year project, which is currently being investigated in the lab, has received more than $500,000 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The Niagara region has also contributed $10,000 to the initiative.

Dr. McCarthy has yet another item on her to-do list: studying the impact of biosolids on agricultural fields. While animal dung has long been used as a fertilizer, little is known about the effects of applying human sludge to farmland. Dr. McCarthy aims to increase our understanding with the help of a pioneering $100,000 grant from the Ontario Ministries of the Environment, and Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

Although nutrient-rich, biosolids can contain pharmaceuticals and other contaminants - the result of our prescription-laden society. But are the drugs causing any damage? "We need an environmental assessment to see if the sludge is affecting the earthworms, fungi and macro- invertebrates that make soil fertile," says Dr. McCarthy. "If you destroy them, you might get one season of crop growth, but you will not get a sustainable crop yield over decades."

Dana Yates is a Toronto-based freelance writer - www.danayates.ca.

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