{"id":3930,"date":"2009-01-11T11:19:24","date_gmt":"2009-01-11T16:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacingtoronto.ca\/2009\/01\/11\/torontos-sewers-love-them-or-ignore-them\/"},"modified":"2009-01-11T11:19:24","modified_gmt":"2009-01-11T16:19:24","slug":"torontos-sewers-love-them-or-ignore-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2009\/01\/11\/torontos-sewers-love-them-or-ignore-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Toronto’s sewers: love them or … ignore them."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Toronto’s sewers have been in the news lately with the discovery of a crack in a massive trunk pipe buried underneath the Don Valley. Should we appreciate our sewers more or, dare I suggest it, celebrate them? As I wrote in today’s Ideas section of the Toronto Star<\/em>, appreciation for what gurgles below may not yet match that found in Paris but Toronto is no slouch in both having an impressive subterranean system of our own and a community of people intent on seeing much of it for themselves. Read the rest here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While California may live with the specter of The Big One waiting to strike at a any moment, Toronto rang in the New Year with headlines that threatened our own catastrophic event: The cracking of a half-century old trunk sewer could potentially fill the Don River with raw sewage. Cynical Torontonians may shrug and say “what’s new?” But that a 2.5-metre-wide pipe silently carrying the waste of 750,000 people to the Ashbridges Bay treatment plant by way of Coxwell Avenue lay buried under the Don Valley all these years — anonymous and unsung — is telling of how much we take our sewers for granted. We only notice them when something goes wrong.<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/em><\/p>\n

The sewage works are no small operations. Ashbridge’s alone serves 1,250,000 people — you can begin to understand how important the Coxwell pipe is — and the sewage takes about 12 hours to flow through the plant. For all our 9,000 kilometres of sewer pipes, including 358 kilometers of trunk collector sewers and eight pumping stations, none get the grand Art Deco treatment that the R.C. Harris water filtration plant got, and Michael Ondaatje has never described any of them as a “Palace of Purification” as he did the Harris. Toronto’s sewers are swept under our psychological rug, like other uncomfortable things. Even elected officials want some distance. When Metro Toronto’s first Chair Frederick “Big Daddy” Gardiner was told an expressway was going to be named after him, Gardiner responded: “They offered to name a sewage plant on the Humber River after me. I said: `No thank you.'”<\/em><\/p>\n

—<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet no city has embraced what lies below like Paris has. It’s sewers are celebrated in literature in major works like <\/em>Les Miserables<\/em>, a novel that contains this vivid passage: “… Paris has another Paris under herself; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is slime, minus the human form.” During Victor Hugo’s time, sewer tourism was popular. Sewers have slipped into the consciousness of what it means to both be Parisian and to walk through Paris, making it impossible to forget the subterranean network that sustains and maintains the life above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Photo by kev_walsh<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto’s sewers have been in the news lately with the discovery of a crack in a massive trunk pipe buried underneath the Don Valley. Should we appreciate our sewers more or, dare I suggest it, celebrate them? 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