Our September 1^st 2005 News will start with special greetings to all Colleagues, who decided to upgrade their knowledge with some complimentary study. For the new school year we salute you and wish you luck and determination.

From COSTI Vaughan Employment Resource Centre – www.costi.org

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Employers benefit from program as well

5/16/2005  - Starting over in a new place is never easy - especially if you're one of the tens of thousands of people who come to Canada each year facing the challenges of rebuilding their careers along with their lives.

The dreams of a promising future that lure new Canadians to this country can be stymied by the barriers to employment faced by those entering the workforce with little or no Canadian job experience.

With the hope of smoothing these transitions for new Canadians, the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) launched the Mentoring Partnership in November.

The program, which pairs carefully screened immigrant job-searchers with mentors in industry and the public sector, aims to help new Canadians get a foot in the door by giving them some of the cultural experience they need within their career fields, as well as personalized guidance on their job searches.

The program is currently managing 200 pairs of mentor-mentee relationships in companies from the business sector - Deloitte was an early partner in the program - to public institutions such as the City of Toronto. The program's goal is to have 1,000 such partnerships set up across the Greater Toronto Area by the end of its first year.

TRIEC is a volunteer-driven organization drawing from the corporate, educational, community and government spheres. It has created numerous programs such as Career Bridge, Occupation and Licensing Bridge.

Mentors in the program span varying levels of seniority in their organizations.

Rick Ducharme, chief general manager of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), has been mentoring Ikramuddeen Abdul Gaffar, a civil engineer newly arrived from India, for the last few months.

For Ducharme, the program is as much about paying back a debt to society as it is about improving opportunities for immigrants.

"I was fortunate in my career, because I've been fairly successful, my mentors were my bosses and friends in the industry," Ducharme said. "So, I thought with my background and exposure, if I can do that with someone else's career, why not?

"We've got to break this barrier that's set up there," Ducharme said of the challenges faced by newly landed job-seekers, many of whom find their skills languishing in jobs outside their field for lack of Canadian experience.

Ducharme and Gaffar meet monthly and discuss ways for Gaffar to break into the engineering field in Canada. Ducharme has already arranged onsite visits for Gaffar at several TTC construction projects, which Gaffar has found instructive.

"When I landed here I was confused, because I didn't know which position I was eligible for," Gaffar said. He added that in India civil engineers are responsible for a much broader scope of duties than they are in Canada.

"In India, I had to do all the jobs, from estimation to the dirty work to building construction. Here it is a little bit different. Estimators are doing estimate work and civil engineering differently. Here, they have construction managers, (there) they have construction engineers," said Gaffar.

Although Gaffar is qualified to work at a position higher than entry level based on his job experience in India, he is seeking an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a Canadian company to gain Canadian experience, as well as to acclimatize.

"There is a different work culture here, so I must get accustomed to this," Gaffar said. He added that an entry-level position also would allow him to learn about some of the different factors involved in construction in Canada's cold climate versus that of his native India.

Gaffar said the program provides a definite advantage in finding the right career in his new country. "It's a fantastic program. I've got a very good mentor, he's a great person, he's very easily accessible. That's very important to me. I am lucky."

Another of the dozens of organizations involved with the Mentoring Partnership is the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA).

The agency, which is dedicated to conservation, preservation and the environment, is hosting 12 mentees.

Chris Benjamin, TRCA's volunteerism and diversity co-ordinator, believes that the pool of immigrant job-seekers is an underutilized resource for most organizations.

"New Canadians are a major source of labour that hasn't been tapped into and, for our organization; it's a chance to expose our staff directly to the talent that's in this group. And hopefully it's a chance to create a new source of staff in the future," said Benjamin, who has been working with Maria-Luisa Elias as a result of the program.

Mentees working with staff at TRCA are, like Gaffar, learning valuable job-search skills, networking and getting used to the Canadian vernacular for their area of work.

"Although their English is strong, they may not know the jargon in their field yet," Benjamin said, because many of the program participants speak English as a second language.

Full Story - Business Edge Magazine

http://www.businessedge.ca/article.cfm/newsID/8949.cfm

From Toronto and Region Conservation

Latest News

http://www.trca.on.ca 

If completed, the project would produce enough electricity to power more than 12,000 homes in a region known for its coal-fired Nanticoke plant, the province's worst polluter.

8/31/2005  - Stelco Inc. isn't out of bankruptcy protection just yet, but the steel giant appears to have the wind back in its sails.

Canada's largest steel producer, which is at the centre of a $350 million lawsuit after backing out of a major wind development project in April, has decided to go it alone with plans for a 40-turbine wind farm around its Lake Erie steel plant in Nanticoke.

If completed, the project would produce enough electricity to power more than 12,000 homes in a region known for its coal-fired Nanticoke plant, the province's worst polluter.

"This facility would generate up to approximately 60 megawatts of electricity to be dispatched to the province of Ontario grid via an existing interconnection agreement with the Hydro One system," states one advertisement the company recently placed in a Haldimand County newspaper.

Haldimand mayor Marie Trainer was notified in an Aug. 19 letter, obtained by the Toronto Star, that the Hamilton-based company has commenced an environmental assessment of the planned wind farm location, as required by the Ministry of Environment.

Dean Comand, who is leading the project for Stelco, said the company is committed to green energy and is trying to determine whether the wind farm will be economically viable. He would not say whether the project is part of a longer-term strategy of luring a wind manufacturer to the area.

"We're just doing all the detail engineering now," said Comand. "We're looking at quotes on equipment, and interconnection agreements."

Stelco, which is legally insolvent and expected to emerge from creditors' protection on Sept. 9, has a reason to warm up to wind power. The wind industry is the second-largest buyer of steel, behind the automotive industry, in countries such as Germany — good news in a sector suffering from overcapacity.

Stelco entered a partnership in the summer of 2004 with a small consulting firm called Georgian Windpower. The two companies had a 20-year plan to install 2,200 megawatts of wind power in the area, beginning with an initial 80-megawatt wind farm at Stelco's Nanticoke Industrial Park.

The idea was to attract a wind turbine manufacturer to the region, create thousands of local jobs and secure Stelco a major next-door customer for its steel. But Stelco pulled out of the project on April 15, two days before Georgian Windpower was to secure $150 million in funding for the development.

Georgian Windpower responded by filing a $350 million breach-of-contract lawsuit, alleging that Stelco planned to use confidential information from the partnership, including wind assessments and a detailed economic analysis of the project, for its own purposes.

The allegations have not be proven in court, but Justice James Farley, who is presiding over Stelco's court-supervised restructuring, has given Georgian Windpower the go-ahead to proceed with its case once the steel giant emerges from court protection.

Michael Monette, president of Georgian Windpower, said he's surprised that Stelco is moving forward on its own while seeming to completely ignore the major lawsuit over its head.

"It's nice to see they understand the value of this project ... But this is just another indication that they're paying no respect whatsoever for the agreement we have in place," said Monette.

He said Georgian Windpower has a binding 75-year land agreement with Stelco for wind energy development. Stelco has argued in court documents that it had the right to terminate the agreement on 60 days notice.

Stelco official Helen Reeves said there's no relationship between the two projects.

The government has pledged to close its five polluting coal-fired power plants by 2007, which currently provide Ontario with 20 per cent of its power needs.

5/4/2005  - Ontario’s growing thirst for power and aging nuclear fleet demand that the province confront the divisive question of whether or not to build new nuclear plants, Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said today.

The issue is growing more urgent by the day, Duncan said in a speech to a Toronto business audience.

"We simply cannot afford to ignore the issue any longer," he said. "The useful life of our existing nuclear fleet is getting on and these decisions are coming fast."

Duncan has asked the Ontario Power Authority, a new body established to keep tabs on the province’s power supply, to lead the new nuclear discussion with Ontario residents and report back to the government within the next two years.

The government has pledged to close its five polluting coal-fired power plants by 2007, which currently provide Ontario with 20 per cent of its power needs.

Nuclear power must remain an option for the province, Duncan said, because the current fleet of plants — Pickering, Darlington and Bruce — are responsible for generating about 45 per cent of the province’s supply.

"Finding replacement for that under renewables and other (sources) would be a challenge," he said.

New Democrat Marilyn Churley said she doesn’t buy Duncan’s argument that Ontario is already too dependent on nuclear power to turn away from it now. The province could follow the lead of countries such as Germany, which turned its back on nuclear in favour of renewable energy sources, she said.

"They should just take the bull by the horns and say `no’ to nukes," Churley said.

Ontario’s current nuclear reactors will be operating until at least 2020, but a decision on new nuclear plants will likely have to be made within the next three to four years, Duncan said.

"The toughest issue that must be grappled with is the future of nuclear energy."

One anti-nuclear protester offered Duncan his opinion right in the middle of the speech.

"Nuclear power shouldn’t be in our future," yelled Greenpeace Canada energy co-coordinator Dave Martin as a hushed audience looked on.

Martin accused Duncan of paying "lip service" to power conservation and renewable energy while spending billions of taxpayer dollars on the province’s nuclear plants.

"We’re in the mess we’re in because we invested in nuclear power," Martin hollered. "Renewable energy is the answer."

After Martin was escorted from the room, Duncan quipped it was ``just another day at the office," but he later admitted that the pace at which the government has implemented the province’s conservation plan has so far been "disappointing."

The government also has to build even more renewable energy and smaller hydroelectric power projects, particularly in the northern reaches of the province, Duncan added.

Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said Ontario should turn its back on nuclear power and instead look to renewable energy and natural gas plants.

"Nuclear power plants are the highest cost and highest risk options to meet our electricity needs," Gibbons said.

Conservative Leader John Tory hailed Duncan for seeking public input on nuclear power, but stressed the key issue is making sure the province has enough power to meet the needs of its residents and businesses.

Duncan conceded that Ontario residents are rightly wary of nuclear power, given a seemingly endless stream of costly problems and delays with the province’s reactors, which have proven expensive both to build and fix.

"Eventually a government will have to come down on one side or the other," he said. "We’re not there yet but we do have to begin the discussion."

8/9/2005  - Last summer's forest fires in Yukon and Alaska sent carbon monoxide pollution around the world, scientists say.

Researchers looking at the effects of the fires on the atmosphere say the fires raised ozone levels around the northern hemisphere, and produced a record amount of carbon monoxide.

The Yukon wildfires in June to August 2004 added about 30 billion kilograms of carbon monoxide into the atmosphere – about as much as was released by human-related activities in the continental U.S. during the same period, the scientists said.

Six per cent of Yukon's forests were burned and the Alaskan government spent $100 million to fight fires in the state.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., used a combination of computer models, satellite readings, ground sampling and numerical techniques to distinguish the carbon monoxide coming from wildfires from other sources.

Ground-level concentrations of ozone increased by 25 per cent or more in parts of the northern continental U.S., and as much as 10 per cent as far away as Europe, the team reported in this month's issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Globally, we are all connected," said lead researcher Gabriele Pfister of the centre. "An event in one area can affect air pollution in another area far, far away from us."

The fire released about 30 billion kilograms of CO from June to August of last year, the researchers reported in this month's issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Fires in the north were particularly intense in the summer of 2004, largely because of unusually warm and dry weather.

Carbon monoxide is a toxic gas that can harm human health even at low levels. It's commonly produced by motor vehicles and industrial facilities. Ground-level ozone is produced from reactions with pollutants, including C0.

"These fires were hopefully a record event and let's hope these fires don't become the rule," said Pfister.

Pfister said the team is still processing data from observing stations as far away as the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

They are also planning to apply the modeling technique to carbon monoxide emissions in South America.

A college in Toronto is exploring the idea of harnessing the power of Canada's busiest highway to create electricity.

8/16/2005  - The wind-tunnel effect created by the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks that travel Highway 401 each day makes Centennial College's Scarborough campus an ideal location for a small wind turbine to feed power back to the school.

To test the potential, engineers have raised a 30-metre tower designed to measure wind speed in the area.

If the results look good, drivers could see a new windmill as soon as next summer, says Matt Vonarburg, one of the engineering students who proposed the idea.

Embracing green energy sources like wind could help put an end to energy woes such as pollution and a predicted shortage of fossil fuels in the future, he says.

"There's huge potential," he said. "It's just that in the European countries they've had incentives in place for a much longer time, and Canada's just starting on that end."

With only one wind turbine planned, the electricity produced would only be enough for the equivalent of about six households.

Centennial College plans to use the windmill to train students interested in the growing field of alternative energies, however. The college is developing a renewable energy program that will also look at producing power from solar panels and biofuels.

Cities across Canada are in danger of losing their mature trees and urban forestry experts say we need to develop strategies now to stem the loss.

8/11/2005  - In many older neighborhoods, trees were planted when subdivisions were first built. That means these urban forests are around the same age and will likely die around the same time.

"We have an age-class imbalance," says Peter Duinker, professor of resource and environmental studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

"There was a huge expansion of urban residential areas at the turn of the century and after the Second World War. In the next 50 years, we're going to see a lot of these trees keel over and that's not a very happy thing."

Urban foresters say that unless we begin to plant saplings soon, some of our leafy neighborhoods are in danger of looking like clear-cut zones.

While Canada has an international reputation as a country of majestic forests, the reality is that about 80 per cent of us live in urban centres. So it's the trees that line our streets and grow in our ravines and parks that provide most of us with our greenery.

Yet it's not just esthetics at stake here.

According to a recent study by University of Toronto forestry professor Andy Kenney, every year, Toronto's seven million trees absorb about 28,000 tonnes of carbon. That cuts back on the amount of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Toronto's urban forest also stores in its branches, roots and leaf litter nearly a million tonnes of carbon and about 1,500 tonnes of other pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxides and particulates, which, when inhaled, aggravate breathing problems.

And urban forests everywhere are energy-savers. They give cooling shade in the summer and cut down on frigid winds in the winter, lessening the need for air conditioning and heating.

"They also have an amenity value," says Duinker. "Who doesn't like driving down a city street where the tree crowns touch?"

Yet despite the significant benefits of city forests, Michel Rheame, urban forestry co-ordinator with the National Forest Strategy Coalition, worries that no one government body is responsible for them.

He says there is too much bickering among the three levels of government over whose job it is to maintain city forests.

"It's a very big concern. We're not receiving the necessary resources to go toward urban forestry," says Rheame.

The coalition, an Ottawa-based non-governmental organization, is working on an inventory of the state of Canada's municipal forests. It hopes to have it completed by the fall of 2005 so it can use it to convince authorities of the need for action.

"The situation is desperate in cities that have a lot of same-age, same-species planting. Fredericton is one. Halifax is not quite that bad," says Duinker. "And some individual streets are going to have a crisis – like mine."

In Vancouver, most of the broadleaf deciduous trees favoured by urban planners after the Second World War will soon need to be replaced.

"The broadleaf trees will be getting close to their lifespan in a lot of places," says Lori Daniels, a professor at the University of British Columbia with an expertise in forest dynamics.

"Out west, we often planted cityscapes with trees like horse chestnuts. These broadleaf trees have a shorter lifespan than our red cedars and Douglas firs."

While deciduous trees grow faster, Daniels says the trade off is that they live only 100 to 120 years. Red cedars, on the other hand, can live to be 1,000 years old.

In Thunder Bay, city forester Shelley Vescio worries that most trees are 40 to 60 years old.

"We probably have 20 years or so left for these trees," predicts Vescio.

"As we start losing the 60-year-old ones, the ones we've been planting will begin to take over. But we've not been planting enough.

"I could line the streets, but there's no point in planting them if someone doesn't water them, especially with global warming. I don't have the [watering] infrastructure for it. It comes down to a lack of resources," she says.

Many foresters are now arguing for a planting strategy that takes into account both public and private land and engages the public in the trees' upkeep. Once we plant trees, they say, we have to safeguard them from modern urban threats, such as road salt and trenching for street construction.

There's nothing like city living for stressing trees.

In fact, look along any tree-lined street and you're likely to see at least one tree with a huge V-shape cut out of its centre.

Hydro workers often prune them back from overhead wires to avoid power outages. Urban foresters say it's an unnatural shape that weakens the tree and makes it more susceptible to broken branches.

And they say that not only must we avoid this kind of damage, we must also ensure we don't repeat the mistakes of the past when replacing urban forests.

"The worst thing we could do is what we did 100 years ago in places like Fredericton and Truro. We planted just American elm and then along came a disease and wiped them out," says Duinker. "It's really important to have a wide variety of trees planted in urban areas."

Our litre of water may have started as a snowfall 300 years ago near Lake Nipigon. Or it may have coursed over Niagara Falls, watched by tourists and lovers.

7/26/2005  - Up above the 401, in the northwest pocket of the city, buildings wilt under a blazing sun. There isn't a tree in sight. Heat sizzles off the pavement, which is deserted but for an unwise or unfortunate few, such as the city worker combing steaming asphalt over a new patch of Islington Ave.

This far from the lake, the only water in view trickles down your temples and the back of your knees. It's been the hottest summer in Toronto's recorded history (about 167 years), with the mercury already bubbling above 30 degrees 26 times. It's also the driest summer since 1949, at least since we started keeping records, in 1937.

There's been barely a half centimetre of rain since the beginning of May — a fourth of what usually falls. The city has been issuing heat alerts like parking tickets and offering reprieve at its pools till almost midnight, since no water has come from the sky above. The word "drought" has been cropping up in newspaper headlines. The province has begged us to cut down on air conditioning; the city has begged us to cut back on water. It's almost as if all the apocalyptic environmental prophecies are proven true, and we're running out of water.

But if you could burrow your hand down through the asphalt on this same stretch of road, and then through 1.5 metres of earth, 30 centimetres of concrete and a thin wall of steel, you'd hit a geyser of water that, within minutes, would flood the street around you.

That's true not just here but anywhere in Toronto. Peel back the top layer of the city, and you will discover a whole other organized world buzzing beneath us. The workings of this world are dizzying: On an average summer day, 2 billion litres of water course from the lake, beneath the city and into homes and businesses — enough to overflow the SkyDome. They travel through 5,500 kilometres of pipe, which if stretched together in one straight line, would reach almost all the way to England. They are pushed uphill from the lake around the city by 120 pumps using 50 million watts of electricity — enough to brighten 500,000 light bulbs. The operation's hydro bill alone is $25 million a year.

It's an elaborate system of engineering wizardry, all aimed at delivering free running water anywhere, anytime. Few of us realize it's there, let alone appreciate it. We just turn on the tap. But day after day it churns, taking water to the city's faucets, toilets, drinking fountains, swimming pools, and splash pads — places like Rexdale Park.

Tucked between a rock of neat bungalows near Islington and Elmhurst Dr., Rexdale Park is an oasis in the middle of the desert. On a scorching afternoon in July, 17-year-old Stetson Ford has brought his group of 9- and 10-year-old campers here for a reprieve from the heat. They run squealing through the geysers shooting water up from different holes in the ground. They bound beneath two towering taps pouring water.

Ford fills and refills a blue bucket with a litre of water at a time to attack the dry and unsuspecting. "Oh, you're going to get it," he hollers.

The kids, like most people in this city, don't know what a miracle the water is — how far that litre has traveled, all the way from the middle of Lake Ontario, and for hundreds of kilometres and years before that. The story of a singe litre of water in the city is a tale of drama and non-stop action.

One night in March some 300 years ago, snow fell gently in the woods a few kilometres from Lake Nipigon, north of Thunder Bay. That spring, when the sun gained momentum, the hard film coating the snow slumped like a fallen soufflй. Slowly, it began to melt, and the water swelled the earth beneath it and trickled towards a nearby creek. That water bubbled quickly down toward the lake, where it stayed for a few months, before following the tug into Lake Superior. It could have been here that at least some of our litre of water began its journey.

If you could seal Lake Superior so no more water could enter, it would take around 191 years to drain — so it's likely our water stayed swirling there for at least a century and a half before flowing down through the Straits of Mackinac into Lake Huron. From there, it made its way down below the canoes by Manitoulin Island, past the cottages of Georgian Bay, the bathers lounging on Sauble Beach, before seeping into Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. About 85 per cent of Lake Ontario's water comes from Lake Erie, so our water might have helped to carry a ship through the Welland Canal. Or it may have coursed over Niagara Falls, watched by tourists and lovers leaning over rusty railings.

And then, two days before Ford scooped it up in his blue bucket, it may have gathered with the droplets from last week's rainfall, and the water that meandered for years up the Saginaw River and through Lake Michigan, and with that brown murky water from Toronto's streets that flooded into the Humber River, and undulated just below the surface of the lake, precisely 1.6 kilometres from the Etobicoke shoreline.

That's where the R.L. Clark Filtration Plant's intake pipe opens. The Clark is one of four filtration plants that treat the city's water. All the water spraying out of taps and car washes across this city starts its journey outside the intake pipe of one of these.

The best-known of the four plants is the art deco R.C. Harris, rising from the shores of the city's Beach neighbourhood. Toronto writer Michael Ondaatje immortalized it as the "palace of purification" in his book In the Skin of a Lion — a place built with the sweat of Italian immigrant labourers in the 1930s.

The oldest, at least in its original form, is on Centre Island. The city built the first sand-filtration plant here in 1908, after a typhoid epidemic killed many Torontonians and raised fear about the water supply. Until then, they had simply been pumping water to homes from a wooden pipe running from the lake. After another outbreak a few years later, it became one of the first plants in North America to disinfect the water using chlorine.

Over the years, as the city grew, so did the size of the water supply system, with new water reservoirs being erected, and eventually, additional filtration plants. The R. L. Clark was opened in 1968, replacing an older plant in the area.

Tucked at the end of a residential street in New Toronto, the plant looks like a cross between a light-industrial factory and a war bunker from the outside. It's long and thin, shaped like a hot dog, with two ends poking out from under a berm of sun-bleached grass. Locals living in the surrounding bungalows use it as a park for their dogs. Its interior has been closed to the public since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. This is a rare glimpse.

Inside, the Clark plant smells like a public swimming pool. That's from the chlorine. The air is cold — the same temperature as the water, at around 7 degrees. There's a high-pitched squealing sound of rusty mixers that slowly lift and lower logs into the water; these help stir the water during the purification process. This is not a place you'd want to be trapped in overnight.

To get to the plant, that litre of water passed layers of zebra mussels clustered around the lips of a giant bell-shaped funnel at the end of the intake pipe. The pesky mussels are kept from attaching inside the pipe by recurring bursts of chlorine as water enters the giant pipe, spanning about 3.3 metres — the height of an average storey.

Within the pipe, the water plummeted into the lake bottom, and burrowed under the bedrock until it reached the shoreline, where it rose up and into the plant, propelled by the pressure of the lake. It then poured through one of three giant metal screens, which removed the odd twig or small fish that had joined the voyage.

It was then pumped up nine metres above to one of three giant, dark concrete pools that always glow an aqua green. That's from the smidgen of alum — about one-twentieth of an aspirin pill — that's sprayed into each litre on its way in. Alum, or aluminum sulphate, acts like a magnet for the dirt, clumping it together in little groups called "flocs." The flocs were left to settle, then gleaned from the water by metre-high filters made up of anthracite, sand and gravel.

Once the dusting was finished, the water was ready for a tiny dose of chlorine, which killed all the naked pathogens — stripped from their silty hiding places — in the water. But before it could be pushed up through the city by one of nine pumps, the water was treated with ammonia, which acts like shellac on wood, protecting the chlorine from the wear of elements along its travels. That way it can last for up to five days, or all the way up to its farthest possible destination, in Woodbridge.

Eight hours after it entered the intake pipe, the water was converted from "raw" to "treated." It now had that small zing of chlorine, and a trace more aluminum sulphate and fluoride. And the few dangerous microbes bobbing among its particles had been killed — but 1.6 kilometres out from shore, there aren't that many of those, anyway.

In fact, contrary to what you might assume driving past Hamilton harbour, pollution levels in Lake Ontario have dropped considerably over the past three decades. Since Lake Erie was pronounced dead in the 1970s, and the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement signed by both the Canadian and American governments, the levels of PCBs and dioxin found in Lake Ontario have plummeted. Pesticides like toxophene and chlordane are also down. And populations of eagles that were once dying from contaminated fish have rebounded.

"I know people find it hard to believe, but Lake Ontario is quite clean," says Mike Lukich, chief chemist at the city's central lab, where workers test water samples every four hours. A kilometre and a half into the water — the home, for a time, of that litre of water and of every other litre of water that eventually ends up in Etobicoke's pipes — even the dreaded E. coli bacteria that cluster along the beaches after a big storm, causing throat infections and diarrhea for any who risk bathing there, aren't present. They don't make it out that far in the lake. While testers found 51 colonies of E. coli in a 100 millilitre sample taken from Marie Curtis beach last week, they would find only one colony in a similar sample around the intake pipes.

So the truth is, that litre of water hadn't changed as much as you might think. It looked the same, tasted the same — still heavy from the layers of calcium-rich limestone lining Lake Ontario.

But now it was ready to graduate from the open world of mother nature, into the subterranean depths of urban Toronto. It joined the 614,999,999 other litres of water that enter the city from the R. L. Clark plant every day, propelled by one of nine pumps into a giant 2.5-metre-wide steel pipe.

The reason for all the pumping is clear when you stand outside Summerhill subway station and look north up Yonge St. The city is built on a gradual hill and, given its wont, water would flow down towards the lake and not the other way.

To get to its splash pad in Rexdale, a hundred blocks away from the Clark plant, the litre would only have been pumped twice. To get to the most distant area in Vaughan, though, water is pumped as many as five times.

It didn't necessarily travel in a straight line. The city's giant trunk water mains dogleg through neighbourhoods, dodging underground hydro corridors, Bell cables, and harder slabs of rock. Plus, they are barred from crossing beneath private property, sticking instead to public road and walkways.

Our litre rushed north, 1.5 metres beneath the roadway between rows of small, brick bungalows, before making a sharp left down another residential street and after a few blocks, turning north again. Moving at the pace of a relatively fit jogger, it passed beneath large graceful maple trees and before sleepy homes, undetected by families fanning themselves on porches, zigzagging all the way to the beginning of The East Mall. Once here, it continued north, past light industrial buildings, factory outlets, gas stations and a man in a tan car covered in yellow lettering that reads: "Want problems? Buy a Saturn."

When it dipped under the QEW, it dove 5 metres farther underground to avoid the traffic reverberations, and bobbed back up the other side.

After travelling 12.7 kilometres, it spilled into an underground reservoir tucked beneath a local sports field for the surrounding high-rises near Eglinton Ave. and Martin Grove Rd.

You've likely walked on one of the city's 10 reservoirs before, thinking they were simply raised parks. But under the grass are giant tanks of water. They are raised up above street level so gravity can pull the water down into nearby homes and buildings, which is why, during the blackout two summers ago, water still flowed into your home.

Originally, all reservoirs were open-faced, like giant, boarded outdoor skating rinks. The oldest and biggest, Rosehill reservoir, spans the size of a full city block near Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. and stores 271 million litres — enough to fill 271 Olympic-sized swimming pools. During World War II, city leaders worried enemy fighters would poison the water and posted armed guards around the reservoirs. Two decades later, during the nuclear terror of the 1960s, the city decided to permanently cover them.

For our litre, the reservoir was a small pit stop, allowing it to rest temporarily until another pump sucked it up and pushed it farther uphill, under Martin Grove Rd.

From there, it zigzagged north again, under the nose of towering apartment buildings, ducked under highways 401 and 409, and finally reached Rexdale Blvd.

Along the route, many of the water's compatriots funnelled off the main course, down smaller pipes and into local neighbourhoods. At Islington Ave., our litre followed suit. First, it diverted into a cast-iron pipe nearly half a metre wide, that acts like an off road from the highway, shadowing the trunk line for a few blocks. Then, it turned into a slightly slimmer pipe under Elmhurst Dr. Had it continued onto one of the even smaller residential streets, it would have cascaded into another pipe half that width, before reaching the 1.9 centimetre pipe running into one of the bungalows.

But the pipe running to the splash pad in the middle of Rexdale Park is twice that thick. When it spurts out the long blue faucet and into Ford's bucket, that litre has travelled enough to work up a good sweat — 21 kilometres over two days. It should be treasured like liquid gold.

Ford takes the bucket and chases after one of his 9-year-olds, unleashing the water over the young boy's back. Soon, some of the water will evaporate into the hot, midday air. The rest will slide down his thin neck and back and wind toward a drain at the base of the splash pad.

From there, it will funnel through another maze of pipes towards a sewage treatment plant before being released back into Lake Ontario to begin the whole story again.

Job Postings     

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The Council of the ABEC announces the purchase of two copies of the PEO licensing books.

Law for Professional Engineers – Third Edition – D. L. Marston.

Canadian Prof. Eng. and Geoscience: Practice and Ethics – Gordon C. Andrews

Our Members will avoid the waiting period in the Libraries and the short term of lending.

	August 30, 2005

Al-Hussein, Mohamed Assistant Professor Ph.D., P.Eng. Contact Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering 3-011 Markin/CNRL Natural Resources Engineering Facility University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2W2 Tel: 780.492.0599 Fax: 780.492.0249 malhussein@ualberta.ca