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WATERSHED CHARACTERIZATION REPORT PRELIMINARY DRAFT VOLUME I OF III TEXT MISSISSIPPI-RIDEAU SOURCE PROTECTION REGION Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region Watershed Characterization Report – Preliminary Draft March 2008 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Clean Water Act (CWA) was passed by the Ontario Legislature in December, 2006. The CWA is part of Ontario’s response to the Walkerton tragedy of 2001 in which tainted drinking water was distributed to unsuspecting citizens. The CWA prescribes a process of watershed-based research, analysis and actions rooted in good science, public participation and sustained effort for keeping Ontario’s municipal drinking water safe. The province is divided into 19 Source Protection Regions for purposes of drinking water source protection. This Watershed Characterization Report, a snapshot of the drinking water source situation within the Mississippi and Rideau watersheds in Eastern Ontario, is the first product in the process. Parts of this report plus other technical “modules” (vulnerability analysis, threats inventory, water quality and quantity risk assessments) will eventually be brought together to form the Assessment Report detailing the issues around drinking water sources. Finally, a detailed Source Protection Plan for each watershed will be developed with full public participation in which current threats to municipal drinking water will be reduced and future threats will be reduced or eliminated. This three-volume document known as the Watershed Characterization Report for the Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region (MRSPR) is the result of 18 months of exhaustive research among existing reports, government files, consultants’ work and practitioners’ experience. It is essentially, the most thorough, the most up-to-date and the most detailed reference book on the natural and man-made physical characteristics of the Mississippi and Rideau watersheds ever produced. We believe it merits an important place on the reference shelf of all municipal offices in the Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region. This document and the multi-year efforts to follow are all about protecting municipal drinking water sources from contamination and depletion. The Watershed Characterization Report covers the 8,600 square kilometres of land within the entire Mississippi and Rideau valleys. This is a huge chunk of Eastern Ontario including the two main river systems which flow east and north to empty into the Ottawa River. The report includes detailed sections on water patterns, climate, geology, where people live, land uses, vulnerable water areas and issues that we already know about within this vast area. The MRSPR is a complicated piece of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Lowlands. The region can be divided into two parts: about 70% bedrock outcrops covered by shallow soils and sparse overburden (western and southern portions), and about 30% surface deposits of clays and sands ranging from 10-30 m in thickness (northern and eastern portions). This pattern produces a complex network of lakes, rivers, wetlands and streams which (generally) flow from west to east/northeast. There are many local exceptions and uneven distribution of these features based on the local geology. Version 2.1 Page i Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region Watershed Characterization Report – Preliminary Draft March 2008 Detailed maps and tables explaining fascinating but little-seen features of the region are bound in Volumes 2 and 3 of this document. They include for instance the locations and water-takings from five bedrock aquifers and five overburden aquifers in the area. There are 12 municipal drinking water systems in the MRSPR: groundwater source systems include Almonte, Kemptville, Merrickville-Wolford, three in Ottawa (Carp, Munster, King’s Park in Richmond) and Westport; surface water source systems include Carleton Place, two in Ottawa (Britannia and Lemieux Island), Perth and Smiths Falls. In terms of municipal water-taking, the Nepean sandstone aquifer is the most desirable in Eastern Ontario from the perspective of source water quantity and quality. It provides the highest sustainable yield of high quality potable groundwater and is targeted by large commercial and municipal systems including six of the seven municipal groundwater systems in the MRSPR. Almonte, Kemptville, King’s Park (Richmond), Merrickville, Munster and Westport all use the Nepean sandstone aquifer as their source. Only Carp extracts groundwater from a different aquifer due to the sufficiently high volume and quality found within this local overburden deposit. In general terms, municipal drinking water drawn from surface water sources throughout the region is good to excellent based on the monitoring of eight chemical factors, three metals and one biological characteristic over many years. Similarly, municipal drinking water drawn from groundwater wells is generally of good quality based on the data currently available. Data on the quality of the raw water used at the 12 municipal systems is presented. The total population in the MRSPR is estimated at 865,000 people of which 730,000 are on municipal water and sewers. The remaining 135,000 people rely on private services throughout the region. There are an estimated 44,000 private wells and septic systems. The population estimates are broken down by municipality in accompanying tables. A typical climate year in the MRSPR would include about 900 mm of precipitation, 200 cm of snow, average annual temperature of 6.3°C; January is the coldest month, February is the driest, April has the peak stream flows and July is both the hottest and the wettest. A key goal of the Clean Water Act is to protect what is known as “vulnerable areas”, places where water used as sources for municipal drinking water could possibly be degraded by contamination or depletion. In the case of municipal systems, the key vulnerable areas are around the wells and around the intakes from surface rivers. The areas close to these critical sites are the most vulnerable in terms of potential degradation of the raw water. As you move farther away from these sites, the threat of contamination of the municipal system diminishes. These close areas, known as Well Head Protection Areas and Intake Protection Zones, will receive a lot of attention during the upcoming additional Assessment Phase of the work. Version 2.1 Page ii Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region Watershed Characterization Report – Preliminary Draft March 2008 Across the entire MRSPR, it has been calculated that as much as 89% of the region is classified as having highly vulnerable aquifers because of the large area of exposed bedrock, shallow soil or permeable overburden deposits. It means that, over large parts of the region, contaminants could travel quickly into drinking water aquifers and potentially cause real risk to users drawing drinking water from those sources. This is a concern for private wells in the rural parts of the region. There is lots of data available and arranged here for easy viewing. At the same time, there are many data gaps. Some of the gaps are geographical; there is simply no monitoring going on in a certain area; sometimes the gap is caused by not having enough years of data to have confidence in the trends. For example, there is a lack of stream flow gauges on most of the tributaries of the Mississippi and Rideau; there are limitations in the quality of the information in the water well records database; there are known limitations in the quality of information in the Permits to Take Water database; bacterial sampling is not conducted evenly on all rivers in the region; and so on. This Watershed Characterization Report concludes with a “Threats Inventory”: some drinking water issues already known about in the region. All municipal drinking water systems occasionally exceed several provincial quality guidelines like colour, odour, hardness and turbidity. These are generally aesthetic or operational in nature and do not constitute real threats to the water system. The data gaps and the issues are clearly identified in the report and flagged for future work. The ultimate goal is to ensure, to the best of our collective ability, the security of municipal drinking water well into the future. Version 2.1 Page iii Mississippi-Rideau Source Protection Region Watershed Characterization Report – Preliminary Draft March 2008 Volume I – Text Table of Contents INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................. 1 1.0 WATERSHED DESCRIPTION.......................................................................... 2 1.1 Drinking Water Source Protection Region .................................................................... 2 1.1.1 Watershed Vision ...................................................................................................... 2 1.1.1.1 Conservation Authorities .................................................................................. 3 1.1.1.2 Mississippi Valley Conservation ...................................................................... 4 1.1.1.3 Rideau Valley Conservation Authority............................................................. 5 1.1.1.4 Rideau Canal..................................................................................................... 6 1.1.2 Stakeholders and Partners.......................................................................................... 6 1.1.2.1 Municipalities ..................................................................................................