City of Brantford Council received information in regards to nitrate levels in the Grand River during a Committee of the Whole meeting on Tuesday, January 21, 2025.
Nitrate, which is a form of nitrogen, naturally occurs in water, soil and air, and forms in the Grand River for various reasons including agricultural operations, stormwater runoff and wastewater discharges in the watershed.
Because having high levels of nitrate in drinking water is known to negatively affect the health of pregnant women and infants under the age of onek, often causing what is referred to as “blue babies,” the Ontario drinking water limit for nitrate is 10 milligrams per litre.
According to a detailed report from Inderjit Hans, the City’s Commissioner of Public Works, naturally high levels of nitrate occur in the Grand River during the winter months due to low biological activity, and on Wednesday, January 1, 2025, levels peaked at 9.8 mg/L for a couple of hours after heavy rainfall.
“As an operational measure, the inlet gates to the Holmedale Canal were closed during this event,” read Hans’ report. “The nitrate level in the drinking water never exceeded 8.7 mg/L, as it was supplied from the storage reservoirs, and met all Ontario’s Drinking Water Quality Standards.”
During the meeting, Selvi Kongara, Brantford’s Director of Environmental Services, Duane Ayres, the City’s Manager of Water Treatment Operations and Dr. Rebecca Comley, the acting Medical Officer of Health for the newly formed Grand Erie Public Health, spoke as delegates to provide the Council with more details about nitrate, the January 1 spike, and to discuss plans to mitigate any future issues.
Noting that Brantford’s drinking water is pulled from the Grand River, Kongara said that the City has been monitoring its nitrate levels for years now and that in recent years, the levels have been overall trending upwards.
While she reiterated that the drinking water is in fact safe, Kongara explained that the City has a conventional water treatment plant and is unable to remove the nitrate with the current system and they are looking for more efficient options.
“The City undertook a feasibility study last year to find out options on how to control the nitrate and there were three different options presented,” said Kongara. “Approach one is to reduce the concentration right at the source, so right at the farm or right at the wastewater plant where it is coming from. The second option is to find an alternative supply, like groundwater by drilling wells and the third option is to find some treatment that can remove nitrate. So, the study looked at various technologies and identified that reverse osmosis treatment was the best solution for Branford.”
She said that while the City has been working with many agencies surrounding source water protection, and has put in several emergency plans in place, one of most reliable ways to ensure the safety of Brantford’s drinking water is to have systems in place to remove and ultimately reduce the nitrate.
Kongara shared that City is currently looking into installing a more permanent solution for the future, but that for the time being, the City will be renting four trailer mounted reverse osmosis units. To rent and install the units this year, the cost is $900,000.
“The immediate solution is an emergency procurement of trailer mounted reverse osmosis units. It will take four to six weeks for the City to install them and we’re planning to complete the installation by the end of February 2025,” she said.
When Mayor Kevin Davis asked how the units will be set up, Ayres confirmed that because the water system is split in half, “there’ll be two trailers on one side and two trailers on another, and the water will feed through them and go back into our chlorination system.”
Kongara also explained that City officials are exploring the installation of a permanent reverse osmosis system, estimated to cost between $50 million and $100 million, and are seeking provincial and federal grants to help fund the project.
“The design and construction of this process will take roughly four to five years, and it is estimated to cost 50 to 100 million dollars. It’s a very expensive treatment, but it is a robust technology,” said Kongara. “This is a good investment for the city to add the reverse osmosis process and to modernize the plant, and what it is going to give us is high quality water for our community and also support sustainable growth of our community.”
After the presentation, councillors had the opportunity to ask several questions.
Given that the price to rent the mounted systems is less than a permanent solution, Councillor John Sless asked if it would be better to just rent the trailers each year, but Kongara said that there are risks associated with the temporary system.
“The temporary unit is only for three months, so if we have higher levels in other months, we would have no protection. Also, the unit may not be available when we want to rent so there are many risks associated with this temporary system,” she said.
She also noted that the permanent system would be more efficient as it would have the capacity to dilute 50 million litres of water compared to the temporary system’s nine-millions litres.
When Councillor Greg Martin asked if they would have the ability to run groundwater through the water treatment system as an alternative option, Kongara said that there may not be enough to do so.
“We will be going through a study to explore groundwater availability but right now, the initial studies show that we don’t have enough groundwater to totally replace the water we get from the Grand River,’ she said. “We may be able to find some to blend it, but again, we need to do an investigation to find out.”
With that being said, Kongara notes that groundwater can also have negative contaminants as well such as iron, magnesium, sulfur and nitrates as well.
Davis later said that he was appreciative of staff’s work and agreed that reverse osmosis was likely the best option to handle the issue at hand.
He said that since all of the information has come forward, he has been in touch with other partners located in the Grand River watershed. He said he’s informed Six Nations Elected Chief, Sherri-Lyn Hill and Haldimand County Mayor, Shelley Ann Bentley, about the issue. Meanwhile, the Grand River Conservation Authority has established a task force to address the situation.
Davis also noted that he met with Rob Flack, Minister of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness, on Monday, January 20, at the ROMA conference where he advocated for the issue.
“I explained to them that this is a growing issue in our watershed, and probably in other watersheds as well, and that there needs to be a concerted province wide action that assists agricultural producers in using best practices to minimize their operations,” he said. “…I pledge that I will continue to advocate this issue, both encouraging staff to deal with it through the options we have, but also through the watershed and across the province. This is a serious issue that we need to address as a province; it doesn’t take just one person or one ministry, it has to be many of us working together and I’m optimistic we can do it.”
The report and information was received on a unanimous vote.
Kimberly De Jong’s reporting is funded by the Canadian government through its Local Journalism Initiative.The funding allows her to report rural and agricultural stories from Blandford-Blenheim and Brant County. Reach her at kimberly.dejong@brantbeacon.ca.
