Today, Indigenous Water Walker Kristen Villebrun @justkristen01 showed me another septic flood in our @CityofHamilton community. @environmenthamilton

Even while wearing a mask and using fragrance oil under my nose, the stench was unbearable. It made me gag and wretch. The smell was intensely putrid, like sewage and decay.

Standing there, looking at contaminated water flowing where it shouldn’t be, I couldn’t help but think about Hamilton’s history of sewage spills and environmental failures.

Many residents will remember that the City of Hamilton was recently fined $600,000 after a sewage leak went undetected for 26 years, releasing an estimated 337 million litres of sewage into Hamilton Harbour. Before that came the Chedoke Creek sewage spill, another environmental disaster that resulted in nearly $3 million in penalties and remediation costs.

I also remember the 2015 cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) bloom that threatened Hamilton’s drinking water. The algal mat grew to roughly 1.6 kilometres long and 0.8 kilometres wide over the water intake area. These issues are connected to the health of our harbour and should concern everyone who relies on our municipal drinking water.

Seeing this new septic flood today raises serious concerns for me.

People need to see and experience this for themselves. This water drains into Hamilton Harbour. All water is connected. Approximately 13 kilometres away, near Hutch’s, is the intake pipe that supplies drinking water to our community.

I am also concerned about the impact on local wildlife. The City has disturbed a beaver habitat that was once thriving in this area. While remediation is necessary, we should be doing everything possible to respect and protect the wildlife that calls this watershed home.

Kristen often reminds people that water is life. That teaching is not symbolic – it is practical. Every spill, every leak, and every failure of oversight affects our waterways, ecosystems, health, and future generations.

Hamilton cannot afford to treat these incidents as isolated mistakes. We need transparency, accountability, proactive infrastructure maintenance, and environmental stewardship that puts clean water first.

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