Hamilton's Randle Reef 'barely passing' on report card

It's large. It's dark. Sometimes it's called the "spill in slow motion."

And it's preventing the Bay Area Restoration Council (BARC) from being too optimistic about the state of Hamilton Harbour.

BARC has released its latest report card on the state of Hamilton Harbour. While there has been improvement in the harbour's water quality, the report says, inaction on the 630,000 cubic metres of toxic sludge at Randle Reef is hindering progress.

"It would fill Copps Coliseum three times, and it's very nasty stuff," said Chris McLaughlin, BARC executive director.

Randle Reef is a massive coal tar deposit of industrial waste located offshore from Stelco. It's second only to Nova Scotia's Sydney Tar Ponds as a site contaminated by coal tar.

Plans are in the works to construct an underwater containment facility, which will cost an estimated $105 million. The federal and provincial governments have committed $30 million each. Locally, costs are being split between the local government, the Hamilton Port Authority and U.S. Steel, McLaughlin said.

Randle Reef 'frustrating' for community

For the harbour to get anywhere close to being remediated, it needs to happen, he said. With an environmental assessment and peer-reviewed engineering design completed, he's more hopeful than before.

"The project is a frustrating one for the community because it's been announced as imminent for many, many years now," he said. "But we have reason to believe there's more cause for enthusiasm now."

Work on Randle Reef got a D (for "barely passing") on BARC's Toward Safe Harbours report card. Having beaches open at the west end of the harbour was a D+, but has improved since the last report card five years ago, the report says.

The Pier 4 beach was safe for swimming 81 per cent of the time during the 2011 swimming season. But Bayfront Park Beach was posted as unsafe for more than half of the swimming season, which was sometimes caused by cyanobacteria blooms.

There were only two A grades. One was increasing public access to more of the harbour shoreline, which was achieved in part a trail connection from the Lake Ontario shoreline to Red Hill Valley.

Overall, water quality in the harbour got a C+ from BARC, which cited a need for the completion of upgrades to the Woodward wastewater treatment plant.

No exact science

There's no exact science to putting a progress grade on something as complex as environment remediation, said BARC president Scott Koblyk in a media release.

But "we built this process on data and a breadth of expertise and opinion, so we feel the report card does a good job of describing the process our region is making towards delisting our bay as an area of concern."

Hamilton has been listed as an area of concern by the International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes since the late 1980s. The goal is to have the necessary work done to be delisted by 2020.

So far, we're doing "very well, but there's a significant distance to go and it's going to be expensive," McLaughlin said.

"It will a national story the day that Hamilton Harbour gets cleaned up. I can see the headline now: 'Hamilton harbour clean.'"