One of the things that we did over the last few years was studies with monitoring instream during storm events to see how much phosphorus and sediment were coming through the system. This was done in conjunction with both Environment Canada and the Province of Ontario. It's no surprise but as you get through a storm system, you find that at the peak flow times, there are extremely high levels of phosphorus and sediment. The take-home message is if you see dirty water flowing through the stream, it's not just sediment-laden, it will likely be heavily laden with phosphorus.
To give you a feel for things, our watershed contributes about half the flow into Hamilton harbour. The other half, as it was previously mentioned, comes from the waste water treatment plants.
In the past, the heavy burden of phosphorus that was contributed by the waste water treatment plants overwhelmed the watershed. Now, with upgrades that are going to be taking place to these waste water treatment plants with tertiary treatment, it's our watersheds that we have to focus on. And we literally have to cut in half the amount of phosphorus coming into the watershed.
The simplest analogy is that right now we have an amount of phosphorus every day going into Hamilton Harbour that is about four times the equivalent of my body mass—every day. Four guys like me, made up of phosphorus, jump into the harbour. We will cut it down to one person jumping in, made out of phosphorus, from our waste water treatment plants, and we need to do the same in our watersheds.