Hayley and Tyler Tersigni woke up on Nov. 29 in their St. Davids home to an overpowering chemical stench that brought tears to their eyes, headaches and a strong sense of nausea that only lifted when they stepped outside.
“I remembered it from my dad when he used to do flooring and melted glued together and attached carpets,” said Tyler.
It smelled, he said, like an epoxy, a resin or even a little like burning rubber.
“It was bad up here and then I went downstairs. It was so concentrated that I almost puked,” he added.
“I couldn’t breathe, opened all the windows — the washroom, specifically, down there was like the worst.”
Exasperating the problem is that the young couple have a four-month-old newborn.
Whatever the smell was, it wasn’t good for anyone, they assumed — especially not for little Leo.
Recalling that a construction crew had been doing some sewer work in front of their house at 76 Four Mile Creek Rd. a week earlier that resulted in a sewage scent in the home, Hayley thought this may be the cause.
She checked outside and sure enough, a crew had returned.
She first called the Niagara Region and was told it wasn’t them doing the work.
She then called the Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake and said she was initially told by the person who answered that it wasn’t the town either.
The woman from the town then called back and told the Tersignis that someone was coming out to take a look.
“And then after I spoke to the to her, we went out and just walked around for like an hour with the baby, because we were like, ‘this can’t be good.’”
Later, two town representatives showed up and after checking with the construction crew, informed the Tersignis what the stench was.
It was the chemical residue that results from steam being released into the sewer line, as crews repair the old piping by lining the inside of a pipe with an epoxy-like film, essentially making a new pipe inside the old one.
The practice is called cured-in-place piping.
“He said, ‘It is totally harmless. You can breathe it in,’” said Hayley.
That answer did not fly with the couple, especially since the individual barely entered the home to inspect anything.
“There was no detectors of any sort,” said Tyler.
“So really it was, ‘You just came to pay me lip service at the door,’ and as soon as he closed it, I pulled my phone, I typed in ‘CIPP toxic lining.'”
The results of his search shocked him.
What popped up were stories from news outlets, including USA Today and The Conversation, telling a grim story about the effects of cured-in-place piping.
The stories included schools that decided to evacuate and workers that have died from exposure to the chemicals, said Tyler.
The Tersignis question why the town did not inform them prior to the work that it could be dangerous and to just give them a heads up so they could leave while it was being done.
In a written response to The Lake Report from Darren MacKenzie, NOTL’s director of operations, he said the town’s stance is that it only informs residents when they will be without services as a result of work being done.
“While the town does not routinely notify residents about main sewer repairs, staff do provide advance notice if individual sewer services will be directly affected,” he said.
The Tersignis say they received no notice of anything.
MacKenzie further stated that fumes from the cured-in-place pipe process are not expected to enter residences “under normal conditions.”
“Each plumbing system is equipped with P-traps, which use a water seal to prevent sewer odours and gases from entering the home,” said MacKenzie.
“However, if a P-trap has dried out due to infrequent use, such as in a basement drain or rarely used sink, this seal can be lost, allowing sewer odours or air to escape.”
He advised residents experiencing odours to “pour water into unused drains periodically to maintain the P-trap seal and to ventilate their homes if they notice odours.”
Tyler did give the P-trap reasoning some thought even before the response from MacKenzie but isn’t convinced they work fully when exposed to high-pressure steam.
His home’s piping is equipped with a P-trap.
“They work partially unless there is air pressure that comes through and it bubbles out, which is what we had,” he said.
He further questions what will be the effects in other parts of NOTL that will need the same work done because of aging infrastructure, especially those in the older parts of town.
“Some of these homes don’t even have P-traps, so they are going to get instant smell,” said Tyler.
“I imagine this (work) is going to get carried through all of Old Town, and a lot of old homes don’t have … these P-traps.”
A 2017 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States was very critical of the cured-in-place pipe practice.
The study found that “during steam-cured CIPP installations, many different types of materials were created and released into the air.”
These materials included particulates, droplets, partially cured resin, organic vapours, and water vapour.
“While historically referred to as ‘steam’ (and thus implying only water vapour), the emission instead is a ‘multi-phase mixture’ or emission cloud,” it went on to report.
Those clouds contained volatile organic compounds that included suspected carcinogens and hazardous air pollutants including styrene-based compounds.
According to Health Canada, these compounds can have adverse effects on a person’s lungs and liver, among other health issues.
To date, the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake has repaired 14 sewers across the entire community, said MacKenzie, who added that “all repair work in St. Davids is complete.”
“Similar work may be planned for other areas in the future based on ongoing condition assessments of the sewer system,” he added.
