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Five of Canada’s most prominent waste water treatment experts say the city of Montreal is right to release several days’ worth of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River while necessary repairs are carried out on a crucial section of its sewage system.

The discharge of billions of litres of untreated sewage into the St. Lawrence River for seven days is unavoidable, legal, and necessary to avoid much worse impacts if the work is left undone, write the experts from the Université de Montréal’s engineering faculty, the École Polytechnique, in a position paper released Thursday.

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“Considering the size of these infrastructures it is quite simply impossible to install an additional interceptor sewer or build a retention facility in the short term that would be capable of holding the amounts of waste water produced during a prolonged work period (several days),” the experts conclude.

They also say the impacts on drinking water in communities downstream will be insignificant.