Dispatches from Montreal’s River of Shit

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

The VICE Montreal office is a block away from the Saint Lawrence river, which means that a five-minute walk from where this is being written, 8 billion liters of steaming raw sewage are flowing into one of Canada's most important waterways.

Thankfully, we can't smell it from here, but a brief stroll near one of the dumping sites earlier this week confirmed that this whole mess is one foul-smelling, shitty deal.

A bit of context: In late September, Radio-Canada revealed that the city of Montreal was planning to quietly unleash a torrent of wastewater into the Saint Lawrence in order to conduct major repairs on a large chunk of sewage network. Apparently, this kind of dump is done everywhere all the time, it's NBD, and the belugas won't even notice. But the news generated international attention and condemnation from environmental groups, prompting Environment Canada to step in and temporarily put the brakes on the whole operation (insert skid mark joke).

Eventually, after much pleading that this was "the only option" (another idea, involving 37,000 tanker trucks, was deemed unfeasible), municipal officials were given the go-ahead to flush, and the weeklong crapshoot launched on Wednesday at midnight. (Happy Remembrance Day!)

The ensuing #flushgate media chaos has been quite the shitshow. Journalists reporting on the issue have been using drones and helicopters to check out the damage, providing sprawling, scenic vistas of the feces-filled river.

Some reporters, like VICE's very own Simon Coutu, waded right into the stench to check out Montrealers' soggy Q-tips and used tampons. Others, like this intrepid soul, even used a fishing net to give cameras a real good look at one the many soiled condoms now bobbing out into the Atlantic Ocean because #News. (What a scoop!)

Hygienic products aside, the dump also contains heavy metals and even some arsenic. But the impact of these harmful substances, city reps say, will be negligible as they become diluted in the quick-flowing Saint Lawrence waters.

In an attempt to calm the masses, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre opted to get very hands-on. Dressed like a safety-conscious Minion, he was lowered down into the sewer tunnel in order to check out the repairs and proclaim the operation a success.

For the time being, Montrealers are being told tap water is safe to drink, a claim supported by Minister of Health Gaetan Barrette who qualified the dump as "quasi-homeopathic." For the next week, however, officials have issued a strict warning against flushing things like diapers (???) and medication down the toilet, lest you want to feed that junk directly to the whales.

Follow Brigitte Noël and Simon Coutu on Twitter.