The City dumps raw sewage into the river.

In 2024, a pipe failure at the Fort Garry Bridge dumped 230 million litres of raw sewage into the Red River. One of the largest spills in the city's history.

That wasn't a one-off. In 2002, the North End Water Pollution Control Centre failure dumped 427 million litres — still the largest on record. The system overflows regularly, releasing a combined 10 billion litres of raw sewage per year into the rivers and lakes of the Winnipeg region.

These aren't accidental leaks. They're built into how the system operates. Combined sewers — carrying both stormwater and sewage in the same pipe — overflow during heavy rain or snowmelt, discharging untreated wastewater directly into the Red and Assiniboine.

Raw sewage carries pathogens, phosphorus, nitrogen, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics. When it enters the river, it feeds the same algal blooms choking Lake Winnipeg. It makes the water unsafe for recreation. It threatens fish and the communities downstream that depend on the fishery.

E. coli counts after a combined sewer overflow can exceed recreational water quality guidelines by orders of magnitude. That means no swimming, no fishing, no safe contact with the water — sometimes for days.

And it all flows into a lake that is already critically overloaded with nutrients.

We can't fix Winnipeg's sewage infrastructure. That's a municipal and provincial responsibility that has been deferred for decades.

What we can do is pull the debris out of the river that compounds the damage — the cars, tires, and garbage that release additional contaminants into water already burdened with sewage. And we can push for accountability on the spills that keep happening.

Learn about our debris removal work →