Discovery of bones under Queen Street sent city and rail contractor into panic
Plan for dealing with archeological surprises was never done, city discovered too late
By David Reevely, OTTAWA CITIZEN January 17, 2014 8:00 PM
OTTAWA — The discovery of human bones under Queen Street in an excavation related to the light-rail project sent senior city officials into a tizzy, partly because the city’s rail contractor hadn’t come up with a plan it was supposed to have devised for dealing with such surprises.
It was the first serious problem the city and its contractor, the Rideau Transit Group, encountered in a contract worth more than $2.1 billion. Hundreds of pages of internal emails released to the Citizen under access-to-information legislation show how poorly prepared the city government and RTG were for it and how badly they worked together when it happened.
The bones found Sept. 19 just east of Metcalfe Street were the first of numerous remains uncovered from an early Bytown cemetery for Rideau Canal workers and their families, people left behind when the graveyard was moved in the 19th century.
At first, though, it wasn’t even certain they were bones, let alone human ones. Everyone knew the basics — stop work, protect the site, call the police to send a pathologist — but the hours and days afterward saw top managers begging each other for updates and relying on news stories to find out what was happening with their own project.
By the evening of the day the bones were found, both the Citizen and the CBC had confirmed with the police that they were human remains. Neither RTG nor the city’s rail office knew anything about it.
“Can you provide a status of where this issue sits?” wrote the city’s Dennis Gratton, its manager of rail planning, to RTG’s manager of environmental and sustainability matters Ryan Legere, late on the 19th. If the bones are actually human, we’ll have to follow some strict rules, he said in a message copied to a number of senior people in both organizations.
Legere didn’t know anything about that: “I just spoke with our site representative and he had not heard anything,” he wrote.
Maybe we should call the police’s media-relations department? suggested RTG’s communications manager Kathryn Keyes. They did that the next day and found that yes, they were dealing with human bones.
And then they realized they didn’t know just exactly what that meant they had to do. For instance, everybody knew the site needed guarding but the city and RTG each thought the other was responsible for it.
This sort of thing went on for days — “Have you heard from Ryan today?” “We have had no response from RTG.” “Have you received a status report yet from RTG?” “Nope.” — culminating in a letter from the city’s rail boss, Gary Craig, pointing out that the whole thing would have gone better if they’d had a plan of some sort for dealing with unexpected finds, the way they were supposed to.
“[W]e believe the protocols for dealing with such an event would have been more clearly understood by both parties had the Archeology Risk Management Plan ... been prepared and submitted,” Craig wrote in a formal letter to RTG on Sept. 23, days after realizing the plan was overdue. “We insist that this document is prepared and submitted to the City for review without delay.”
That plan isn’t included in the documents but it is clear the city employees who had to deal with it by early October were not happy with it.
“The lack of detail and process of this submission is completely inappropriate given the experience we just went through,” wrote Gratton, the rail planning manager. “I suggest we send our collective comments to [Legere] and have him revise the document before we meet — if required. He has to learn to be more thorough.”
Engineering consultant Kim Eaton agreed: “I do think that a constructive discussion of ‘what went well and what did not’, may be a way to make it obvious to Ryan the types of changes that are needed (in addition to our comments of course).”
Throughout, the city’s people struggled with what to tell city council and the public, realizing frequently that they weren’t sure about the things they thought they knew. Is the examination forensic or archeological? When they say they want to dig up the road eight metres from the original find, is that a radius or a diameter? (A trench in one direction, it turned out.) Agonizing email exchanges show senior officials cutting memos and “key messages” documents down, removing things they suddenly realized weren’t sure were right.
Craig and his boss, deputy city manager Nancy Schepers, had to wade in when Mayor Jim Watson asked on Oct. 4 what was going on, sending underlings polishing and re-polishing four bullet points for hours.
After weeks of work, archeologists found evidence of 16 people left buried under Queen Street. They were re-buried and will stay there until at least the spring, when they’ll be moved to a new cemetery and the water-main project can finish. The city and RTG have four more years of construction to get through together.
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