Drainage and plumbing, Capitol Hill Burnaby
Drainage and Plumbing in Capitol Hill, Burnaby
Capitol Hill sits on some of the last combined sewer left in Burnaby. Under a lot of these streets one pipe carries the roof water, the perimeter drain and the toilet.
Put that under a 203 m hill with a lot of lower suites in it and you do not have an environmental abstraction. You have a basement problem. We camera the line before anybody quotes a number.
One pipe under the road, and the City is still splitting it
Burnaby says only 7% of its sewers still need separation, in the Burnaby Heights and Glenbrook neighbourhoods, and that one of its two remaining combined outfalls is Gilmore, discharging into Burrard Inlet. On the hill above that outfall the City’s asset map records 5,127 m of live combined main north of Hastings Street.
It runs on Macdonald, Gilmore, Madison, Carleton, Albert, Eton, Pandora, Ingleton, Dundas, Esmond, McGill, Boundary, Rosser, Howard, Alpha and Willingdon. Just under a third of it is vitrified clay. The oldest live segment sits on Gilmore Avenue and went in the ground in 1931. 95% of what is left was laid between 1950 and 1969.
The other half of the picture is the part the old version of this page got backwards. The City has not left this neighbourhood alone. 86.1% of the storm main with a recorded install date went in from 2000 onward, and 62.3% of the sanitary main did too. Burnaby has been pulling these streets off one pipe and onto two for twenty five years. It is just not finished.
What has not been replaced is the clay. 9,649 m of vitrified clay sanitary main is still live in this area, most of it laid between 1957 and 1969, with the longest runs on Pandora Street, Dundas Street, Highfield Drive, Cambridge Street, Bessborough Drive and Capitol Drive. A lateral from a 1958 house joins a 1958 clay main, and the joint is where the roots go.
The neighbourhood is older than most people assume, which is part of why the pipe under it is what it is. The name goes back to 1909, when the area was being marketed as one of Vancouver’s newest suburbs, and the hill was logged in 1902. There are 36 heritage buildings and sites in this area, including houses on Yale Street dating to 1911 and Cambridge Street to around 1912. Houses that old have had their plumbing done and redone. The main in the street has not always kept up.
The north face is a ditch system, not a storm sewer
Over the top of the hill the drainage stops looking like a city and starts looking like a rural road. The City’s ditch layer records 10,829 m of open drainage ditch in this area, and 2,352 m of it is on Penzance Drive alone, on a street only 1,972 m long.
The ground there is doing something extreme. On the Hythe Avenue line the north face falls from 157 m to 11 m across 678 m of horizontal distance, a mean grade of 21.5%. The steepest pair measured anywhere on the hill averages 47.2%. Above and below those lots sits the Capitol Hill Conservation Area, an undeveloped forested City park running roughly from Hythe Avenue east to Sea Avenue. That is where the leaf load comes from, and it is a named City asset rather than a vague claim about big trees.
Here is the part people miss. Burnaby’s flood prevention page puts that ditch on the owner. If you have an open ditch and culvert along your property, you have to keep the ditch and the culvert clear. Nobody is coming to do it for you.
The housing mix matters here too. In the census tract that covers Capitol Hill, 1,550 of 2,985 dwellings went up before 1981, and the single biggest band is 1961 to 1980 rather than the 1940s. Another 735 were built between 1981 and 2000, which is the Poly-B window. And 865 of the roughly 2,980 dwellings are recorded as an apartment or flat in a duplex, which in this part of BC usually means the lower unit of a house. So when a Capitol Hill basement takes water, it is often somebody’s home and somebody’s rent, not a storage room.
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Drainage problem in Capitol Hill?
Ryan picks up. Live dispatch, and you get a real arrival window on the call. We camera the line before anybody quotes a number, and there is no travel fee anywhere in Burnaby.
Capitol Hill drainage and plumbing FAQ
Possibly. There is still 5,127 m of live combined main north of Hastings, on Macdonald, Gilmore, Madison, Carleton, Albert, Eton, Pandora, Ingleton, Dundas, Esmond, McGill, Boundary, Rosser, Howard, Alpha and Willingdon. Whether your own connection is combined is a separate question, and the camera answers it.
That is the signature of a combined system. One pipe is taking your roof water, your perimeter drain and your sewage. When a storm fills it faster than it can move, the level rises and the lowest opening in your house is a floor drain. In dry weather the same pipe copes fine, which is why the problem looks intermittent.
Yes. The City runs a grant for eligible homeowners to offset the cost of upgrading a combined sewer connection running from the house to the new City lines. Burnaby’s own diagram calls a house still on one pipe a legacy system, and a house on a separated street with a combined private side a partially upgraded system. Worth finding out which one you are.
You do. Burnaby’s flood prevention page says that if you have an open ditch and culvert along your property, you must keep the ditch and culvert clear. There is 10,829 m of open ditch in this area and 2,352 m of it is on Penzance alone.
Almost certainly clay. 9,649 m of vitrified clay sanitary main is still live in this area, most of it laid between 1957 and 1969, with the longest runs on Pandora, Dundas, Highfield, Cambridge, Bessborough and Capitol Drive. Clay is jointed, and jointed is where roots get in.
If your place went up between 1981 and 2000, yes. 735 dwellings in the census tract covering Capitol Hill were built in that window, which is the Poly-B era. It is usually grey and stamped PB2110 or CSA-B 137.8. Go and read the pipe rather than guessing from the year.
On a combined connection it is the single most useful thing you can fit. The valve closes when flow tries to come back up the line, which is exactly what a surcharging main does in a storm. We scope the line first so the valve goes in the right place.
Those are City assets and there are 1,515 of them in this area. Burnaby asks residents to check that the curb gutter and catch basin next to their property are clear of leaves, garbage and other debris. The ones on private ground, driveways and parking pads are ours to clean.
In October 2024 the City reported significant flooding in many low lying areas of Burnaby and said its crews were responding to reports of flooded basements and clearing blockages in City sewers. On a hill this steep the water does not pool, it travels, and it finds the lowest opening it can.
Burrard Inlet. The City states that stormwater from north Burnaby ends up in the inlet, and the Gilmore combined outfall discharges there too. That is why keeping storm out of the sanitary side matters beyond your own basement.
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Water where it should not be?
Ryan picks up. Live dispatch, and you get a real arrival window on the call.