Portable toilet returns: City relents after homeless Londoners used buckets and dug holes in Watson Street Park

Return of portable toilets to Watson Street Park for homeless population comes just weeks after they were removed. CTV London’s Daryl Newcombe reports.

Homeless Londoners living in Watson Street Park spent about seven weeks without a portable toilet, so some of the 40 people resorted to using buckets, plastic bags or even holes dug into the ground.

“It’s very dehumanizing,” says a woman named Moon, who describes her options when public washrooms were closed for the night or located too far away. “It depends on your urgency, I suppose. How badly you have to use the washroom. So they brought us buckets, bright orange Home Depot buckets and garbage bags.”

In recent weeks, removing the human waste from the park required hiring a private company to perform costly biohazard clean-ups.

“It was costing around $1,500 to do a clean-up, and it’s $400 for the porta-potty, so even just from a budgetary point of view it wasn’t sustainable,” explains Coun. Hadleigh McAlister.

Following an encampment fire in April, City Council supported McAlister’s motion to immediately switch to a mobile system of delivering basic needs (food, water, hygiene) to the park’s residents.

The decision resulted in the removal of the stationary service depot and two portable toilets.

On Wednesday, a portable toilet returned.

“When we closed down the (stationary) service depot, the bathrooms were kind of bundled with that (decision) at the time,” McAlister explains. “But we’ve now gone back and looked at it and determined we can actually have one to two porta-potties in Watson Park.”

The ward councillor says he worked with civic administration to ensure that returning a portable toilet would not contradict the previous council direction.

“Once we moved to the mobile model, nothing actually precluded reintroducing bathrooms. It was a separate service,” he says. “It’s kind of viewed as something that we could provide to any park and not necessarily something that was specific to encampments supports.”

The stationary service depot had been criticized for attracting larger numbers of people living in tents to cluster in Watson Street Park.

McAlister says the city has subsequently improved enforcement of encampment rules in Watson Street Park.

“What we’re seeing now is more proactive enforcement in terms of the rules, our by-law staff are going down there more frequently and ensuring that the rules are being adhered to,” he adds.

The provision of food, water and other basic needs to the encampment will continue to be delivered via the council-endorsed mobile model intended to reduce the clustering of tents.