Waterworks in a changing climate: the R.C. Harris filtration plant, Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research paper reviews the literature in an area of engineering heritage requiring further examination, the impact of climate change on historic urban water supply systems. Many opportunities exist to enhance the sustainability of historic waterworks still in operation in order to help mediate climate change effects. This must include mitigating climate change impacts on sources of potable water, such as by implementing strategies for water-efficient landscape design, while considering possible uses of the visible elements of the system, such as water treatment plants, to draw attention to this engineering heritage’s continued and critical role. The R.C. Harris filtration plant is the main water treatment plant for the Greater Toronto Area in Canada, drawing water from Lake Ontario. This iconic ‘Palace of Purification’ has been in continuous use since 1941 and was declared a National Historic Civil Engineering Site in 1992. In 2013, it was still producing nearly 40% of Toronto’s tap water. Examination of this plant serves to illustrate the interconnection of a system’s historic design and its water source’s watershed as heritage, to discuss expected impacts of climate change and explain not only some of the possibilities for mitigation, but also eventual necessary and challenging adaptations to changing treatment needs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".