 Gooderham and Worts used the marsh to dispose of waste from pigs and cattle, as well as wheat swill from their distilling operations.The once natural area was now an open sewage dump and became a health hazard by the 1890s (threat of a cholera outbreak) forced the city to act.The Don River's mouth was filled in and the river was re-routed into the Keating Channel (named for the City engineer Edward Henry Keating (1844–1912), who devised the idea to re-route the Don) into the inner harbour and a large shipping channel (the inner basin) was created to allow access into the center of industry in the 1910s.