We have a very serious environmental/ political situation ongoing in Cambridge. The relevance to Woolwich/ Elmira is that it involves the Region of Waterloo , who let me state at the outset can and have done good work environmentally. Unfortunately they have what I refer to as a Fortress Mentality and are extremely defensive , if not antagonistic when confronted on water issues.

The Cambridge East Water Supply Project June 1994 report is the concern. The Region of Waterloo have responded three times (in the Cambridge Advocate ) to my concerns about 105 industrial chemicals in well P11. Their first response essentially said , nope you're wrong, all the chemicals have, < (less than detection limit) sign in front of the numeric values. Their second response included their 29 page attachment of Working Paper No. 2 including text and 3 Tables. This version indeed did show lots and lots of < signs in front of the numeric values. This however merely proved that we had at least two different versions of the same report. Finally the Region's third response says that their 29 page attachment was the March 1994 revision to the original report, which they claim had typographical and transposition errors in it.

The problem with the Region's third response is that my original 1994 document is clearly marked as the March 1994 revised copy and it's the one with 105 chemical detections in it. So at this point in time (10 am. Tues. May 18/10) the Region have given three inadequate responses to a serious issue. First off, the sheer number of chemicals tested for, is far more than you will ever find in the Region's provincially mandated Annual Drinking Water Reports. Secondly the detection limits in this 1994 report are 1000 times LOWER. They are testing at the parts per trillion level rather than the parts per billion level. Therefore the possibly scary scenario could be that all our drinking water has dozens of toxic chemicals, albeit at low concentrations, present. Region of Waterloo: STEP UP and TELL US THE TRUTH !