Friday, January 29, 2016

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION STILL A JOKE IN ONTARIO



There was an article in the Waterloo Region Record on January 11/16 titled "City to sell contaminated factory site". The site is the former Electrohome plant at 152 Shanley St. in Kitchener and it has sat abandoned and empty literally for decades. This is on the corner of Shanley and Duke St.. Electrohome built hardwood television cabinets at that location. It would appear from the contaminants listed in the groundwater and soil that they are the result of improper/illegal disposal of paints, solvents, varnishes and lacquers. Like many other manufacturers using those products including the formerly contaminated Deilcraft site near Manitou Drive; in ground disposal was common.

The shame in all of this is that both the city of Kitchener and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment have known about this contaminated site for so very long and done essentially nothing. "The soil and groundwater on the property have "elevated concentrations of metals, petroleum hydrocarbons, volatile organic compounds and trichloroethylene (TCE)," an industrial degreaser... .". Allegedly earlier studies of the site suggested that the chemicals are confined to the upper aquifer by a layer of clay. Please we've heard about those so called impermeable, inpenetrable clay layers up here in Elmira and they are mostly wishful thinking and an excuse to do nothing. Aquifers flow horizantally as well as vertically. Allegedly the Ministry of Environment carried out indoor air sampling in 2008 and 2009. That would have been mostly looking for TCE via vapour intrusion as occurred so dramatically and dangerously in the Bishop St. community in Cambridge.

The Cambridge disaster courtesy of Northstar Aerospace should have been a wakeup call for everybody. Instead the Ontario M.O.E. are content to sit and wait for the City of Kitchener to attempt to sell this land and then get it cleaned up. The neighbours are in danger of vapour intrusion and this site should have been remediated twenty-five years ago.

1 comment:

  1. I am sorry that I've only come across this post now. But I want to say that I worked closely with the M.O.E.staffer who supervised the extensive testing done on the property, to the extent that I considered him a friend. He informally considered that the TCE contamination was an easy clean-up, esp. since we have the experts at U. of W. here who are coming up with new methods to ameliorate TCE issues by injection rather than extraction. However, in spite of his excellent work and community relations, he was turfed to Timmins and effectively disappeared. No big conspiracy theories here - but I know of one local developer who felt he was actively discouraged by city staff from proceeding with ideas for the property.

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