WATER FLOWS DOWNHILL

Tough to argue with the above title but entitled, privileged, corporate employees have no problem doing so. Today's posting concerns yesterday's post and map. The highest elevation on the former Uniroyal Chemical site is 361.8 metres above sea level. The lowest is 344 metres above sea level and occurs along the banks of the creek in the southern portion of the site. The highest elevation is located on the north-east corner (i.e. top right). The daily volume of waste waters being pumped into the east side pits in the 1960s was 173,000 imperial gallons per day as per both Uniroyal and the MOE. On a five and half day work week that is just about one million gallons of contaminated waste water PER WEEK being dumped into the natural environment by Uniroyal and with the full knowledge of the Ontario Water Resources Commission (OWRC), forerunner of the Ontario Ministry of Environment (MOE).

CPAC and the public have been advised by Chemtura employees that Uniroyal ploughed furrows into the ground surface running north to south for the express purpose of channelling all the overflowing waste waters southwards versus some of them flowing westwards. Besides these man made furrows there is also a large swale on the immediate west (left) side of the former pits that runs southwards from the bottom of RPE-1 (the most northern RPE) past RPE-5 (the most southern RPE). It appears that the idea was both to discharge these toxic waste waters back into the Canagagigue Creek downstream of Uniroyal (out of sight out of mind?) and possibly they felt that the longer the liquid wastes were held on the soil versus the most direct route into the Creek, the more time they would have to break down, possibly.

Yesterday's map has both the Martin and Stroh properties clearly marked although they do not show up well on the image on my Blog. The large red arrows are on the Stroh property and indicate the location of a probable "sink" of dioxin/furans, DDT and more. This area unfortunately is submerged during major flood events as per the GRCA map presented here on Monday July 8/19. The smaller red arrows indicate a tiny pond on the Uniroyal/Lanxess property that also should be examined as a possible smaller "sink".

It is quite possible/likely that based on gravity flow some of the east side pits toxic contents flowed westwards after their diversion southwards and that they then discharged into the Canagagigue Creek on the Uniroyal property. Also there may be a small gap at the top (north) of the diagonal ridge of high ground (in red) that permitted entry of these gravity flowing waste waters into GP-1. In hindsight both GP-1 and GP-2 were somewhat red herrings put forth by both Chemtura and the MOE in 2013-2014 for remediation partly in order to pretend that large quantities of Uniroyal's wastes had not flowed eastwards onto the Stroh property and southwards onto the Martin property. That behaviour and public deception in my opinion is a form of corruption.