Let me be clear. I am referring to public commitments. Maybe privately Lanxess have given some promise to either Woolwich Township or the Ontario Ministry of Environment but one who knows and two of what credibility would such promises be? Keep in mind Uniroyal Chemical and past corporate successors have even made public promises and commitments only to renege on them. The November 2012 promise to triple the amount of off-site pumping in order to achieve drinking water standards is a major example of that. As they never even doubled much less tripled the pumping volumes we really will never know if that is because they were saving pumping and treating costs or whether they themselves suspected that tripling the pumping rates still might not do the job. Hard to say.
So the Creek more than fifty years after the stopping of daily discharges of liquid toxic wastes into pits, ponds and lagoons along the Creek still has large amounts of DDT and dioxins above provincial and federal criteria in its' creekbank soils and below water surface sediments. I expect that there are dozens of other contaminants also still present but as long as they are not routinely tested for they can be easily denied by Lanxess and the MECP.
We were promised the Cadillac cleanup back in the early 1990s and all we've received to date is the broken down Volkswagon Beetle version. None of the local citizens who volunteered to sit on the Uniroyal Public Advisory Committee (UPAC) would have believed how little has been accomplished more than thirty years later. Susan Rupert the first head of APTE advised against them joining UPAC as she felt that the citizens would be outnumbered, out maneuvered and overwhelmed.. Sylvia Berg and Susan Bryant of APTE had other plans and quickly joined UPAC as soon as Susan Rupert moved to Waterloo. The results are a triumph for the polluter and fellow travellors.
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