Hmm I love the word conflate. I think that our reporter friend conflated the disgusting issue of compensation fighting with the province over cancer from airborne volatile organic chemicals at the former Uniroyal Strange St. Kitchener tire plant with the equally disgusting exposures to DDT and dioxins/furans at the Elmira chemical plant. Also speaking of conflation it may appear that the Titles of yesterday's Blog posting and today's have been conflated.
Look at a map of the Uniroyal Chemical/Lanxess property in Elmira that shows where many (not all) of the buried wastes were/are buried. First of all the west side ponds and lagoons are all nudged up tight with the Canagagigue Creek which runs through the property from north to south. In other words the west side ponds and lagoons are moved as far to the east as the Creek allows. Why would either the company or the OWRC/MOE ever permit that clear intention for overflow directly into the Creek? Now look at the east side pits and ponds location. Again the east side is the larger of the two sides and there is to this day nothing but empty space over there. So why did they locate all their east side pits and ponds tight up to the eastern property line with their neighbour Earl Stroh? One suggestion that I have received is that when these toxic waste pits were being planned Uniroyal wanted them as far as possible from their workers and from the general public. They did not want issues with odour complaints, stinging eyes, breathing problems etc. Remember the west side pits both conveniently overflowed/drained into the Creek on their own and were washed away and as well at least annual flooding completely emptied them into the Canagagigue Creek.
So if Uniroyal Chemical were concerned with public perception of their business as either dirty, smelly or poisonous why were they unafraid of complaints from Earl Stroh, his wife and eventually four children? They had to have compensated him! He was NOT a Mennonite with a religious distaste for taking arguments and disagreements to court. Even our most biased, pro business, pro big shot courts here in Waterloo Region would have had a difficult time not telling Uniroyal that they had literally hundreds of metres of open space from Earl Stroh's property line westwards towards the Creek. Especially so when you realize that Mr. Stroh was planting both corn and soybeans for animal and likely human feed right up to his property line.
Then there are the local legends. I distinctly recall being told in the early to mid nineties at UPAC (Uniroyal Public Advisory Committee) meetings that Uniroyal used to deliver an envelope full of money to the Stroh household each Christmas. Allegedly this was due to "crop damage" along their shared property line. Afterall Uniroyal was pumping millions of gallons of waste water from the west side over to the east side pits and ponds through two pipelines. Much of these wastewaters included herbicides which would kill crops and vegetation. I personally recall seeing crop damage at the northern end of the Stroh field beside Uniroyal well into the 1990s two decades after the pumping had stopped. Other rumours circulated decades earlier including that some knowledgeable parents warned their children to stay well away from the Stroh swamp as it was full of chemicals.
Uniroyal/Lanxess like to suggest that their environmental sins were "historical" and or were the industry standard at the time. Well if murder and mayhem were the industry norm would they have participated in that as well?
Finally I will also point out that the Stroh family likely paid a high health price for any money that they received. Yes one of the four children has done extraordinarily well financially. Is it possible that that financial estate started via permitting an alternate route for Uniroyal chemical liquid wastes to discharge further eastwards and downstream into the Canagagigue Creek beyond the Ministry of Environment's normal monitoring at the time?
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