WHAT A COUNTRY: WE CAN"T EVEN GUARANTEE ALL OUR CITIZENS CLEAN DRINKING WATER

 

Perhaps the title above should have had the word "honestly" included immediately before "Guarantee". Afterall our governments have always been long on promises and short on followup. Or as wise people have said "Talk is cheap but delivering is expensive". 

Do you think that we have clean drinking water here in Waterloo Region? Give your head a shake. Those dumbasses didn't even begin to test and publish their results for NDMA until twenty years or more AFTER  NDMA shut down the wellfields in Elmira. Glyphosate (Roundup) has a Method Detection Limit (MDL) of 25 parts per billion (ppb). The vast majority of other chemicals have MDLs below 1 ppb. None of the chemicals in our water are likely to be at zero. They are simply/hopefully below the health criteria listed on the Ontario Drinking Water Standards (ODWS). That is below their individual health standards. There is no attempt to actually measure the cumulative effect of dozens or more low level industrial chemicals and solvents simultaneously in our water supply. Again keep clearly in mind that there are thousands of different chemicals in our air, soils, ground and surface water. A miniscule number of them are picked for sampling and the results published in the Region's Annual (Water) Report each spring. These reports with hard work can be found on the Region's website.

Meanwhile the very same Region plus Woolwich Township and the Ontario Ministry of Environment knowingly permit second and third hand cleanups and less in and around the former Uniroyal Chemical site in Elmira. They know how much toxins continue to flow non stop down the Canagagigue Creek to Kitchener-Waterloo every day and how through the IUS (Integrated Urban System)  they are at best partially (but expensively) treated, sampled and distributed throughout the Region of Waterloo. A few years hence from now water managers and others will be asking themselves how on earth they weren't testing for chemical A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L etc. 

Of course it will require a crisis such as those in Cambridge, Elmira and Walkerton. Oh and of course the Region's cryptosporidium crisis in the early 1990s in which seniors died from getting infected by the microscopic parasite that the Region of waterloo had not been testing or treating for beforehand.