FAMOUS HYDROGEOLOGIST JOHN CHERRY WAS INVOLVED WITH CEAC IN 1982 IN ELMIRA

 

Why did I not know that decades ago? Likely it was because of the circumstances of APTE's beginnings in 1989 as Esther Thur and Susan Rupert left CEAC (Citizens Environmental Advisory Committee) under the chairmanship of Dr. Murray Haight. Sandra Bray was also one of the three founders of APTE and may well have been also on CEAC. I'm not sure. Regardless I joined APTE in the spring of 1990 and there was very little discussion of CEAC, either its' strengths or weaknesses.  John Cherry indeed would have been a huge strength and I did wonder for years why he was not involved with APTE or the whole situation until I met him in January 2007 at the University of Waterloo. 

During the 1980s apparently the Globe and Mail were doing a number of environmental stories dealing with Agent Orange lawsuits, Uniroyal and Elmira. Jock Ferguson of the Globe and Mail did do a story about Varnicolor's infamous Lot 91 at the eastern end of Oriole Parkway.  This I have known about for decades . The Globe and Mail quoted John Cherry in relation to his work with CEAC as follows. Cherry stated "I'm aghast at what they (the company and the ministry) know and don't know about the site." The Globe and Mail reported that Cherry was regarded by other earth scientists as one of North America's leading chemical contamination experts, and he said that the presence of a wide range of organic chemical wastes, including an unknown amount of tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, make the Uniroyal dump the most difficult site in the country to control and cleanup. Furthermore Cherry stated "This is going to be the Canadian test case...This is not an everyday problem that can be coped with by ministry employees who are new in this world of organic spills and all the complexities that go with it."

World famous Dr. John Cherry knew how awful the ground and groundwater was in and around Uniroyal Chemical in the early 1980s. By 1985 excavations were underway in order to expand the 1965 Elmira Sewage Treatment Plant . They unearthed an ungodly mess of buried chemical drums put there by Uniroyal Chemical. By 1989 the Ontario Ministry of Environment coincidentally ?? discovered ??  NDMA in the south Wellfield. This is the same NDMA that had been found on the Uniroyal property and in the air in 1979.  Being extremely toxic, albeit less so than dioxins, it was a very convenient distraction from the dioxins in Agent Orange that were the subject of numerous American lawsuits at the time.