That was a large part of my takeaway from yesterday's meeting. We shall see how things unfold down the line as their efforts progress. I am both hopeful and confident. Meanwhile lets have another story told. We (Richard, myself and Ted) had advised the Ministry of Environment that there was both a buried tanker and a buried septic tank hooked up to the floor drain in Varnicolo's orange building facing Union St. in Elmira. There were valves inside the building to direct liquids that flowed into the drain to the public sewers (storm or sanitary) or out the back of the building to the buried road tanker or septic tank. After the road tanker was excavated one could see the below ground pipes exiting the building and running along the back wall of the orange building (i.e. administration/offices etc.).
One of these pipes went directly into the fully buried road tanker and the other appeared to run towards the septic tank on the north side of the tanker which was parallel to the back side (i.e. west side) of the orange building. It appeared that is in the wonderful, coloured photographs that Gord Robinson and Con Papenhuzen showed Richard and I at EDSS, the high school in Elmira where Richard taught. Con and Gord were M.O.E. inspectors of somewhat dubious quality. This is explained by the fact that they showed us these photographs in order to confirm that we were correct in telling them about their existence. By this point both Varnicolor and the M.O.E. certainly knew that I had an inside person feeding me information after I was fired for whistleblowing.
Now the most priceless picture showed one of the two M.O.E. inspectors standing at the north end of the tanker as it was being pulled out of the ground. I think it was Con with Gord taking the picture. It was fabulous because not only did we get a good look at the still intact tanker but (be still my heart) I could clearly see rebar (reinforcing rod) poking out of the ground beneath Con's (?) feet. In addition I could just slightly less clearly see the concrete edge of likely the lid of the concrete septic tank. Now either Con and Gord were miles beyond stupid and had no idea what they were looking at or they figured that Rich and I being city boys had no idea what a septic tank looked like. Wrong. I spent many glorious summers at our cottage near Sauble Beach and knew full well what septic tanks looked like and how they operated.
So here were two M.O.E. inspectors with one of them literally standing on top of the buried septic tank tellung us that yes we were right about the buried tanker but no we were wrong in that they had not found any septic tank. Well that blew up in their faces and a few weeks later the septic tank was also excavated by the M.O.E. Both these containers were part of an elaborate and massive illegal dumping system that never did actually go to court or make a big splash in the media as they should have. Regardless the owner was convicted of pollution charges and spent some time in jail (Burtch - Brantford).
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