"MID-COURSE CORRECTION FOR ELMIRA'S SET OF TOXICS REMEDIATION PROGRAMS"

Henry Regier, CM PhD, Elmira, ON

For the past seventy years, hazardous chemical contaminants have been seeping into the soils and aquifers underlying Elmira and have been spreading deeper down and away from the many original sites of contamination. Numerous attempts to prevent, intercept and reverse the continuing release, seepage and spread of toxics have registered some success, but not enough to achieve the goal of returning these waters to drinking quality 20 years hence. Further contamination is still occurring--sometimes episodically due to preventable accidents, always gradually from well-known buried hotspots--and current programs will not achieve the drinking-water goal in 20 years, I infer.

More than any other organization in Elmira, its weekly papers have "kept the faith" in efforts to correct Elmira's problems with hazardous chemicals. The churches have been silent, though many of their members have suffered the harm of chemical contaminants. No local medical professional has taken more than a passing interest in the kind of harm caused by such contaminants, so far as I know. Politicians have seldom played a direct role; when a politician has intervened directly it may often have been to defuse public relations problems related to particular pollution events. About half of the members of public advisory committees have joined the relevant Company and the Ministry in shooting messengers whistle-blowing about serious pollution issues.

In 1984 the US government collected US$180 million from chemical manufacturers for the injuries caused to its soldiers in the American War on Vietnam by dioxins contained in the defoliant Agent Orange. Further lawsuits are still underway. Some of that Agent Orange was manufactured here in Elmira.

In 1987 the International Joint Commission, in a co-ordinative role, initiated a large program in the Great Lakes Basin to correct or remediate some 42 contaminated hotspots along the shores of the lakes and up the tributaries. At that time, none of the hotspots in our Grand River valley was included in that list of "Areas of Concern". I have long sought for the reasoms why hotspots in Elmira, Guelph, Cambridge, etc., were kept off that 1987 list and have never found anyone who would give me a reason.

No coherent comprehensive strategy to correct historic and on-going contamination of Elmira's subsurface ground and water has ever been made public. The current mix of programs is a non-rational jumble of ad hoc responses to public concern; no public servant or service has ever been required to provide a public rationale for the mix or an accounting of the successes and failures of any particular initiative, so far as I know.

Much has been learned scientifically about the hazardous contaminants that are part of Elmira's problem. As more has been learned about their effects on living creatures, including humans, scientists have found additional reasons for concern. I have no doubt that many residents of Elmira, and downstream in the Grand River Valley, have suffered and are now suffering from effects of this toxicity. With some of these hazardous chemicals, the greatest harm is done at the foetal and infant stage; this harm may cause lifelong impairment of health, if not premature death.

At times when some corrective action was planned and undertaken in response to public concern, numerous kinds of hazardous contaminants have simply been ignored. With those contaminants that have been addressed selectively, only some of their hazardous effects were taken into account during the design and implementation of partial corrective measures.

In my own professional life since 1960 I developed general competence in the science and statistics of risk assessment. During the ten years in which I was a member of one of Elmira's public advisory committees, it became obvious to me that some of the scientific and technical work conducted ostensibly in aid of the correction of Elmira's contamination was of shoddy quality.

For example, years ago one Company and the Ministry agreed that a "site-specific risk assessment" should be undertaken to assess whether a particular case of public concern warranted any corrective action. I then undertook an arduous investigation of what the Company's and Ministry's scientific-technical advisers understood about the science and statistics of such risk assessment. I failed to find a single person associated directly with the company or the ministry who had competence beyond following a long protocol that focused primarily on the process rather than the substance of the risk assessment. Even so, I learned that a crucial early step--objective peer review of the frame of reference--had been over-looked or ignored.

Years ago some undergraduate and graduate engineering students enrolled in my courses at the University of Toronto. Had such students submitted reports of technical projects like those sometimes provided for Elmira's problems, they would have received failing marks. Under public duress, the "technical experts" serving Elmira's polluting companies and Ontario's pollution-fighting ministry did provide professionally-responsible information, sometimes. Years ago I asked for a copy of the professional code of practice from an executive of one Company's technical advisory firm and was told that the firm provided the kind of services for which they were paid.

Admittedly, the reality relevant to hazardous contaminants is complex beyond full comprehension by even the most competent expert. Purposefully incomplete reporting of available information, or reporting of results of biased analyses would complicate the underlying complexity further. But ways can be found of summarizing and presenting information that provide sufficient insight to make progress in correcting the contamination process.

The relevant Company and Ministry responsible for correcting the contamination of the subsurface grounds and waters have long ignored a request for a three-dimensional map of all the inter-connected aquifers (watery-gravely layers) and aquitards (dense-clayey layers) underlying Elmira. Such a three-dimensional map, together with reporting of contamination concentrations in different aquifers as "plume diagrams", would provide useful insight for public advisory committee members. Do Company and Ministry employees fear the "public empowerment" that would come with such information?

Some of Elmira's chemical companies are committed to a voluntary program called "Responsible Care" conducted by an association of chemical industries. In effect, a member Company negotiates the details of a practical code of conduct with representatives of the Municipality and agrees to be held accountable every few years according to an established protocol. In return for good behaviour, the Company may expect that the Municipality will share some of the risk associated with inevitable "accidents". So any court action following such an "accident" might lead to less expensive compensation or penalty costs by a Company for a Municipality or its residents. Do the Municipal representatives on "Responsible Care" teams realize that their participation may limit the compensation by the Company for harm done? Does the Municipality stand behind any consensus shared by its representatives on a particular "Responsible Care" team? Could such representatives be sued, following an accident, for collusion concerning bad practices by a Company?

During the ten years I served on a public advisory team in Elmira, there were many, many occasions when some personnel serving the Company and the Ministry took exception to what was said and argued by members of the public advisory team. They took exception to any comments that were "undiplomatic" for example. Regularly a senior representative of the Ministry would preface any comments in response to a direct question with a caveat that he himself did not possess expert status with respect to the question asked, and then wander off sonorously in a time-consuming monologue that drifted away from the issue. These and related tactics to marginalize committed public advisors were often sucessful in splitting an advisory committee. Companies (and political parties) buy professional services with expertise in such obfuscation and refocusing tactics.

Here in Elmira, the new Municipal Council has been working toward a new CPAC, and perhaps even a Municipality-wide re-focussing of efforts directed to correct pollution with hazardous chemicals. If that CPAC continues with the kind of agenda and practices of the old CPAC, then Elmira's problems with hazardous contaminants will likely get worse. It's time for a mid-course correction, with different planning and decision-making. No resident of Elmira has expertise to lead with such a mid-course correction, I infer. Professor Gail Krantzberg of McMaster University has appropriate expertise and has expressed willingness to provide counsel, if asked.