CPAC IS BACK AFTER A TWO MONTH HIATUS

One week today at 6 pm. in the Woolwich Council Chambers, CPAC (Chemtura Public Advisory Committee) will reconvene. It is my fervent hope and prayer that the momentum described here on July 29th, after the last CPAC meeting, will continue. Based upon a very bad Council decision in early May to remove me from CPAC, I had briefly lost faith in the Mayor and the CPAC process. I never lost faith in a few CPAC members I had gotten to know from numerous in person meetings. Hindsight being twenty-twenty I am very pleased to be able to say that my faith has risen dramatically in regards to a couple of CPAC members whom I had thrown stones at, back in early May. I assumed that their close relationship with the Mayor made them complicit in his very bad decision. Since that time they have attended, participated in and contributed positively to getting CPAC back on track. Their expertise and professionalism was never in doubt, merely in my wee mind, their motivation. If they continue to do such good work, there will be no help for it, I will be forced to apologize. Nothing would make me happier than truly believing that my doubts about them last May were groundless and that apologies are necessary.

The August Chemtura Canada Progress Report is out. I will shortly be going into detail on their failing off-site pumping but today I will focus on their "discovery" of 125 buried drums. These were "found" in the south-west corner in the old Municipal landfill, known as M2. Chemtura's consultants like to use terminology such as "remnants, drum carcasses" etc. but the reality is that waste chemicals were dumped, buried and ignored literally for decades. These drums were described in the July 2003 Request for Action co-authored by yours truly. I found reference to them in the 1991 Environmental Audit as well as in literature from the 1980's. They were removed from a depth of only 1 to 2 metres, years after their liquid contents leaked into the ground and groundwater. Shame on both Chemtura and the Ontario M.O.E. for stalling and delaying this simple removal task for so long.