GETTING SMART ABOUT ROAD SALT

The above title is also the title of an article in this week's Elmira Independent, written by Janet Baine. Although this story is filled with interesting facts there are a couple that leaped out at me. Firstly "In 1999, the Regional Municipality of Waterloo noticed increasing levels of sodium and chloride in almost all their water supply wells." "...the region concluded that the main source was from winter road de-icing...". The reason this is so incredible is because the majority of the Region's wells are deep below surface often 100 feet below. In Cambridge many wells are even below the overburden into the bedrock. Hence salt (sodium chloride) deposited at surface, on roads was making it's way through the sand, silt and clay down to most of the deep drinking wells in Waterloo Region. This clarifys for me just how likely and probable that all the liquid solvents and fuels spilled and dumped over the last half century by industry have also entered all our drinking water aquifers and wells. I find it interesting that the Region have no problem advising citizens that innocuous salt penetrates the overburden soils easily yet they routinely deny that industrial liquid pollution can do so or is even likely to do so. This double standard needs to stop.