ORIENTATION/EDUCATION MEETING TODAY

I am told that today's CPAC Education meeting is a public one (9 am.) and that is why I'm comfortable posting about it ahead of time. While public, I'm not sure if it has been advertised as well as the usual monthly Thursday evening (6 pm.) public meetings. By the way the next regular CPAC meeting is Thursday November 1/12 as usual in the Woolwich Council Chambers. I believe that credit is due to Woolwich Township for being proactive and much more conscientious in ensuring that Woolwich business, even by its' committees is done in the public eye. There have been some notable and regretable situations recently, including the City of London, where municipal business has been done behind closed doors. There alas have been far too many prior years where municipal business via committee has been done privately, on private property. These private meetings while occasionally being "breakfast meetings" at a restaurant, similar to the London situation, have far too often been out of sight. They include, by invitation only, partial CPAC meetings at Conestoga Rovers in Waterloo and at Chemtura in Elmira.

Surprisingly, one would think, the greatest proponent and advocate for private meetings with Chemtura, CRA or even the M.O.E. has been a former long time Woolwich Councillor and Chair of CPAC. Perhaps it's been coincidence but I think not, that one of the main topics at these private meetings has been DNAPLS in, on, under and off the Chemtura site in Elmira. For years there was a DNAPL sub committee of CPAC which met at Conestoga Rovers offices on Colby Drive in Waterloo. While a formal voting member of CPAC (2000-2007) at that time, I was a member of this sub-committee. Considering I was by far the best informed and qualified CPAC member on the subject of DNAPLS at Chemtura, it would have been too obvious to exclude me. Also I had been involved with the "consolidation" of one of Uniroyal's consultants who had quoted a famous hydrogeologist, out of context, regarding a DNAPL issue. For this APT Environment gave me a modest award, autographed by their co-ordinating committee, dated September 1992.

At today's CPAC Orientation/Education meeting I have been asked to give a presentation on DNAPLS. As Yogi Berra once said "It's deja vue, all over again". My presentaion will give a generic overview as to what DNAPLS are and how they behave in the subsurface. It will vary substantially from the information that CPAC members and the public have been receiving from Chemtura/CRA over the last twenty-two years. I will also be exploring five documents related to the discovery of probable DNAPL behind Varnicolor Chemical and beside the Howard St. water tower in Elmira in 1998. I will be attempting to show not only the internal errors and inconsistencies within these five CRA documents but also the overall timing, and overall desperate attempts to deny the issue as well as the truth about it.