ELMIRA INDEPENDENT WEIGHS IN ON LAST WEEK'S CPAC MEETING

The title of their front page story is "MOE, Chemtura pursue clues in DDT mystery". This of course is in reference to a significant spike in DDT at one monitoring station downstream in the Canagagigue Creek. Gail Martin's report on this CPAC meeting very much focuses on the DDT issue. It is particularily relevant at this time because Chemtura are planning on doing some scraping and capping of contaminated soil in their south-east corner (GP1 & 2).

Besides Mark Bauman getting some ink from Gail, yours truly was also quoted a couple of times . ""You can't say all the results are lower than 1996 results, when you only looked at two of the locations" said Marshall. "You can't cherry pick.""

Further in regards to time frames Gail wrote "Marshall also suggested that since the testing was done in a floodplain, test results only represent one moment in time, and could essentially mean fresh sources of DDT are being deposited on the floodplain, only to be washed away again.".

The final significant point I raised was that the clam and leeches monitoring stations were intentionally upstream of GP1 & 2 as they were looking for results of the major creekbank work done on the west side in 2005. Therefore these results could not accurately give any indication as to whether dioxins or DDT etc. were still entering the creek from Chemtura just a little further downstream. It does appear as if Chemtura have taken the criticism to heart and will be adding downstream biomonitoring stations.