THREE CHEMTURA NEWS STORIES THIS WEEK

Impressive! Three Chemtura stories in this week's Elmira Independent. "Revisiting Elmira's water crisis", "Chemtura pilot test moves forward", and "Chemtura to revisit GP1 and GP2". As of right now they aren't yet on-line so I can't link to them. The first one is in regards to Jane's Walk and was intended to remind locals that the water issue is still going on. That alone is worthy of commendation. Also the part of the story headlined "Creek Health" was excellent. I will pick a bone with Gail Martin's friendly exaggeration that Susan Bryant regularily attends CPAC meetings. Recently Susan and Pat McLean have taken turns alternately attending public CPAC meetings. For the first 1 1/2 - 2 years they avoided this CPAC like the plague. Secondly Bryant has suggested that subsequent managers to Dr. David Ash have been much more willing to work together on the cleanup. That's basically horse manure. It does a disservice to Dr. Ash while giving undeserved credit to the following managers who simply do what U.S. Chemtura tells them to do. 

The "Chemtura pilot test..." article refers to In-Situ Chemical Oxidation (ISCO) being tested in Elmira to assist in the off-site cleanup of the aquifers. Chemtura/CRA claim that their tests with a compound known as Fenton's Reagent have proven sucessful with both NDMA and Chlorobenzene. This is more than a little strange. Fenton's is well known to work well on chlorobenzene. Neither it nor any other ISCO chemicals have a sucessful history, that I am aware of, with NDMA. Once again Conestoga Rovers are saying trust us it will work. Well guess what? I don't trust you one inch due to your history of client driven drivel. Please provide the chemical equations showing the breakdown of NDMA by Fenton's Reagant as well as any scientific literature showing that NDMA can be broken down by ISCO. Let me rephrase that. Real scientific literature by an unbiased party other than yourselves. Yours truly is also quoted in Gail Martin's article expressing concern that the promised tripling of off-site pumping hasn't started yet. In fact to date all they've done is lower their target pumping rates a little.

The third article regarding revisiting GP1 and GP2 is interesting. We were taken by surprise and thus didn't have any questions ready. First off which persistent and toxic compound are they going back in to reduce? Is it DDT or Dioxins? Secondly where and what were the concentrations found? Thirdly, using extreme deception and visual manipulation they enhanced the alleged lack of toxic contaminants in GP2 and thus only excavated (1 foot ie. .3 metre) in GP1. They also most probably lied by claiming that their $2.5 million cleanup was voluntary. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment specialize in backroom, private, shady "deals" while publicly trumpeting public consultation. All the scientific evidence points to just one more coverup in a long history of pollution coverups on this site, all enabled by the Ontario M.O.E..