TREATING THE PUBLIC WITH DISRESPECT

On Saturday November 22, 2014 the Waterloo Region Record carried the following story "No public risk in buried, leaking drums". The title is a misnomer, an exaggeration and a lie. I suspect that the writer of said article honestly doesn't know that both the title of his article and a significant quantity of the "opinion" expressed are nonsense. It is even conceivable that the technical expert being interviewed, gilded the lily, simply as a matter of course. Certainly local politicians are known to be very concerned about not unduly alarming the public. Hence their attitude is that if nobody is going to immediately drop dead in the street then of course any and all paid experts ever wanting further work from a city for example, had damn well better be reassuring that all is well. Even when it isn't.

I've downloaded most of the report dated November 2014 regarding the Paisley Clythe Watermain. It is not a reassuring document to anyone familiar with contaminated sites. As indicated fifteen chemicals exceed the soil concentration standards set out by the Ministry of Environment. That is not good. Further comments indicate that groundwater samples were not taken. That is weird. Allegedly groundwater was not present. Really? The site is within fifty yards of the Speed River and apparently very close to Howitt Creek and they couldn't find groundwater? Nonsense. Twelve of the chemical exceedances involve Polyaromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH). There are some very toxic compounds here such as Acenaphthylene, Benzo(a)pyrene and Dibenzo(a,h)anthracene. Furthermore the solvents ethylbenzene and xylene are quite capable of solubolizing and enhancing the mobility of these PAHs.

Based upon the high concentrations of these compounds in the soil, namely measured in parts per million when often contaminated sites are measured in much smaller parts per billion or trillion; this is serious contamination. Serious contamination that not only will have moved in groundwater but most likely has also been mobilized over the decades by floodwaters from the nearby creek and river. The public are being given the sanitized version here. At the very least the tiltle and article should have indicated some public risk, perhaps not exactly quantifiable. No public risk is simply beyond wishful thinking.