DOES THE NEW CONESTOGA ROVERS (GHD) GET PAID BY THE PAGE?

Conestoga Rovers (CRA) are the longtime client driven consultants to Uniroyal/Chemtura up here in Elmira, Ontario. Last summer they were bought out (taken over/merged?) by a company called GHD. I haven't yet made up my own acronym for them however I will entertain suggestions as long as they are irreverent, inappropriate and wickedly accurate. Perhaps along the lines of Great Human Destruction or Glorify Housing Development. You get the idea.

GHD's leap into the yawning chasm of environmental trickery begins with their East Side Surficial Soil and Groundwater Investigation. It is 634 pages of drama, gut wrenching suspense, and historical revisionism all combined with a who done it flare. Oh all right maybe it's not going to be a bestseller afterall.

Last Saturday my post here included a Table showing Dioxin & Furan concentrations in surficial soil samples running most of the length of Chemtura's eastern property line. Along with the concentrations were the calculated (by CRA) Human Health Criteria for the Chemtura property itself. Following is a similar Table for DDT for the same area several hundred metres in length along their eastern property border shared with the neighbour's farm.


Location***Human Risk Based**DDT (& metabolytes) Conc.
ug/g (ppm)**Criterion ug/g


SS01-15 *****.142 ********* .3078
SS02-15 ****** " ********** .695
SS03-15 ****** " ********* 1.977
SS04-15 ****** " ********** .4735
SS05-15 ****** " ********* 1.797
SS06-15 ****** " ********** .260


These DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane... O.K. so I'm showing off) results right on the property line with the neighbouring active farm are between almost double the highest criteria of three (Table 2 & 8 criteria are more stringent) to more than thirteen times higher than CRA's calculated Human Health Criteria. The Table 2 & Table 8 criteria are .078 ug/g which is approximately half of CRA's criteria. Table 2 is the criteria for agricultural lands as in the active for many, many decades farm next door. Table 8 refers to being within 30 metres of a waterway such as say the Canagagigue Creek or perhaps even the Stroh Drain. Therefore these DDT results by the more stringent criteria vary from three times higher to more than 25 times higher. While these soil samples may be new evidence, there have been contaminated groundwater samples along this property line for over three decades. No one has ever accused the Ontario Ministry of the Environment of being in a hurry when human health is at risk.