M.O.E. FAILURES IN WATERLOO

Saturday's Waterloo Region Record carrys the following front page story titled "They don't know what's underground". It is in reference to the Waterloo Region Landfill, formerly known as the Erb St. Landfill. There have long been concerns and whispers of groundwater contamination leaving this old landfill and migrating towards the Erb St. Well System also along Erb St..

Interestingly I posted about the Erb St. Wells on Friday March 4 and how the Region refuse to explain in their Annual (Drinking Water ) Reports why they have certain wells shut down or even how long they've been shut down. It turns out that one of the original wells W6A has been shut down without explanation since 2013 while there is a new well up and pumping, sort of, maybe. The new well is W6B and I wonder if it's a new well geographically or simply beside W6A and in a deeper or different stratographic layer. Or perhaps it's the same well with a sleeve put in it the way the Region have done over in Cambridge.

It turns out that contaminated groundwater has been migrating since the 1990s and attempts to contain it hydraulically via pumping wells have not been totally sucessful. Of course in order to save a nickel only two wells were installed and began pumping several years ago when more were needed. This same failure occurred at the Uniroyal site in Elmira when two wells PW1 and PW3 were installed and up and running in January 1992. A third well (PW4) was added later on when they realized the most contaminated groundwater wasn't being contained. Of course our Ontario Ministry of the Environment were approving everything that Uniroyal did at the time.

A little clarification regarding Vinyl Chloride that is in the plume of contaminated groundwater. It is not a breakdown component of food wastes or other normal garbage in a landfill. This same excuse is also often used for the production of methane gas from landfills. Vinyl Chloride is produced from the breakdown of highly toxic Trichloroethylene (TCE) a formally very common industrial solvent and degreaser. Vinyl Chloride however is even far more toxic than TCE which is the major culprit that caused cancer and death in the Bishop St. community in Preston (Cambridge). The (ir)responsible industry was primarily Northstar Aerospace over there.