ALL WATER CRISES ARE PREVENTABLE

The Saturday June 25, 2016 Waterloo Region Record carried a story titled "Flint water crisis was preventable". Indeed it was just as the Elmira Water Crisis was as well as the Walkerton Water Crisis. All three were a direct result of apathy, corruption, profit motive, incompetence and in the case of Elmira and Flint, environmental injustice.

In Flint the water supply was switched from Detroit's water system to the Flint River. The water was cheaper from the Flint River however it wasn't treated to control corrosion inside the lead pipes in older homes in Flint, Michigan. A state task force has concluded that the Flint crisis was a "case of environmental injustice in a poor, majority black city".

Here in Elmira, back in the 1940s the proportion of both Old and new Order Mennonites was higher than it is now. In fact those living directly downstream, along the Canagagigue Creek are still primarily Old Order Mennonites. They do not complain, raise a fuss, initiate lawsuits or otherwise speak out about political or environmental injustices inflicted upon them.

These conditions were ideal for a corporation who located in Elmira looking for a population unlikely to object to their casual and entirely self-serving methods of hazardous waste disposal. In fact make that several corporations as the east side of Elmira was referred to at one time as a mini chemical valley what with Uniroyal, Varnicolor, Nutrite, Sulco and Borg all located up and down Union St..