UNIROYAL'S AMATEUR HYDRAULIC CONTAINMENT

Between 2000 and 2004 UPAC/CPAC were given a steady diet of bull.... from Uniroyal/Crompton and their consultants. The scam was called "Optimization". The poorly explained idea seemed to be that two years after they began off-site pumping they allegedly didn't like the location of those wells. Hence they wanted to move wells both on and off site to areas of greater contaminant concentrations. This was somewhat explained in the November 1, 2003 Woolwich Observer written by Casey Lessard. The theory was that they could speed up cleanup this way. The hypocrisy of course was that UPAC had been yelling at them for years to increase the pumping at on-site well PW4 right in the heart of the most highly contaminated south-west area. Off-site well W4 near the Elmira water tower was supposedly drawing chlorobenzene from W5A/B which was just south of the Elmira Sewage Treatment Plant. This we were advised in the December 20, 2003 Woolwich Observer.

Formaldehyde concentrations had long been an issue in the Canagagigue Creek. Basically Uniroyal/Crompton claimed that they were a mystery. Most likely they were not but with Uniroyal/Crompton we often did not know when they were telling the truth or otherwise.

The February 24, 2004 K-W Record advised us that Crompton air emissions were down to a mere 100,200 kilograms per year. This was reduced 71% between 1991 and 2002. Ron Ormson of CPAC told Crompton "...this is what your peers have expected from you all along.". These emissions consisted of toluene, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide among others. Elmira residents had been breathing this crap literally for decades. Of course no scientific study ever took into consideration that both drinking water standards and air standards were totally independent of each other and did not presume multiple routes of exposure simultaneously.

In the March 27, 2004 Observer Susan Bryant and Shannon Purves-Smith both lit into Crompton big time over the "Phantom Mound". Crompton had known positively since 2002 that it did not really exist and had not verbally advised CPAC. The company had suspected it was a sham since 1998 and again had not advised us. This "mound" was a small area of high groundwater elevation off the south-west corner of Uniroyal/Crompton. The company had relied on it to at least on paper pretend that groundwater from the site was not discharging off-site to the south-west. It was yours truly who had found the small reference to it in an earlier monthly Progress Report.

We learned in March 2004 that Crompton had been hit with a $50 million fine for price fixing of rubber additives. Both the Record and Observer carried these stories.

Then we had the really big bang in mid June 2004. A solvent known as Nonene was floating on top of a waste water tank in Crompton's south-west area. It caught fire and exploded. The headline in the Woolwich observer was "Towering Inferno". More to come!