ADDITIONAL INFORMATION REGARDING THE GEOTECHNICAL INVESTIGATION FOR THE SPLASH PAD IN BOLENDER PARK

This report is dated September 2016 and was produced by CMT Engineering Inc. from St. Clements, Ontario. Last summer here in the Advocate I had pointed that all six Boreholes had indicated "organics" in the Fill that is located just beneath the topsoil and above the native sands, gravels and clays. "Organics" usually refers to plants, vegetables and other foodstuffs. This would include compostable food items that people throw into their backyard composters. Obviously over time these foodstuffs break down and eventually become soil. Afterall this is the basic purpose of backyard composters.

Hence Fill containing well decomposed municipal garbage including paper and foodstuffs probably isn't a problem. Of course municipal wastes with plastics or other non-decomposable items aren't so great. The other problem is that the actual decomposition of foodstuffs produces methane gas and this is a significant problem in the Bolender Park landfill as it is explosive.

I have just reread the Geotechnical Investigation done by CMT Engineering Inc. Additional information is as follows. Soils intermixed with organics are not good load bearing soils. Thus on page 5 of the report they suggest that soils with Gravels in them "Should be inspected during construction to be free of organics and topsoil". All six Borehole Logs (Appendix A) also refer to decomposed plant fibres as being mixed in with the Fill. This Fill which essentially is non-native soil brought in literally to build up or elevate low lying areas also had pieces of asphalt in it at Borehole 4a. This indicates that municipal garbage has been dumped in Bolender Park in it's low lying areas to build it up out of the floodplain of the Canagagigue Creek.

I find it very unlikely that the Township paid for an outside contractor to bring in "clean fill" to build up the Bolender Park prior to turning it into a Park. It was all private land owned by Cecil Bolender who also owned the adjacent land to the north which he leased to the Township to be used as a municipal/industrial landfill. The clean fill was much more likely to be relatively clean municipal wastes brought from next door to raise the elevation of the future parkland. Mr. Bolender eventually gave the southern part of his property to the Township to be turned into a park and named after him. The northern part encompassing the greatest amount of municipal and industrial garbage he sold to Chris Paleshi who ran a garage and auto wrecking yard on the western part of it.