LOOKING BACK & LEARNING FROM IT

Ah for the good old days when the Elmira Independent, Gail Martin and Julie Sawyer were covering CPAC meetings. There were two excellent articles in the December 3, 2008 edition of the Independent. These two articles covered a CPAC meeting held on November 28, 2008. The first article was titled "Ministry has harsh words for Chemtura" and the second titled "Contaminants should be removed, says Marshall".

The first article describes the report produced by the Ontario Ministry of Environment presented at the CPAC meeting which criticized Chemtura s "best efforts" to maintain hydraulic containment of it s site during construction of the new Ammonia Treatment System. Steve Martindale of the M.O.E. stated "Chemtura s monthly reporting has identified when containment had been lost". "It is the Ministry s opinion that the loss was understated". Further Steve Martindale stated "in regards to omitting monitoring wells from it s monthly reporting that Chemtura should not unilaterally revise the monitoring program for the containment wells". I attended the meeting as usual and also strongly criticized the lack of hydraulic containment of the site during the Ammonia Treatment System upgrades.

The second article was in regards to DNAPLS or dense non-aqueous phase liquids. A CPAC sub-committee had studied DNAPLS for nearly two years and determined that very little work was further required. Unsurprisingly these conclusions were the ones favoured by Chemtura, the M.O.E. and Pat & Susan of CPAC. Pat & Susan ensured that neither the highly critical letters of Jaimie Connolly (M.O.E. hydrogeologist) nor of Wilf Ruland were included in the report or handed out to CPAC members. They also refused to advise CPAC members of the incredible meeting held in January 2007 between Drs. Beth Parker and John Cherry with myself, Susan, Pat and Wilf Ruland. The critical letters of Connolly & Ruland eventually surfaced during the next reincarnation of CPAC around 2012 and I spoke publicly to CPAC about their significance. Susan suggested that she and Pat may have failed to send them to me because I was not on e-mail at the time. What a pathetic excuse for hiding crucial information.

The incredible meeting held at the University of Waterloo recommended source removal of DNAPLS whenever and wherever possible. This shocked and dismayed the other three and especially so for Pat & Susan whom I believe had long ago made a private, verbal deal with Uniroyal to let them slide in exchange possibly for more creek work.

I have since learned that this was neither the first nor the last examples of hiding key information from the public by various authorities and individuals.