THE REALITY OF SLOWLY DYING FROM A POISONED WATER SUPPLY

Today's Waterloo Region Record carries the following story written by Paul Hunter (Toronto Star) and titled "Walkerton's poisoned water ruined this cop's life. So he ended it.". There is neither fame nor fortune involved. While "only" seven died, thousands became sick. Some permanently. Robbie Schnurr an off duty OPP officer was one of the unlucky ones. He wasn't even living in Walkerton, his home town, at the time. He was back for a visit.

It does not matter what the source of the contaminated water. Once seriously poisoned your life will be shortened and most probably you won't even have the satisfaction of sending the perpetrators to jail. That must be especially galling for a police officer because there are identifiable perpetrators. In the Walkerton case it was two brothers (Koebel), the town council and the Ontario Ministry of Environment. Some were incompetent, some were negligent, some were lazy and some were all three. The results were death and injury, in some cases permanent and life shortening injury.

There were no multi million dollar lawsuits to take good financial care of the victims. The perpetrators at the bottom of the hierarchy were fired, the ones at the top lawyered up. There was an Inquiry and the Judge spread the blame widely. Just about every opportunity and every back up contingency was missed.

Here in Elmira, Ontario we have had the same thing from our poisoned water supply. The ability to avoid accountability here was magnified because while Walkerton was an acute, sudden poisoning here it was a slow, decades long, assault upon the immune systems and the health of residents. Many have died since prematurely of cancers and other diseases related to solvents and carcinogenic compounds in our water supply. One I will name because she attributed her health problems to Uniroyal Chemical and that was Esther Thur. She was an active participant in the EH-Team as well as a founder of APT Environment. She had cancer repeatedly after living for over fourty years in Elmira. To date any Health Study has been assiduously avoided by all our pollution loving authorities.

People have died just as slowly here in Elmira as some of those in Walkerton. They have avoided the blame and accountability much better here than in Walkerton. Yes Councillor Mark Bauman, some times blame must be assigned in order to discourage future similar murderous behaviours. This Barry is why I am still fighting here in Elmira. Lanxess, Chemtura, Crompton & Uniroyal you have to date escaped full transparency of your sins and full accountability for them. You have not escaped forever. You and your fellow travellors will eventually be brought to justice. Keep looking over your shoulders.