A CHRONOLOGY OF VARNICOLOR CHEMICAL

In 1962 Severin Argenton opened for business on First St. in Elmira. At that time he did not own the building on 62 Union St. which was owned by B-Line Trucking, also known as Bridgeland Terminals. Therefore he had thirty years of leaking and dumping of solvents and more on that property bounded by First St., Union St. and Howard Avenue. His waste mismanagement practices resulted in gross contamination of at least the top fifty feet of the gravels, soils and clays beneath the surface. He introduced a minimum of six different solvents into the Municipal drinking water aquifer beneath his site. Some of those solvents were the same ones as Uniroyal Chemical also put into the drinking water aquifers but as they had much deeper pockets, the Ontario Ministry of Environment focused on them for cleanup costs.

In 1970 after Varnicolor had delivered its waste to the town dump, there was a fire and Council prohibited further disposal of industrial wastes in the Elmira dump. Guess which dump that would have been folks? The Bolender Park Landfill operated from either 1962 until 1968 or according to some sources until 1970. Regardless the point is that not only Uniroyal but every industry in town handling all kinds of toxic wastes were permitted to dump in our local in-town dumps. To this day those dumps are likely still leaching industrial wastes into our ground and surface waters.

In 1971 a committee appointed by Council listed six local firms as "eyesores" one of which was Varnicolor. Councillors requested the company to dispose of a large number of barrels containing waste chemicals which were stored on the property.

The following year (1972) Council gave Varnicolor permission to use town property next to the south pumping station on Oriole Parkway east for storage. Fencing and a floodlight was required. The floodlight was there for a while but the fencing was never installed. This property being referred to is the nationally infamous Lot 91. My understanding is that Varnicolor eventually purchased this property. According to Jock Ferguson of the Globe and Mail, General Motors made an inspection of Lot 91 in the mid 1980s and saw their labelled waste drums tipped over, leaking and being generally improperly handled by Varnicolor. GM had paid a middleman to properly dispose of these drums and that middleman had then paid Varnicolor to properly dispose of them. GM and the MOE were not impressed.

In 1986 Varnicolor was required by the Ontario MOE to remove all liquid and solid industrial waste from Lot 91 and take it to the company's main site at 62 Union St.

In 1988 I started working for Varnicolor Chemical. It was the beginning of the end of the company's polluting practices although it took huge assistance from Susan Rupert, Richard Clausi and Ted Oldfield as well as Phil Jalsevac of the K-W Record and Bob Verdun and Shirley Rennie of the Elmira Independent.