WELL DONE WOOLWICH OBSERVER

Yessss! Faisal Ali, reporter for the Woolwich Observer, attended Monday evening's TAG (Technical Advisory Group) meeting. This he has done for at least the last few meetings and I and I hope all of Woolwich Township and the Region of Waterloo thank him and the Observer for so doing. The Observer's coverage of TAG and RAC meetings is a public service and should continue regardless of the sham of public consultation which RAC and TAG were intended. There are good people present at TAG and they are sincere in their efforts.The discussions are about the Canagagigue Creek and the toxic legacy of Uniroyal Chemical using it as a sewer for far too many decades. While most of the highly soluble compounds appear to have departed to grace our downstream communities there are other compounds that are known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) present in the creek which greatly exceed both provincial and federal health and safety criteria.

If I were to find fault in this story I might nitpick about the use of the word "isolated" in the second last line on page one. Perhaps Mr. Ali meant isolated as in off the beaten path. O.K. in that sense I have no complaint. On the other hand if he means isolated as in by itself or suggesting that most of the creek is clear of DDT and dioxins except for "isolated" locations then I have a problem. In fact these toxic compounds have been detected and exceed the criteria everywhere they've been sampled. The problem is that they've only been sampled in a very few locations. Ahh you have to love the English language. One could say they've only been tested in "isolated" locations and hence they were indeed only detected in "isolated" locations.

Tiffany Svensson, Chair of TAG, states later in the article that "Data indicate that we have hotspots, but we don't have all the hotspots fully delineated and characterized." That is a very good representation of the situation. I might add my own comment that I believe that this lack of delineation and characterization is probably intentional as a method of reducing the cost of remediation of the creek. After all remediating three or four alleged "hotspots" and ignoring the rest of the creek is a lot cheaper than remediating two dozen "hotspots" throughout the length of the creek from Lanxess all the way to the Grand River.