"Source water protection" has a nice ring to it. As does "Country side line". Also "aquifer recharge areas" and the provincially mandated, several years old now, long term planning to protect the Region of Waterloo's groundwater. I suggest that just as the "Country side line" has been exposed as a fraud in Wilmot Township, the other terms are also mostly smoke and mirrors.
The Region of Waterloo have been playing musical chairs with our drinking water wells for decades now. Cambridge in particular has a number of industrially contaminated sites that have adversely affected their groundwater. Hence drinking water wells when pumping draw in groundwater from great distances away including changing the natural groundwater flow direction. This "management practice" of operating pumping wells for short periods of time (eg. six months) and then shutting them down and restarting another well has even been admitted to at public CPAC meetings in the past.
In other words our regional authorities have been knowingly pumping from industrially contaminated aquifers for decades. Early on (late 70s & early 1980s) there was concern in Elmira when it was admitted that yes the regional aquifer supplying drinking water from the north and south wellfields was located directly under the Uniroyal Chemical plant. Now of course all our politicians and fellow travellors jumped in to Uniroyal's defence with a myriad of lies and falsehoods such as there is an impenetrable clay layer between the aquifer and the ground surface as well as well the south wellfield is far too distant from Uniroyal for any contaminants to travel that far.
Thirty-four years ago there was a public scandal regarding liquid chemical wastes as well as semi solid wastes being sent to the regional landfill in K-W from Varnicolor Chemical via fraudulent lab reports showing that they were non-hazardous. Yours truly had tipped off both the Region as well as the media. So embarrassing for the Region. That is the reality likely of all our former landfills as industries paid both above and below the table including bottles of whiskey to MOE officers as well as landfill supervisors.
Right now as we speak the Erb St. Landfill is leaking leachate into the regional aquifer right beneath them that supplies drinking water to the St. Agatha wells as well as to downgradient wells in Waterloo and Kitchener at various wellfields. The Region of Waterloo are also using "management" practices to attempt to mitigate the extent of contamination in our drinking water wells caused by the Erb St. Landfill. Claims that nobody knew better than to locate that landfill directly above the regional aquifer in 1972 are ludicrous. Further claims that nobody knew anything about leachate collection in 1972 are also ludicrous. Our municipal and regional politicians have always cheaped out on the important stuff such as sewage treatment and clean drinking water in favour of grandiose projects to attach their names and reputations to such as the LRT.
No comments:
Post a Comment