Sylvia Berg former second -in-command at APT Environment rolled over and reversed herself and APTE's position on DNAPL's after December 10, 1993. In so doing she caused the loss of three strong APTE members including one of the original founders Esther Thur as well as Richard Clausi and myself. Esther was a real founder along with Sandra Bray and Susan Rupert. Notice the last name Rupert; not the co-opted pretender Susan Bryant who both herself and the media too often inaccurately refer to as one of the founders. Sylvia in reneging on her and APTE's strong opposition to Uniroyal Chemical's inadequate and inaccurate DNAPL position basically totally sold the farm on a proper cleanup right there. That was the beginning of the end for Elmira achieving a proper and permanent cleanup of their drinking water aquifers. At the time however I still naively believed in the basic decency and honesty of Sylvia and Susan Bryant.
Sylvia and Glenys McMullen who both assisted me in writing APTE's DNAPL critique on Conestoga Rovers (Uniroyal consultants) final DNAPL report were in complete agreement with our finished report. Oddly however Sylvia wanted me to sign the report on my own as she correctly stated I had done the bulk of the DNAPL reading and research. I protested, she insisted so I said O.K. blissfully unaware of the game she was playing. Then after the Ministry of Environment's surprise acceptance on December 10, 1993 of the badly flawed Conestoga Rovers DNAPL report, she suddenly wanted to support it. What the hell?
She convinced APTE coordinators (Susan B. was in India) in January 1994 that despite her, Glenys and my DNAPL critique that Conestoga Rovers report was O.K. This was also despite a Kitchener-Waterloo Record article of September 28, 1993 titled "Cleanup of 2 toxic waste pits going smoothly, Uniroyal says" written by John Roe. Sylvia was quoted in this Record article stating that the company must excavate "all DNAPL hotspots" and as well she stated in reference to the environment ministry needing to approve Uniroyal's DNAPL plan that she'd "be very surprised if they found this report adequate."
Despite all this she reversed her position after December 10, 1993 without any substantive grounds to do so. She turned the APTE January 1994 meeting into a bit of a popularity contest and if I still didn't realize then what she was then neither did anybody else. The myth that APTE were a united and big happy family was just that, a myth. There were other less than amicable departures later on although I believe that Susan Bryant was responsible for them.
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