UNIROYAL AND THE RISE OF SNAKE OIL SALESMEN - A REAL "CLEANUP" IS FIFTY TO NEVER YEARS AWAY

Snake oil salesmen are trained to pivot on a dime. Crush one lie and they can throw up two others a mini second later. Their oratorical skills are second to none. When really cornered they can simply make up "facts", data, quotes and phony references. Do not let them in your home, your office or your mind. They are insidious and are well paid by people with even fewer ethics than themselves and also with lesser talents for verbal manipulation and prevarication,

Turning on a dime includes twenty-five years of absolute, bold and bald lying by Uniroyal/Crompton/Chemtura, CRA/GHD, M.O.E./MECP publicly stating loudly and proudly that they would restore the Elmira Aquifers to drinking water standards by 2028. They knew full well from 1990 onwards that they were completely bricked if they told the truth. Their goal was to lie like dogs until their retirement and then let the second generation of snake oil salesman step up to bat. 

There are closer to one hundred chemicals in Elmira's groundwater courtesy of Uniroyal, Varnicolor Chemical and Nutrite/Yara. Likely there are more contaminant sources than that but we will stick with the proven ones for now. A number of these chemicals are DNAPLS (Dense Non Aqueous Phase Liquids). They sink to the bottom of higher permeability zones and slowly over decades to centuries dissolve their toxic components into the groundwater flowing by them. Other chemicals are just as toxic but either dissolve well with groundwater or less so but still produce toxic plumes beneath Elmira such as Benzene, Toluene, Xylene etc. Still others are "floaters" with densities less than water and they float on the surface of aquifers slowly dissolving their chemical components over time into the groundwater. Then of course there are even nastier problems such as DDT, Dioxins, PCBs and other heavy compounds which are hydrophobic. Uniroyal Chemical contributed DDT and Dioxins into Elmira's aquifers. Varnicolor had PCBs on both their Union St. site and buried on their Lot 91 property here in Elmira, Ontario. Varnicolor also had NDMA and chlorobenzene but likely in smaller quantities than Uniroyal. We will never truly know due to Ontario Ministry of  Environment incompetence and corruption.

The hydrophobic compounds do dissolve readily in solvents such as chlorobenzene, trichloroethene, benzene, toluene, chlorophenols etc. and move with them into the subsurface. They however have extremely low ability to dissolve into water/groundwater but nevertheless can do so up to and barely past their very low Ontario Drinking Water Standards (ODWS). Hence their presence in the subsurface whether as components of DNAPL mixtures or as recrystallized DDT, Dioxins, PCBs do become extremely long term, ongoing contaminant sources to our drinking water just as the various DNAPL pools, puddles and residual blobs and ganglia are. 

The latest batch of snake oil salesman will have you believe that they can somehow make use of our now permanently tainted groundwater. They will pretend that maybe, just maybe they can magically extract water here and there for some kind of secondary uses. We would hope that meant for industrial cooling water for example versus something like using prior industrialized contaminated lands for nursing homes on the theory that none of the residents will live long enough to be poisoned by them. Or perhaps diluting our contaminated water and putting it into Waterloo Region's Integrated Urban System (IUS) for use by the thirsty folks over in Wilmot Township.