It was also the most difficult and it was literally on a moment's notice. I loved being a member of APT Environment. I loved both the technical reports and data that I was reading, absorbing and questioning as well as the social events they held. My wife and children were also strongly welcomed by the APTE membership and this made the decision to resign in protest on the spot excruciatingly difficult and painful. Of course the contemptible and dishonest behaviour of Sylvia Berg in hindsight was intended to produce that result. Undoubtedly she received at the minimum a Christmas card full of Xs and Os (love & kisses) from David Ash and Uniroyal Chemical. I have over the decades tended to minimize my personal negative impact on the credibility of Conestoga Rovers (CRA), Uniroyal, M.O.E. and other dishonest parties. According to Wilf Ruland (hydrogeologist & good friend of Susan Bryant) I was a quick study and absorbed more hydrogeological knowledge than any other layperson he had met. This was a direct threat to the now proven substandard and cheapest remediation method focusing on hydraulic containment or pump & treat technology. Oddly enough in the early days it was Susan Bryant of APTE who referred to pump & treat as "pump & dump".
Susan and husband were in India in the fall of 1993. Sylvia, Glenys McMullen and I worked on responding to Conestoga Rovers latest DNAPL report. It was essentially nonsensical in light of the various professionally accepted technical criteria that had been presented such as soil and groundwater concentrations of DNAPL components. I did most of the technical stuff with Glenys and Sylvia editing and discussing specifics with me about our response. In hindsight I was much too naive and trusting and should have been forewarned when Sylvia insisted that my name alone be put on APTE's response. I later concluded she already knew that APTE would not publicly be challenging CRA's report or the December 10/93 M.O.E. (Min. of Environment) report accepting CRA's perverted conclusions in their latest DNAPL report.
The "on the spot" resignation was due to Rich Clausi resigning after APTE coordinaters accepted Sylvia's DNAPL position that it just wasn't that big of a deal to protest and Sylvia then announced she could no longer work with me on the UPAC committee hence I was off it. Richard's resignation was a surprise but then he was fully up to date on the DNAPL specifics, the APTE co-ordinaters were not and the vote became essentially a popularity contest. Sylvia just like Susan Bryant publicly was strongly against Uniroyal Chemical at that point plus she had been with APTE longer than I.
DNAPLS were and are the defining problem both on and off the Uniroyal Chemical site. I knew they were a big deal in the early 1990s as I'd read not only CRA and Morrison-Beatty reports on them but also gone to the University of Waterloo main library and read other professional reports describing the long term pollution issues they caused. That said, in hindsight, they have proven to be an even larger problem locally than I could have imagined. They are why chlorobenzene which if as we were falsely advised by Uniroyal and consultants were fully dissolved and no longer existed in the free phase (i.e. non-aqueous) form would have been easily reduced below drinking water standards both by pump & treat as well as by natural attenuation (sub-surface bacteria (bio-remediation)). This has not occurred and they have focused on NDMA's low drinking water standard of .009 parts per billion as the problem when they can't even get chlorobenzene down to its' drinking water standard of 80 parts per billion.
Personally I hated resigning but I knew the truth was obvious and was shocked at Sylvia's behaviour and attitude. She and her drinking buddy (coke / pepsi ?) Glenys totally reneged on their position and attitudes as shown in our joint DNAPL response under the APTE headline albeit only with my name on the bottom. At one point I even wondered if their choice of refreshments affected their thinking/decision making. In hindsight it was only a small part of their motivation.
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