Toxic misconceptions - Parker Donham replies to "Sludge City"

Letter to editor
The Montreal Mirror
Dec. 3 - Dec. 10, 2003

How disappointing to see the Mirror fall for the Sierra Club of Canada myth that Sydney, Nova Scotia, is a horrible place where everyone dies of cancer, and callous bureaucrats won't clean up the deadly toxins polluting every nook and cranny ["Sludge city," Nov. 27]. Your story contained so many misconceptions and falsehoods, one scarcely knows where to begin.

First, the material going to the St-Rémi incinerator does not even come from the Sydney Tar Ponds. Second, it does not contain one speck of PCBs. It is coal tar oil, a common industrial product you can buy at Canadian Tire as driveway sealant. It's also used in the manufacture of tires, dyes, paints and pharmaceuticals.

The coal tar oil bound for Quebec comes from a storage tank abandoned in the 1960s when the Dominion Tar and Chemical Co. closed a plant that processed byproducts from the Sydney Steel coke ovens. As tests by Quebec's Environment Dept. confirm, it contains no PCBs whatsoever. Its chemical composition makes it incapable of producing dioxins or furans when burned.

Sydney is a working-class, industrial town whose mainstay industry has closed. As such, it faces a familiar set of social and environmental problems. The former steel mill and coke ovens produced a large volume of contaminated material that needs to be cleaned up. But there is nothing exotic or unusual about this material. It is standard-issue steel plant waste like that at hundreds of former steel mills throughout the industrial world. The chemicals it contains, mostly derived from coal, are thoroughly understood, as are the various means of treating them. Scores of similar sites have been successfully cleaned up, as will ours be.

An exceptionally empowered citizens' group devoted more than 900 public meetings and 100,000 volunteer hours to finding safe, effective cleanup solutions. (So much for the Sierra Club guff about political patronage and closed-door meetings.) Meticulous risk assessments by independent environmental engineering firms under the watchful eye of these citizen volunteers conclusively demonstrated that contaminated materials are not moving from our site into nearby neighbourhoods.

Like many declining industrial communities, Sydney does suffer poor health outcomes. But the local health authority has identified cardio-vascular disease, not cancer, as the big concern. Among the probable causes: unemployment, poverty, and income disparity; high smoking rates, sedentary habits, and poor diet; low use of medical screening tests; a history of occupational exposure to toxins. But proximity to the Tar Ponds and defunct Coke Ovens is a non-starter as a cause of illness. The coal derivatives in the Tar Ponds do not have supernatural powers. They cannot rise up like bogeymen to attack those who live and work nearby.

As anyone who has visited Cape Breton knows, it's a wonderful place where residents are fiercely loyal to their community. We face some tough problems, which citizens and governments are working together to solve. Exaggeration and fear-mongering won't help. Real people suffer when you publish such falsehoods. The Mirror's admirable concern for environmental issues does not excuse careless journalism.