[Parker-L] [PBD 5-30-01] Moving the toxic goal posts

[Parker Barss Donham]

30 May 2001
Halifax Daily News
Parker Barss Donham


	If you'd rather not spend hundreds of millions to solve a seemingly
intractable problem, insist on further study before starting.

	If you're afraid further study will reveal the problem to be even
worse than suspected, focus the research on some trivial aspect of the
situation that's likely to prove harmless.

	If, despite your best efforts, the benign study turns up yet more
damaging evidence, move the goal posts. Change the definition of what
constitutes a problem.

	That sums up the appearance, if not the reality, of federal and
provincial efforts to cope with the crisis facing neighbourhoods
adjacent to the Sydney Tar Ponds and the former Sysco coke ovens.

	As if making Sydney safe for human habitation weren't hard enough, a
series of missteps this spring by federal bureaucrats and provincial
politicians has made any solution much harder for people most affected
to accept.

	Officialdom's latest move is to announce that guidelines for safe
limits to toxic exposure, established for all of Canada by the
Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment, will be revised for
Sydney alone.

	I'll say that again.

	Sydney, site of what's often referred to as the worst industrial
waste dump in Canada, if not North America, will soon get its own set
of guidelines for toxic exposure. Guidelines developed for the rest of
Canada are apparently too good for us.

	If I were Dave Barry, this is the point where I'd say, "I am not
making this up."

	The communications geniuses who dreamed up this 11th-hour ploy don't
come to the table with a surplus of credibility. They start in a deep,
dark hole, facing citizens already disinclined to believe them, owing
to the two governments' long record of equivocation, inaction,
incompetence, and delay.

	Ottawa and Nova Scotia first announced a plan to clean up the Sydney
Tar Ponds in the early 1980s. They spent tens of millions of dollars,
only to see every aspect of the project fail. 

	The custom-built boiler designed to burn the sludge couldn't be made
to function. Neither could the custom-built dredge designed to gather
up the toxic goo, or the piping system intended to deliver it to the
boiler. Environmentalist critics who warned that the ponds contained
too large a volume of PCBs to be safely burned in an ordinary boiler
were first dismissed as alarmist, years later acknowledged to be
right.

	While all this was going on, provincial officials approved
construction of a new shopping centre on a filled-in section of the
Tar Ponds.  

	Next, officials proposed to bury the muck under concrete, then
abandoned that scheme in the face of furious reaction from residents.
That fiasco led to the establishment of a citizens' advisory group,
JAG, to oversee the project.

	When JAG disintegrated into rancorous squabbling (for which obdurate
environmentalists share some of the blame), the feds and the province
sat back and let the bickering kill time.

	When rising public demands for relocation of affected families
finally forced them to act, they commissioned a Florida scientist to
look for something no one had ever suggested they would find: an acute
risk to human health.

	To everyone's surprise, Richard Lewis found one area so severely
contaminated, a single exposure could cause illness. To no one's
surprise, he found a multitude of sites that raise concern about
chronic exposure.

	Each round of tests takes an unconscionable amount of time to
process, and no matter how bad the results, officials sit on the data
for weeks.	By contrast, Mayor John Morgan arranged to test a sample
gathered on the downtown side of the Tar Ponds, where federal and
provincial officials had refused to look. He got the results, which
exceeded federal guidelines, in four days, and released them
immediately.

	Now, the bureaucrats want to change the guidelines. What they
euphemistically call "site-specific standards" are needed to assess
naturally occurring background levels of the many toxins discovered in
the soil and ground water of Sydney neighbourhoods.

	Question: If the issue is human health, what does it matter if the
toxins arose naturally, from household use of coal, from the use of
steel-plant slag as landfill, or from production of steel and coke?
It's either dangerous or its not.

	When pressed on this point, Garth Bangay, Atlantic Regional Director
General for Environment Canada, acknowledged that the source of a
toxin has no bearing on its human health effects. However, he said, it
could help decide whether to attempt a clean up, because, "You can't
beat Mother Nature."

	Question: Since the steel plant and the coke ovens rained tons of
toxic dust per year over the Sydney area throughout the last century,
how is anyone going to sort out "background levels?"

	Bangay acknowledged it will be difficult, perhaps impossible.

	Question: What natural source might there be in Sydney for such
notorious by-products of coke production as benzine, toluene, and
polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons?

	"You're absolutely right," said Bangay. "Some contaminants are
entirely man made."

	Question: Given Sydney residents' decades of exposure to toxins,
shouldn't guidelines for their further exposure be tighter, rather
than looser?

	Could be, said Bangay, which is why consultant Lewis urged a study of
the chronic effects on Sydney residents.

	A study of the chronic health effects from living near the Tar Ponds
and the Coke Ovens? That's the one they should have begun 20 years
ago, when the problem was first recognized.

	<I> Copyright (C) 2001 by Parker Barss Donham (parker@donham.org).
All rights reserved. <N>



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