Muggah Creek

Muggah Creek Watershed
Sunday, May 16, 1999
Halifax Daily News
Editorial
By Parker Barss Donham

Finally, compassion

Regardless of the actual danger, Frederick Street residents deserve the province's help
Who would want to live next to a notorious toxic-waste site, where Human Health Hazard signs adorn the back fence, authorities advise against letting children play in the yard, and a mysterious yellow ooze seeps in through the basement wall?

No one, that's who.

Whatever else might be true about the dangers facing residents of Frederick Street in Whitney Pier, there can be no disputing their homes are worthless. No prudent person would buy them.

After reviewing a chemical analysis of the yellow goo that's infiltrating Frederick Street basements, the province agreed to relocate worried families to a hotel. Environment Minister Michel Samson described the move as temporary, and insisted the province acted not because the sludge posed any health risk, but to curb the residents' anxiety.

Whatever the result of further testing ordered by the province, this move will not be temporary. The frightened families will never return to live on Frederick Street.

Instead, Samson's "temporary" concession will step up pressure for government to buy out residents adjacent to the coke ovens, a process that would require impossible decisions about where to draw the line.

Two investigations

Independent environmental consulting firms have carried out two investigations of the coke ovens site. The first, by Acres International in the mid-'80s, led to the ill-fated plan to generate electricity by incinerating sludge from the tar ponds. The second, by Jacques Whitford and Nolan Davis, in 1990, went over much of the same ground.

Both showed the coke-oven site to be massively polluted not only with deadly arsenic, the toxin most often cited as a concern on Frederick Street, but also with PAHs, a family of powerful carcinogens categorized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a "priority pollutant."

A century of coke production, along with related industrial processes at the old Domtar plant and a benzol facility, have created a toxic underground plume that at its core is unquestionably dangerous to human health.

The question is whether this plume is migrating, how fast, and in what direction.

The province did not make public the results of chemical analysis in affected homes, though it did furnish them to the residents. Department officials said the results were comparable in magnitude to tests last year of a similar yellow sludge found oozing out of a railway bed adjacent to the properties.

Those tests showed arsenic levels above desirable concentrations, but well below those found in gold-mining areas around the province. PAH levels in the rail-bed sample were roughly a hundredth of the upper limit deemed acceptable for a contaminated site that has been remediated.

The ooze apparently owes its yellow colour to high levels of iron, a condition common to Cape Breton soils.

The coke-ovens site lies in a shallow valley that slopes westward toward Muggah Creek and its estuary, the notorious tar ponds.

Frederick Street runs along the northern edge of the coke site. To the southwest, the province recently allowed construction of a shopping centre on Prince Street, on a filled section of Muggah Creek.

Piles driven still further away, on the south side of Prince Street during the expansion of a Sobey's store this winter, turned up a tarry ooze that alarmed shoppers, who reported it to provincial environment inspectors.

Tests showed the tar contained PAHs at nearly six times federal standards, but the province declined to stop work on the project. Sobey's later revised its construction plan to include a thicker, more impermeable floor.

An inclined layer of relatively impermeable mudstone underlies the coke-ovens valley and follows its contours. Both Acres and the Jacques Whitford and Nolan Davis consortium concluded this layer makes it unlikely the underground plume will migrate toward populated areas north and south of the plant. The handful of off-site samples they examined supported this view.

The Sobey's site, on filled land along the banks of Muggah Creek, could be a different story. Environment Department engineers take a cold look at this data and conclude, reasonably, that while the fears of Frederick Street residents are understandable, hard facts don't back them up.

The residents look at the area's high cancer rates, at the mess the environment department made of the tar ponds cleanup, at the failure to stop Sobey's from building on contaminated land, and at their own proximity to a site the media continually refers to as the worst toxic-waste dump in Canada, and they are not reassured.

Track the plume

Given its own checkered track record on protecting Sydney's environment, the province is right to treat the Frederick Street residents compassionately.

It should also design and implement a continuing program to monitor contaminants along the coke-ovens periphery to track the migration of the toxic plume. And make the results public promptly.

Three more families leave arsenic zone

Relocation might last eight months
By Tera Camus / Cape Breton Bureau Halifax Herald, May 15, 1999
Sydney - Three more families were evacuated from the toxic Frederick Street neighbourhood Friday night.

Laura Lee Langley, spokeswoman for the provincial Environment Department, confirmed Friday additional residents wanted out after seeing neighbours leaving Thursday because of arsenic in their homes.

"Those residents are being looked after as well," she said. "There's a sensitivity to the Frederick Street area."

Lori Keough and her two children were among the families to move to a downtown hotel Friday.

"Who wants to live in a toxic environment? I don't. I don't want my children growing up in it," she said.

Ms. Keough lives in a home between the McKenzie and McDonald families. Those two families, along with the Ouellettes were evacuated Thursday. A fourth, the Ross family from two streets away, was also relocated.

"I have a new basement. . . . I went down there the other day and you can see orange," Ms. Keough said. "And I called the provincial Environment Department and asked why wasn't it tested. I've asked, but it was never tested."

One of the largest deposits of goo was found in Debbie Ouellette's basement. On Friday, she finally received a copy of the results, more than four days after the province received them.

"All I know is that there's arsenic in my basement," she said. "I don't know what the numbers mean."

There is no acceptable limit established for indoor exposure to arsenic by the federal Canadian Council of the Ministers for the Environment.

However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified arsenic as a human carcinogen.

Short-term exposure (days to weeks) may result in gastrointestinal irritation, difficulty in swallowing, thirst, abnormally low blood pressure, convulsions and cardiac failure leading to death, the agency said.

The estimated lethal dose for an adult weighing 70 kilograms (155 pounds) is in the range of 70 to 280 milligrams. Children, seniors and chronically ill people could be affected by lower levels.

Last week, arsenic measuring 49.9 milligrams per kilogram of soil was found in a patch of goo near the back door of one home. The acceptable limit is 12 mg per kg. An official with Housing and Municipal Affairs met with some residents on Friday to discuss long-term needs.

Residents were told they could be homeless for up to eight months. But Ms. Langley said to her knowledge that's not the plan.

"Housing and Municipal Affairs are part of a team here . . . to see what (are) the needs of the families involved and look at how best they can be met in the short term," she said.

Temporary housing may be part of the plan, she said.

Extra security was engaged to watch over the vacant homes on Frederick Street starting Thursday night. Security from the coke ovens site as well as regional police will do extra patrols, Ms. Langley said.

Frederick Street spokeswoman Juanita McKenzie said residents felt a lot more compassion from the government Friday.

"This is a healing process and it's got to start with the government by doing the right thing," she said. "I'm open to any solution to this. That's all I've ever asked for is a clean and healthy place to live with my family. . . . Until the government can give that to me, I'm not returning to my home."

Tory MLA Jim DeWolfe pressured the province to define a clear plan for residents.

"Both the minister (of environment) and his predecessor have kept insisting on more testing," he said. "The testing has to stop at some point and a plan of action put into place that is in the best interests of Frederick Street residents."

Sydney-Victoria MP Peter Mancini also renewed his call for action from the federal and provincial governments Friday.

"These families . . . need a permanent solution so they can get on with their lives and stop living under a cloud of fear and uncertainty," he said.

Province moves three more families out of Pier homes
By Laurel Munroe, Cape Breton Post, May 15, 1999
The provincial government has now moved a total of seven Whitney Pier families from their homes to a downtown Sydney hotel.

Thursday, four families were relocated after test results confirmed orange-coloured goo found seeping into their basements contained traces of arsenic.

Friday, three more families asked to be moved. Lori Keough, a 13-year resident of Frederick Street, was upset she wasn’t personally approached by officials from the provincial Environment Department who visited the street Thursday.

Keough’s residence is situated between the homes of Juanita & Rick McKenzie and Ronnie & Debbie McDonald; both the families, along with the Ouellette family of Frederick Street and the Ross family of nearby Laurier Street were moved Thursday.

Keough’s home has never been tested. She has a new basement and claims to have seen an orange-coloured substance near the sump pump hole.