No one knows what brew of deadly chemicals has cooked in the pipes, ground and streams of the industrial wasteland that surrounds what many consider North America's worst toxic waste site. There have been almost no wildlife studies to look at how animals pick up the chemicals, and few health studies of the thousands of people who live, work and play just metres away from the poisoned land and streams.
Sydney's infamous tar ponds are well-documented: 700,000 tonnes of poison sitting at the bottom of a shallow estuary between the harbour and a century-old steel plant. Federal and provincial officials already have spent $60 million trying to clean it up, with no success.
But it's only in the last few years that officials have started to realize the surrounding land is also dangerous, haunted with the deadly residue of the city's only major industry.
Benzene. Toluene. Kerosene. Naphthalene. Tar. Commercial byproducts created in a plant that baked coal in super-hot ovens to make coke for the steel mill.
Just upstream from the tar ponds, the 51-hectare coke oven plant is now
a broken field of coal-black rubble and wild grass. Officials know
the benzene tank leaked for years and that part of the ground is saturated
with the deadly chemical.
But they don't know what else is left on the site, or in the 160 kilometres of underground pipe beneath it. One tank, open to the air, contains an unknown mix of chemicals that site officials simply refer to as "nasties."
"We don't have any idea what's down there and until we know we can't do anything," says Gary Campbell, a provincial official involved in the project for years.
"We don't want to bring in a welder to dismantle things and have him blown up."
Nor do they know if the grasses growing across the plain are transforming the poisons from the earth, or sending them into the air. Many visitors to the site get headaches; some become nauseated.
Don Ferguson has asthma. The Health Canada scientist involved in studies of the area says he literally lost his breath when he got downwind from the benzene spill.
"Sometimes the smell of naphthalene is strong enough to drop you to your knees," says Mike Britten, program co-ordinator for the local group charged with figuring out how to clean up the mess.
Yet it was only last year that a fence was erected around the site, along with signs warning "Human Health Hazard."
Before the fence went up, some nearby residents still took coal from the abandoned plant through the winter.
Even now, kids and adults climb the fence to take a shortcut across the toxic coke ven site to downtown.
It's been 12 years since the federal and provincial governments launched a $34 million project to clean up the tar ponds. Taxpayers spent $60 million on an incinerator to burn sludge from the ponds, but the piping system to transport the goo didn't work and the project was abandoned.
The tar ponds remain a "national shame," as then-environment minister Sergio Marchi called them two years ago, when he renewed the cleanup call.
Marchi set up a local citizens' group to figure out the problem but, with a little more than a year left in its mandate, the Joint Action Committee still hasn't a clue what to do about the mess.
It has launched health studies, put up the fence and raised awareness. It has also successfully pushed to have sewage routed away from the tar ponds, a vital first step in the cleanup project. Construction should begin soon on new collectors to divert the 33 pipes that spill waste into the ponds.
But the pace of action is maddeningly slow, even for those committed to the process.
At one recent meeting, steering committee member Donny Gauthier paced a back room in fury after one frustratingly bureaucratic discussion.
"I buried my best friend last week," said Gauthier, 41.
"I know five more guys who are dying, all of them under 50, and maybe another five who don't have it terminal. And tonight ... we just spent another hour arguing about the memorandum of understanding. It's driving me crazy."
The group hasn't decided whether it will tackle only the coke oven site and tar ponds, or also take on the municipal dump and incinerator that spill toxins into the tar ponds. Some committee members want the group to clean up a massive area between the tar ponds and steel mill known as the "high dump."
It is a scary place, a long hill of slag and industrial trash overlooking the harbour that's filled with metals, huge rusting tanks and sinister black ash.
No one has even begun testing soil here, where puddles turn fluorescent green after rain. Perhaps most disturbing is that the area is still being used as a clandestine dump. Truckloads of unrecorded industrial junk are dropped amid the slag every week.
Britten shrugs his shoulders and sighs when asked if the high dump should also be cleaned up, clearly exhausted by the size of the task. He says whatever contaminants are leaking from there are probably going straight out to sea, not into the tar ponds, because of quirks of the local geology.
"They should give the high dump to Warner Brothers to film post-nuclear apocalyptic war films," he says.
The pace of the citizens' committee is not the only thing delaying the long-promised cleanup of Sydney. The truth is that no one knows what to do. They are still searching for someplace else in the world that has successfully cleaned up an area with so many contaminants in so many places, all connected by streams and a fractured bedrock that lets poisons leak into the groundwater and travel in odd directions.
Carl "Bucky" Buchanan, chair of the citizens' group, is resolutely optimistic. He thinks the stinking centre of his hometown could become a magnificent waterside recreation area with rolling fields of wildflowers, soccer greens and a golf course.
Few share his dream.
"There will never be a golf course here," says Campbell.
Eric Brophy, a local activist who believes steel-mill pollution has killed dozens of friends who have died of cancer, is determined the toxic lands will never again house polluting industry.
"Maybe they should turn it into a memorial park for all those who paid the price."
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