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Sunday, July 26, 1998 The Halifax Herald Limited
Cleanup could cost billions
By Paul Schneidereit / Staff Reporter SUNDAY EXTRA
Sydney - Cleaning up what's called the largest toxic waste site in
North America could take decades and cost billions.
Until more is known, officials caution that those estimates are very
crude, but no one will deny the final bill for cleaning up the Sydney
tar ponds and former Sydney Steel coke ovens site could be immense.
"To remediate to industrial standards, the best guesstimates, and
these are very crude, are 20 to 25 years and in the order of hundreds
of millions of dollars," says Mike Britten, program manager at Joint
Action Group, the community-driven organization tasked with the
cleanup.
A Smithville, Ont., project to clean up half a hectare contaminated
with transformer oil has already cost in excess of $50 million, he
said.
In comparison, the Sydney project involves 100 hectares and a chemical
cocktail of toxic substances, including heavy metals, various
hydrocarbons and PCBs.
Mr. Britten agreed the cleanup could cost billions.
"That's exactly right. Right now, nobody knows how much, how long,
until the entire problem is defined."
Don Ferguson, Health Canada's director general for the Atlantic
region, says all estimates, including his, are guesses at this point.
"When we talk about this site, we're talking at least half a billion
dollars. And that's a very, very conservative estimate."
For Eric Brophy, a 65-year-old resident of Whitney Pier and member of
JAG's health studies working group, the final figure is irrelevant.
"We demand whatever it takes to clean this up. No more nonsense.
"We're no different than anybody else except we die at a faster rate.
I don't care whether it's $2 billion or $3 billion. Do it."
Studies have shown higher rates of cancer and heart disease in Cape
Breton County and Sydney compared to the rest of Nova Scotia.
An in-depth Health Canada study of disease mortality and incidence
rates, to be released in late September, will reveal similar patterns,
says Pierre Band, one of the scientists involved in the project.
Meanwhile, results will also be released this year from a study into
cancer incidence in Sydney done by Judy Guernsey, a Dalhousie
University scientist. Her work was funded by the Electric Power
Research Institute in California.
What's really needed, Mr. Brophy said, is a study that tracks
individuals who lived in Whitney Pier and what happened to them.
Many residents who grew up in Sydney and moved away were affected, he
said.
"The bodies are coming home, we're burying them here," Mr. Brophy
said. "We not only export our people. We also export our cancer."
Then there's the thorny question of personal compensation.
Many wonder whether studies will ever offer enough scientific proof
that coke ovens and Sydney Steel emissions had a significant impact on
people's health.
"Does government want to come up with a smoking gun?" asked Mr.
Brophy. "I personally believe that government is afraid of the
compensation issue."
But Mr. Ferguson said he has never seen any evidence of that at the
federal level.
"I think that that's obviously a question that governments will have
to respond to" if it's raised, he said.
Provincial officials could not be reached for comment.
With a proper control group, studies should be able to determine if
the environment contributed to higher rates of disease, Mr. Ferguson
said.
But no one will ever be able to prove exposure directly caused cancer
in a person, he said.
"Eventually, we will get to the point where some conclusions can be
drawn," said Germaine Lemoine, JAG's public information officer.
"If it's from the site, then compensation may be an issue. And if it
isn't from the site, then the people of this community have to heal."
Meanwhile, the coming months will see progress on a number of cleanup
projects, Mr. Britten said.
By early fall, work will begin on a $8.5-million sewer interceptor
that will divert roughly three million gallons of raw sewage, now
dumped daily into the tar ponds, directly into the harbor.
The tar ponds are a tidal estuary, so sewage dumped there is already
oceanbound, he said.
Eventually, JAG officials say, a treatment plant will be built to
handle sewage from a large area of the city.
The sewer interceptor is part of the effort to stabilize the toxic
waste site, which includes the tar ponds and coke ovens grounds.
A report on the leachate flowing from a municipal dump above the coke
ovens site is expected within a few weeks, Mr. Britten said.
Members of JAG's environmental committee say a collection system will
eventually be needed to stop the leachate from further contaminating
the site.
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