The Wallaceburg Advisory Team for a Cleaner Habitat (WATCH) group have sent a proposal to Environment Cananda and the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change seeking further information about spills in the St. Clair River.
“The agencies are working on delisting the restriction on drinking water beneficial use impairment due to spills from Sarnia,” said Kris Lee, the chair of WATCH. “They feel that since the spills have reduced, volume and frequency, the major threat is over. While this may be true, WATCH is not confident that the spills issue is resolved.”
Lee said she wants publicly accessible data from industries to ensure they are truly working on reducing the risks of spills.
She said this is mainly from Once Through Cooling Water units and management of daily effluent streams into the St. Clair via monitored containment ponds before they enter the river.
Lee said the number of spills, the volume of and the frequency have been dramatically reduced since 1990’s and the 1980’s.
“So the Ministry was looking at this to say, is this really an impairment now because we don’t have as many spills. Now you have to remember the political climate. Environment Canada and the MOE are under pressure to totally delist the St. Clair River as and area of concern. That’s on their plate to say we got to get rid of this issue. It’s been around since the 1980’s, this has been 30 years. We are not going to go on with this for a full century, lets just get the job done. So they are pushing to see how quickly they can reduce all these beneficial use impairments and there is eight of them that are left.”
Lee said the drinking water is one of the eight beneficial use impairments. however the criteria is from the 1980’s.
“If there are no spills for two years, then we can say everything is fine and our logic from the community is that is just really unreasonable. It’s possible that you can have no spills for two years and than the third year you could have 10. So if you delist it after two years and you have 10, now you have delisted it and now you’ve got another problem. So we can’t use that as a criteria.”
Lee added: “This proposal is basically saying we understand that you have reduced your spills, we understand that you have put in a lot of spill litigation projects to prevent the spills but we’re still not quite sure exactly where you are in terms of the industry,” Lee said. “Where is the industry in terms of their prevention of spills?”
Specifically WATCH is looking at the direct dischargers only, Lee said.
“These are the industries that do not go into the Sarnia Waster Water Treatment but they have a pipe directly into the river. They are called direct dischargers and there’s basically only a handful of them. There’s Imperial Oil, Lanxess, Suncor, Shell, Nova and there’s maybe a few others, but those are the main ones.”
“These guys go directly to the river. They are the ones we are basically saying, we want to understand where are you?” Lee said.
The biggest risk is the once through cooling water.
“The five companies we are talking about still have these old technologies for once through cooling water. The current technology is the cooling towers… we want those because a cooling tower recycles the water. It doesn’t do this once through.”
Lee said WATCH is basically negotiating with the Ministry and Environment Canada “to give us this sort of a mapping of where all the directive chargers are at this point in time.
“We don’t have that information right now. The bottom line is I know they are under pressure to delist the drinking water so basically we have the cards on the table now. We are saying if you want to discuss the delisting of the drinking water, here is what you are going to have to do. So the ball is in their court right now,” Lee said.
In 2003, the Wallaceburg Advisory Team for a Cleaner Habitat (WATCH) began as a committee under the direction of the Wallaceburg Chamber of Commerce, in response to a chemical company’s spill into St. Clair River.
The advisory group has grown to become an environmental grassroots organization that represents the citizens of Wallaceburg and surrounding areas by engaging in public discourse with Sarnia Petrochemical Industries on spill prevention and effluent monitoring.
For more information visit: http://www.biowatch.ca/
