Digging up dirt

>>Toxic muck buried in André Boisclair’s Pointe-aux-Trembles riding resurfaces to muddy the campaign trail

“YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE”: Tar barrels

by P.A. SÉVIGNY
all photos by Yvon Gignac

With a little less than two weeks left to this month’s provincial election campaign, André Boisclair’s promise for a green Quebec may turn into so much hot air when asked about what’s going on in his own backyard.

Two years ago, when Montreal entrepreneur Turan Kalfa decided to expand his self-storage locker business into Boisclair’s East-End Pointe-aux-Trembles riding, he never imagined that his business would become a hot local issue in a provincial election.

“If I knew what I was getting into,” Kalfa says, “I would have run the other way.”

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Barrelful of nightmares

Now, after two years’ worth of capital, interest and taxes paid on land and a new building, Kalfa still can’t open his business because the city has yet to provide the building’s water supply. “I couldn’t figure it out,” he says. “When we finally started to build; they did everything possible to shut us down.”

Once the city knew Kalfa was serious about his project, problems began to occur on a daily basis. Officials began to insist that his construction plans be redrawn to suit their demands. Once the new plans were completed, Yvon Gignac, Kalfa’s project manager, learned that Kalfa had to pay for a new set of permits. Routine building procedures began to get complicated. Contractors were stalled while borough inspectors continued to miss their appointments and the project’s bills continued to pour into Kalfa’s office. However, once workers finally began to dig the boreholes required to do the site’s load-bearing tests, Kalfa soon discovered why the borough was giving him such a hard time. Gignac still remembers the day when workers told him, “This was my worst nightmare.”

When he saw how dozens of old rusty barrels full of black tar were buried barely a foot under a parking lot’s surface, he had men dig bore holes throughout the property. At the end of the day, it was obvious that the site was badly polluted as it had been used as some kind of industrial dumpsite for decades.

“It was a nightmare,” says Gignac. “Parts of the site were completely swamped with toxic muck.… In the middle of some tar, we even found a perfectly preserved newspaper dating back to the fifties.”

Located at the junction of both Gouin and the east end of Sherbrooke, the toxic dumpsite lies between two new residential developments that face the river near the end of the island. City maps cite no records of the area ever having being used as an industrial dump and it is presently zoned for residential and light commercial usage. What’s worse is that Kalfa’s property is located on the crest of a slope that leads toward the river. Over the next few decades, soluble pollutants will invariably seep down the slope under the new houses that were built near the riverbank to the north of the site.

“It’s what we call a rogue site,” says Sylvie Bibeau, a biologist and a specialist in eco-toxicology who works for a local community group. Rogue sites are property sites where unscrupulous industries would quietly pay property owners to dump waste on their land as it was cheaper to do so than to pay for proper disposal. Two such sites have already been found in Montreal’s East-End and Bibeau thinks this could be a third.

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Burning questions

Bibeau says that Kalfa’s new environmental report clearly demonstrates petrochemical pollution. While she admits that it would be difficult to know all the facts, she also says that it’s reasonable to assume that someone was paid a few bucks to haul some refinery’s furnace scrapings down the road rather than to pay to have it all disposed of in a legitimate dump.

Kalfa is suing Mario and Norman Forgues, the former owners of the site, for over $4-million. Inspec-sol, a well-known Montreal land inspection company, is also being sued, as the environmental report they completed for the Forgues brothers is seemingly at odds with what was discovered on the site after the sale was concluded.

Inasmuch as the truth of the Inspec-sol report is being questioned in court, some local residents and neighbours say they knew all about what was being dumped on the Forgues brothers’ East-End property. Retired policeman Norman Venne, who lives directly across the street from the affected site, recalls the night when he saw a container being dumped in a field next to his new house. Even though the event happened over a decade ago, Venne still remembers how he had to rush home to wash his hands after he went to see what had been dumped in his neighbour’s field.

“I took a flashlight and took a look after they left,” he says, “and when I dipped my fingers into the mud, I knew we had a problem.”

Not only were his fingers tarred, but they began to burn as there was acid in the residue. Shortly after the incident, he wrote a letter to the province’s environment minister. Days later, some trucks showed up and workmen told him that the site was being cleaned up. However, 10 years later, when Nicolas Montmorency, the area’s municipal councillor, decided to look into the situation, he discovered that the rest of the Forgues family’s land had been sold and rezoned as residential property. He also learned that there was no longer any record of Norman Venne’s letter telling the government about the toxic dumpsite. Montmorency is now working to have all of the Forgues’s East-End properties tested as homeowners on both sides of the area’s Sherbrooke street extension will surely want to know if their homes are going to lose their value due to the polluted site.

Green meets gunk

Xavier Daxhelet is an East-End environment activist who has been working on a number of local clean-up projects for years. He said that the new government, once elected, will have to do a lot more than that. While Kalfa’s $4-million-plus lawsuit against Inspec-sol and the Forgues brothers slowly makes its way through the courts, Daxhelet doesn’t think anything will be done about the polluted site until the provincial government finally gets involved. Daxhelet, who is the provincial Green party’s candidate in Pointe-aux-Trembles, also happens to be running against PQ leader André Boisclair, who won the riding in last year’s by-election.

“What’s going on with all those green PQ signs that promise a green Quebec?” he asks. “Why doesn’t Boisclair check out what’s going on in his own riding?”

“It’s more than just a local issue,” says Green Party leader Scott McKay. “The economic future of Montreal’s entire East-End depends upon these sites being cleaned up, and if the government doesn’t help, it’s just another demonstration of their lack of political will to really do something about our environment.”

While Boisclair has yet to answer any questions about the rogue site, he did promise to re-new Revi-sols, a program established by the Parti Québécois in 1998. Revi-sols was often used by real estate developers and others to pay for up to half the costs incurred to clean up polluted sites for future development. While the program was cancelled by Jean Charest’s Liberals in 2005, Boisclair has promised to re-instate the program once he and his party are back in power.

But, says Daxhelet, “That’s not enough. It’s the companies that made this mess in the first place, and they’re the ones who should be made to pay to clean it up.”

The Forgues brothers are retired and living in Florida, and their lawyer, when contacted by the Mirror, declined to comment on the case. The borough, meanwhile, finally called Gignac up to tell him that they would connect the water “as soon as possible.”

Two years after he began to build his East-End borough warehouse, Turan Kalfa is still waiting for the city to hook up his water supply.