Toxic misconceptions

How disappointing to see the Mirror fall for the Sierra Club of Canada myth that Sydney, Nova Scotia, is a horrible place where everyone dies of cancer, and callous bureaucrats won't clean up the deadly toxins polluting every nook and cranny ["Sludge city," Nov. 27]. Your story contained so many misconceptions and falsehoods, one scarcely knows where to begin.

First, the material going to the St-Rémi incinerator does not even come from the Sydney Tar Ponds. Second, it does not contain one speck of PCBs. It is coal tar oil, a common industrial product you can buy at Canadian Tire as driveway sealant. It's also used in the manufacture of tires, dyes, paints and pharmaceuticals.

The coal tar oil bound for Quebec comes from a storage tank abandoned in the 1960s when the Dominion Tar and Chemical Co. closed a plant that processed byproducts from the Sydney Steel coke ovens. As tests by Quebec's Environment Dept. confirm, it contains no PCBs whatsoever. Its chemical composition makes it incapable of producing dioxins or furans when burned.

Sydney is a working-class, industrial town whose mainstay industry has closed. As such, it faces a familiar set of social and environmental problems. The former steel mill and coke ovens produced a large volume of contaminated material that needs to be cleaned up. But there is nothing exotic or unusual about this material. It is standard-issue steel plant waste like that at hundreds of former steel mills throughout the industrial world. The chemicals it contains, mostly derived from coal, are thoroughly understood, as are the various means of treating them. Scores of similar sites have been successfully cleaned up, as will ours be.

An exceptionally empowered citizens' group devoted more than 900 public meetings and 100,000 volunteer hours to finding safe, effective cleanup solutions. (So much for the Sierra Club guff about political patronage and closed-door meetings.) Meticulous risk assessments by independent environmental engineering firms under the watchful eye of these citizen volunteers conclusively demonstrated that contaminated materials are not moving from our site into nearby neighbourhoods.

Like many declining industrial communities, Sydney does suffer poor health outcomes. But the local health authority has identified cardio-vascular disease, not cancer, as the big concern. Among the probable causes: unemployment, poverty, and income disparity; high smoking rates, sedentary habits, and poor diet; low use of medical screening tests; a history of occupational exposure to toxins. But proximity to the Tar Ponds and defunct Coke Ovens is a non-starter as a cause of illness. The coal derivatives in the Tar Ponds do not have supernatural powers. They cannot rise up like bogeymen to attack those who live and work nearby.

As anyone who has visited Cape Breton knows, it's a wonderful place where residents are fiercely loyal to their community. We face some tough problems, which citizens and governments are working together to solve. Exaggeration and fear-mongering won't help. Real people suffer when you publish such falsehoods. The Mirror's admirable concern for environmental issues does not excuse careless journalism.

» Parker Donham, Sydney Tar Ponds Agency

Metro facts off track

I enjoyed Kristian Gravenor's column on the metro this week [Kristian Perspective, Nov. 27]. I spotted an error though: He says that the metro has two drivers, one on each end, but this is only true on the yellow line. The other three lines have only one driver, having dropped the practice of using two some time ago for cost-effectiveness reasons. The yellow line retains its two drivers because the route is so short that it's impractical to constantly be switching.

More to the point, I take issue with his conclusion that new metro trains are not needed. The main problem is that the green-line cars (MR-63) are now almost 40 years old, having been in service since the metro was opened in 1966. This puts them among the oldest rolling stock in use on any metro in the world.

Even if the government chose to fund their replacement immediately, the new cars would not be ready for another four or five years. Although they have proven amazingly reliable, they will inevitably begin to degrade - and soon - causing delays, loss of service, frustration, expense and loss of ridership.

Just imagine a 1966 automobile - and also, imagine that the STM's 759 metro cars have travelled a total of two billion kilometres since then, more than the distance between the Sun and the planet Saturn!

Unfortunately, neither the Péquistes nor the Liberals that took their place have seen fit to replace them yet. Apparently they believe that the trains can just keep running forever.

» Matt McLauchlin, Webmaster, Metrodemontreal.com

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