Elmira, Ontario's Chemicals - follow-up

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  Despite my having lived in Woolwich Township for the first nineteen years of my life (1965-84) and occasionally since then (1987, 2000-01 and 2010-11), I did not know that the Elmira groundwater chemical scandal had anything to do with Agent Orange, etc. until last week.  This situation just goes to show how reticent people were to talk about some of the underlying issues that were still going on in the 1970s-80s (i.e., before I first left the immediate area in 1989). At least one of the Elmira newspapers (there were often two, competing, small weeklies), the Signet, was apparently still in the pocket of Uniroyal Chemical until the 1970s-80s, and at one point (I believe in the 1960s) a couple of big-shots from the company (around the time when it was making Agent Orange for the US government) made up a not insignificant portion of the town council.
  
  The timeline of knowledge about various known dangers vs. useful action will be important to establish.  I'll probably want to consult the relevant town council minutes and company reports from 1945 through 1991 (and account for exactly who argued and voted for exactly what), look up the "Weed-Free Zone" newspaper ads from the 1940s in support of the blanketing of basically every lawn in the town with 2,4-D ("at cost" and as a goodwill gesture by the company), and get whatever public access there might be at a local, provincial, or federal level to records about this--and to relevant medical (and, possibly, veterinary) records.  At one point, cows were dropping dead from drinking the creek water, and at another point a prominent citizen's dog died after it was powdered with 2,4-D for flea control. Most such things took place decades before anybody started to do anything about it.  See the book-chapter excerpts at: http://books.google.com/books?id=lj8bcu03WigC&pg=PA297.
  
  N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) and 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD) seem to be the two nastiest things Uniroyal would have spewed out of its plant. However, TCDD (a by-product of Agent Orange) is rarely discussed, so maybe it's not an issue, even though 2,4,5-T was made in Elmira, as 2,4-D (arguably not as scary) had been since the 1940s.  NDMA's cancer/tumour effects on rats had been studied at least since the early 1980s, and in 1982 there was a famous double-homicide case in the US of two people having been killed using it.  It was first detected at contaminant levels in California in 1988, near a place where rocket fuel was made, and then at similar levels in Elmira's water supply in 1989. Although rocket fuel would have been more "glamorous," the Elmira contamination was probably caused by earlier attempts at cleaning up organic nitrogen-containing wastewater with chlorination. 
  
  
  In 1989, the levels of NDMA in several of Elmira's wells were 200 to 300 times (not % above, but multiples above) the maximum level considered safe: 3-4 parts per billion vs. 0.014 ppb. Uniroyal was found to be spewing out effluent with NDMA at 2000 ppb, which means that the water treatment system was getting rid of about 90% of it. The company was required to get its high influent levels of NDMA down to 0.5 ppb (and the average down to 0.2 to 0.3 ppb), so that Elmira's public water treatment system then further could get it down to reasonably acceptable levels.  See the government report at: http://www.ert.gov.on.ca/files/DEC/O9206d1.pdf. The government forced a shut-down of two of the town's major wells in early 1990, then the town started piping in all of its water from Waterloo by 1991.
  
  
  The engineering consultants Conestoga-Rovers have done the clean-up processing, both of continuing contaminants (esp. NDMA, which is done with "ultraviolet oxidation") and of the longer-standing issues. See a report about the clean-up approaches at: http://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/issues/story.aspx?aid=1000106557.  I also know that something was put into storage containers that somehow then later leaked. I'm not sure what that was, but it could possibly contain TCDD, because I suspect that 2,4,5-T wasn't actually made in Elmira until only a little before the "fallout" from it in Vietnam. It's likely that the storage containers were the same type of 55-gallon barrels that were also what ended up leaking similar things at Love Canal in the Niagara Falls / Buffalo area in the 1970s.
  
  
  Elmira's water still won't be safe enough to use for several more decades. So, obviously, it can't just contain NDMA, although that was the tipping point (to use Malcolm Gladwell's, an Elmira native's, expression) that finally got some solutions underway. The town has an active blogger on these types of issues (Al Marshall, at http://elmiraadvocate.blogspot.com/), and the award-winning environmental scientist Henry Regier (retired from U of T in 1995) also lives in Elmira and worked with a citizen's group that helped get things done.  However, I'm still keen to figure out the long-term health implications for those of us who drank and otherwise used Elmira (and/or area) water for decades:  diabetes, various cancers and skin diseases, subacute transient peripheral neuropathy, liver poisoning, diarrhea, etc.
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