Somebody needs to be held fully and utterly accountable for the Naugatuck-Uniroyal-Crompton-Chemtura chemical company having polluted the Elmira area (including the Canagagigue Creek, which runs through Floradale) with some of the most toxic chemicals ever made (including Agent Orange!), for the entire town having been routinely sprayed with an eventually-banned chemical weed killer (2,4-D) in the late 1940s, and for the area having been assured of the safety of its water supply for decades.
Incredibly, until tests were done in 1989, most people in the town had merely complained about some bad smells, and even I did not know much more about the whole situation until now, having lived away from the immediate area from 1989 to 2000 and for most of the time since then. I'm extremely worried that the sulphur smell in the water here (a few miles north-west of Elmira) also means that NDMA (a cancer-causing, dioxin-like compound) could also be present in dangerous quantities. Elmira will not be able to use its own water until most of the way through this century, but has anyone bothered to test for similar issues in closely-adjacent places?
Elmira now gets its water supply from Waterloo and others of us in Woolwich Township now mostly use bottled drinking water. However, I suspect that high numbers of people in the area have serious health issues, and I am going to try to find some statistics on this. The town's politicians and newspapers (not to mention the area's mild-mannered Mennonites) have clearly been either complicit or fairly useless on many of these issues.
See excerpts from the following book chapter (published in 1995): http://books.google.com/books?id=lj8bcu03WigC&pg=PA297.
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