Canada Urges U.S. Not To Take Dangerous Toxic Waste Dump Along Niagara River Off Priority List

By Doug Draper

The Canadian government is urging the United States Environmental Protection Agency not to remove the Hyde Park landfill – one of the most potentially dangerous toxic waste dumps in North America, located above the brink of the Niagara River Gorge – from its list of priority sites for special attention.

“I am writing to express Environment Canada’s concerns regarding the U.S. EPA’s decision to delete the Hooker (Hyde Park) Superfund site from the National Priorities List,” said Diane Johnston, associate regional director general for Environment Canada’s Ontario Region office in Toronto, in a recent letter to EPA remedial projects manager Gloria Sosa. Johnston’s letter goes on to say that recent tests by Ontario Ministry of Environment scientists at Bloody Run Creek, a waterway washing down the gorge from the Hyde Park dump, shows rising levels of dioxin (one of the world’s most toxic chemical agents), above Canadian environmental quality guidelines.

The Hyde Park dump in Niagara County, New York, a virtual hole in the ground that was used by the Hooker/Occidental Chemical Corporation in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as a graveyard  for at least 80,000 tons of some of the most toxic chemicals created by modern science, also contains at least a ton or two of the most poisonous strain of dioxin – the 2,3.7.8, tetrochlorodibenzo variety (alias TCDD), considered deadly in amounts invisible to the naked eye. An article in a 1982 article in Rolling Stone Magazine describe the Hyde Park dump as a “time bomb,” containing far more of the ‘Agent Orange’ chemicals that were ever sprayed as a “powerfully corrosive chemical defoliant” across the landscape during the Vietnam War. 

Yet now, the EPA – the lead environmental protection agency in the United States and normally a good one at that – is prepared to delist the Hyde Park dump as a site that needs priority attention. And of all the tens-of-of-thousands of toxic waste dumps across North America, this one needs priority attention! 

“So help me God, you can’t delist this site,” said Doug Hallett, a former senior scientist with Environment in a recent interview with Niagara At Large.”It wouldn’t take a great deal of disturbance, such as increased seismic activity or some man-made event, to release a chunk of that waste to Lake Ontario. ..; And if a couple of shovels full of that waste got into the lake, it would contaminate the water supplies around Lake Ontario for millions of people.” 

The Hyde Park dump,.one this reporter covered through site visits and through the U.S. courts three decades ago, literally sits on fractured bedrock above the Niagara River gorge  It is, as says Hallett, who was the first Canadian scientist to begin tracking chemicals as dangerous as dioxin downstream from that site, “a landfill that is a bathtub without a bottom.” 

Do you know what that means? 

It means that as much as the courts forced Hooker/Occidental three decades ago to build containment structures around this site – a cleanup strategy Hallett and others felt was folly short of literally spending more money excavating the poisons from the ground and destroying it in a high-end incinerator – the poisons are still buried there in a hole surrounded by bedrock with fractures leading straight to the Niagara River and Lake Ontario.  No bloody wonder that the note from Environment Canada to the EPA cites scientific data showing that the volumes of chemicals entering the Bloody Run Creek flushing  from the Hyde Park dump and intruding on the waters and fresh water clams tested immediately downstream from this infamous site have jumped up in recent years. 

“Given the above data,” conclude Environment Canada in its note to the U.S. EPA, “we strongly urge that further investigation, including site specific toxicity testing, should be conducted to fully understand the implications of these levels of contaminants … before (the Hyde Park site’s) deletion from the National Priority List.

You have to give it up for Canada’s Stephen Harper Government and Environment Canada for taking a stand on this one. Where is the government of Ontario and our province’s environment minister, Jim Bradley? NAL has called Bradley’s Toronto ministry office on this issue and, so far, there has been no response.

(Niagara At Large invites you to share your view on this post, remembering that we only post comments from individuals who also share their first and last names.)