Niagara, Ontario’s Regional Government Wants Dangerous Niagara, New York Chemical Dump Kept On U.S. Priority List

By Doug Draper

In a letter he is sending to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Niagara, Gary Burroughs, the chairman of Niagara, Ontario’s regional government is urging the EPA not to remove one of the notorious toxic waste dumps in the Niagara River/Lake Ontario watershed from list of priority hazardous waste sites in need of attention.

Niagara, Ontario Regional Chair Gary Burroughs

“This is a concern for the Niagara Region because we are located on the shorelines of both the Niagara River and Lake Ontario where there are concerns that hazardous waste from the Hyde Park site may still be migrating,” says Burroughs in his letter. “Water quality in Lake Ontario is an important issue for the Region because it is a major drinking water source for resident of Niagara. … There are (also) aquatic biota (fish, birds and other creatures living in and off the river and lake) that are dependent on these waterbodies.”

What Burroughs and the Niagara, Ontario regional council are responding to is a burial ground for about 80,000 tonnes of some of the most chemicals ever created by human science, including a ton of the deadliest form of dioxin, sitting on a floor of fractured bedrock rock just above the Niagara River gorge, in the Lewiston, New York area. 

During the ugliest of times for this former Hooker (Occidental Chemical) dump, one could literally see the poisons from the site oozing out of the walls of the gorge near the Robert Moses hydro power facility and just above the Niagara River below. One could see the so-called “seeps” of toxic goo from this dump from the Canadian side of the Niagara River gorge. You didn’t need sophisticated lab technology to know it was there, washing down to the waters of the river and Lake Ontario, a source of drinking water for millions of Ontarians and New Yorkers, and a fishery worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Again, during the worst of times when this dump was active from the early 1950s through to the mid-1970s, and for another decade and a half, scientists for Environment Canada, Ontario’s Ministry of Environment, New York State Departments of Environmental Conservation and Health, and EPA were measuring enough Hyde Park chemicals in fish and other biota to significantly limit how much of the fish from the lower Niagara River and Lake Ontario people – particularly women of child-bearing age – should eat. The chemicals from this dump and others also all but wiped out colonies of fish-eating birds on and around Lake Ontario.

Due to the limits of science’s ability to link these chemicals to human disease, it is anyone’s guess how much these chemicals affected people ingesting them through the water and other parts of the foodchain. One set of Canadian tests from the 1980s found the fingerprints of chemicals known to be buried in the Hyde Park site in the flesh of human cadavers from the far end of Lake Ontario in the Kingston area. 

Hooker (Occidental) was sued by the U.S. government in 1979 for damages to the environment caused by Hyde Park and three other infamous dumpsites in the Niagara Falls, New York area – Love Canal, 102^nd Street and S-Area, located on or near the shore of the Niagara River, just upstream from the American and Horseshoe Falls.

To make what then turned into a long saga short, Hooker (Occidental) parlayed this billion dollar legal suit into negotiated cleanup plans for the four sites with a total cost that ranged into the tens-of-millions of dollars for each site, but came in less than the billion the government initially attempted to slap on the corporation. These cleanups fell short of those fought for in the U.S. courts by environmental groups in that country and Ontario, including Pollution Probe and Operation Clean. They wanted complete removal and destruction of the wastes rather than constructing below-ground walls, purge wells and drains in an effort to “contain” them.

Hooker’s lawyers were blunt with the U.S. courts in the court sessions I attended in a Buffalo, New York courtroom. They put it this way; ‘Either accept the negotiated containment proposals for these sites or pursue your lawsuit against us, in which case nothing may be done to stop the poisons from leaking from the sites for many years to come.’ One U.S. district court Judge John T. Curtin was put in the awful position of accepting containment or not knowing if anything would be done to clean up these sites for possibly another decade or more.

The bottom line is this. These materials remain in the ground and the containment systems built around them might begin to break down to a point where they need to be repaired or replaced within 30 to 40 years. As for the dioxin, mirex, PCBs, chlorobenzenes, toluenes and other poisons buried at these sites, according to former Environment Canada scientist Doug Hallett who was one of the first to detect their presence in the Great Lakes, they have the capacity to remain toxic for hundreds of years.

Infrastructure built to last 30 or 40 years before repair or replacement, intended to contain the spread of chemicals with a toxic life numbering into the hundreds of years. Obviously, the math does not add up to anything other than the possibility that these chemicals may once again begin leaking, un-encumbered,  to the Niagara River and Lake Ontario, and we will be right back to where we were four decades ago with the possible destruction of a great fishery in Lake Ontario and drinking water supplies under threat.

That is why a plan now by the U.S. government, through the EPA, to remove Hyde Park – the largest container for dioxin wastes that were the most destructive ingredient in a Vietnam War-era defoliant called ‘Agent Orange’ – from a ‘National Priority List’ it has been on for more than 30 years now is a very dangerous idea. 

The delisting of this site might potentially take it off any radar screen when it comes to dumps that need to be monitored and properly contained for generations to come if that waste is allowed to remain sitting on what is a sieve near the brink of the Niagara River gorge.

Thus, the letter from Burroughs, and the earlier ones from Ontario Environment Minister Jim Bradley and Environment Canada, urging the EPA to keep the Hyde Park dump on its National Priority List. The citizen groups Great Lakes United and Canadian Environmental Law Association have been pushing this issue too, as should all of you.

Write your own letter of concern to;

Gloria Sosa, Remedial Project Manager, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2,  290 Broadway, 20^th Floor, New York, NY 10007-1866, U.S.A.

You can also check out an earlier post from Niagara At Large on this urgent matter by clicking on https://niagaraatlarge.com/2012/09/20/canada-urges-u-s-not-to-take-dangerous-toxic-waste-dump-along-niagara-river-off-priority-list/ .

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