Feb. 11, 03:34 EDT
Living on contaminated ground
Inco and town in uneasy alliance to clean up metals
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Kate Harries
ONTARIO REPORTER
Sunday Special

PORT COLBORNE - The memory of the men in white coveralls haunts  Craig Edwards.

They turned up one day in November, 1995, and dug soil samples from a vacant lot behind his home on Rodney St. in this seaway town, where the Welland Canal meets Lake Erie.

They wouldn't say who sent them, nor what they were looking for. Speculation was rife that it had something to do with a proposed low-income housing development on the site.

But that plan died and a year later the two local businessmen who owned the land - one of them the current mayor's father - sold it to Inco Ltd., the Canadian mining giant that once operated a nickel smelter here.

Inco has had a plant in Port Colborne, operating at various capacities, since 1918. The plant, which today refines cobalt and precious metals, is a block from Edwards' house.

The men in white remained a mystery - a mystery that keeps recurring.

Questions first resurfaced a year ago, when the provincial environment ministry told Edwards and other residents that their neighbourhood was one of two area ``hot spots'' for concentrations of nickel, copper and cobalt.

At lower levels, the heavy metals contamination covers most of the southern Niagara Peninsula, a total of 316 square kilometres - but nowhere does it present a health risk, they were assured.

The memory returned with a vengeance last September, when a Niagara Region health inspector knocked on Edwards' door.

He and partner Ellen Smith listened in shock as Dave Young advised them that soil samples taken in June in the front yard of the home they've owned for 10 years showed massive concentrations of nickel. There were also worrisome levels of lead - which acts on the body's nervous system and can cause learning disabilities - and arsenic.

The couple should not allow their young sons - Eric, 8, and Andrew, 3 - to play in the yard, Young told them. Wash hands frequently, he said. Clean off shoes and pets' paws to avoid tracking in dirt. Vacuum often.

The environment ministry suggests the higher levels are an anomaly - possibly the result of an ancient dumping of contaminated landfill, possibly nothing to do with Inco.

But Edwards is outraged, and insists that someone must have known how severely contaminated the Rodney St. area was.

``The city knew, Inco knew, the MoE (Ministry of the Environment) knew,'' he charges angrily. ``What upsets me is they not once came to my door and told me. I've raised two kids here and they've been playing in the dirt all that time.''

Inco has told The Star that the company did, indeed, commission the 1995 soil sampling by the men in white. And those tests did, indeed, reveal high levels of nickel and lead.

Nickel appeared at up to 4,100 parts per million, much higher than the environment ministry's residential guideline of 200 ppm, and lead at over its 200-ppm guideline level, said Del Fraipont, manager of Port Colborne's Inco plant.

Similar results - for nickel - were turning up in tests conducted by the environment ministry, going back to 1991 and updated in 1998 and 1999.

Rodney St. residents, like others in this city of 18,000, were left in the dark as tests were conducted in their community. It was just a year ago that the ministry finally went public with its results.

At that time, Niagara Region Medical Officer of Health Robin Williams said there was no evidence of a health risk.

The ministry revealed that severe contamination had spewed out across the Niagara Peninsula from the plant's landmark 500-foot smokestack.

A total of 29 square kilometres had nickel levels above the residential guideline, with two ``hot spot'' areas, including Rodney St., where nickel levels were up to 5,000 ppm, 25 times the guideline.

Then the new sample was taken from Edwards' property in June.

As he found out in September, it showed nickel levels at 14,000 ppm, 70 times higher than the guideline. It also showed lead at 435 ppm and arsenic at 85 ppm, two and three times higher respectively than the provincial guidelines.

Subsequent testing of 14 other Rodney St. properties has shown a variation in nickel concentrations, the ministry says. But those results have not been released, and residents want to know if Edwards' property is the only ``anomaly.''

Worried environment ministry officials embarked on a concentrated sampling of 235 properties in Edwards' east-side neighbourhood of about 1,000 residents. Results were to be released at a meeting this coming Thursday.

In the meantime, medical officer Williams has reversed her position, allowing that further investigation of the health of Port Colborne residents is warranted. Two studies have been commissioned.

However, she has resisted demands by Mayor Vance Badawey and other citizens that Rodney St. be evacuated. The Edwards tests point to only an increased ``relative'' risk in chronic exposure, she explains, a risk that is reduced when the ground is frozen and can be minimized by washing and vacuuming.

But a sense of outrage and distrust is palpable among residents. When the alarming test results from Rodney St. were made public in the fall, the dynamic of the community's partnership with Inco was irrevocably changed.

Inco's history in Port Colborne goes back to 1918, when the refinery opened here to process ore mined in Sudbury. The workforce peaked at 3,000 during World War II.

By 1984, when the nickel refinery closed, most of the jobs had gone west to Inco's operation in Thompson, Man. Now a mere 200 people refine cobalt and precious metals at the plant here.

What remains is a persistent legacy of soil tainted by emissions from the refinery smokestack, stretching over 316 square kilometres from the Welland Canal to the Niagara River.

On about one tenth of the area - 29 square kilometres - nickel concentrations reach 200 ppm, the level at which the environment ministry prohibits any land-use change unless the soils are cleaned up.

This meant a virtual freeze on development in Port Colborne.

Nickel is a proven carcinogen in the workplace, but research on its effect on humans in environmental, rather than occupational, exposures is inconclusive.

The metal's toxic effect on vegetation, however, is well-documented and is the basis for the ministry's 200-ppm standard.

The contamination is not in dispute. Inco, the world's largest nickel producer, admits responsibility for three metals - nickel, copper and cobalt.

The environment ministry had called Inco and the city to the table in July, 1998, to discuss evidence of contamination, though the ensuing negotiations were not made public until a year and a half later.

Now the company has embarked on a risk-assessment process approved by the ministry, guided by a public liaison committee of seven citizens appointed by the city of Port Colborne.

Inco has retained the firm Jacques Whitford to study Port Colborne soils and assess the level at which the contaminants present a risk to people or the environment. That work is scrutinized by the citizens' committee with help from their own consultant, Beak Environmental.

Inco's final report, due by the end of this year, will recommend where and how to clean up. If it is approved by the environment ministry, work will begin.

Much of the first year of the process was taken up with wrangling over the scope of work. The citizens were able to expand the number of chemicals to be studied from the original three to a wide range, and the environmental media from just soils to air, water and vegetation.

They also won a new, more focused health study and a socio-economic study to look at an issue of major concern to residents, the impact of the contamination on property values.

All costs are to be covered by Inco, which in the first year has shelled out $1 million for consultants, research and administration, said Bruce Conard, Inco's vice-president of environmental and health sciences.

The citizens' committee meets regularly in the city council chambers. At one of its meetings last June, Edwards asked that his yard be used as a sampling site.

Inco's response to the contamination is a prime example of the ``polluter-pay'' principle at work, says Karl Haniff, the environment ministry's regional director.

The process now under way in Port Colborne could become a model for similar undertakings to reclaim contaminated urban industrial lands, or ``brownfields,'' Haniff says, with Toronto and Hamilton considered prime targets.

Mayor Badawey and business leaders hope it will restore confidence in an area that's trying to re-invent itself as a retirement community and tourism destination.

``Any town with an industrial history has a problem - it's not unique to the city of Port Colborne. It's everywhere,'' Badawey says.

``The only difference is that the city of Port Colborne is doing something about it.''

But many fear that the community is caught up in an exercise in letting the nickel company off the hook.

Harry Wells, chair of the citizens' committee, is among those who suspect that once the studies are done, the amount of cleanup required may be minimal.

Wells says he believes Inco's goal is to demonstrate that 5,000 ppm of nickel in soil is safe.

``If through their risk studies they find that there's no human health risk at levels less than 5,000, then they can present a proposal that they can remediate to that level,'' he said.

``My committee is to get them down to one of these other levels - to get the best deal we can.''

The political process that's playing out here dates back to 1996, when the Tory government introduced a new approach to the restoration of contaminated sites that eased polluters' cleanup liability.

Previously, there were only two acceptable levels: the naturally occurring background level (43 ppm in the case of nickel); and a level at which the contaminant starts to affect human health or the environment (200 ppm).

The risk assessment approach allows for a higher third number. It involves calculation of new contaminant levels based on different soil types and differing property uses - whether industrial, residential or agricultural.

Environmentalists are suspicious of risk assessment, a new research methodology that originated with the nuclear industry, says Tom Adams of Energy Probe.

The environment ministry has embraced the trend of ``basing their criteria on calculated results rather than actual measured health impacts,'' Adams said.

``The purpose of it is to demonstrate that there is no potential for harm, not to study whether there is any harm.''

Here in Port Colborne, Inco has come up with a new twist on the process: Rather than proceeding site by site, a ``community-based risk assessment'' is taking a broad view of city conditions and will set community-wide contaminant levels.

This is a significant change to the 1996 rules which are designed for polluters to clean up their own lands. Here, the property owners are not the sources of the pollution, and the polluter has no financial stake in the final outcome - a disconnect that the ministry has tried to address through public input.

Conard, of Inco, agrees that it's possible 5,000 ppm might emerge as an acceptable level.

``Yes, it might be that high,'' he said. ``In most Port Colborne soils it could range anything from 1,500 to 5,000.''

If the risk assessment process throws up that figure, it means that plants, people and other organisms would be safe, Conard said.

What the ministry guideline permits is a calculation of ``bio-availability,'' he said, explaining that some forms of nickel are less toxic than others, and some soils absorb more of the metal. The risk assessment evaluates how much nickel is available and how much is sitting in the soil, inert.

``If something is not bio-available to an organism, it is not toxic to that organism.''

Remediation in those areas where it is deemed necessary could entail removing soil to a landfill site. Or washing it. Or mixing it with cleaner soil to dilute the metals. Or adding lime to change the pH.

Inco is also interested in trying out an experimental process that uses a plant that ``sucks up'' heavy metals through its roots, which could then be harvested and processed to retrieve the valuable compounds.

The key questions remain: How big an area will Inco clean up? And will Inco admit responsibility if other, possibly more toxic, chemicals are linked to its emissions - such as the lead on Edwards' property?

Rodney St. is at the south end of a neighbourhood known, for reasons lost in the mists of time, as Lidsville.

This is a neighbourhood of neat homes on small lots, where everyone is related, knows everyone's business, and kids don't move away when they grow up.

Now it's also a neighbourhood where sickness, death, and suspicion about links to the metal contamination are on everyone's mind. That was clear at a meeting of the citizens' committee several weeks after the test results from Edwards' yard became public.

Joseph Mayne, a retired worker from Atlas Steel in nearby Welland, recalled the deaths within a year of each other of his daughter Debbie and niece Darlene. They had been born within a year of each other, too, in a neigbourhood northeast of the Inco plant. They both suffered painful deaths 10 years ago, at 37 and 38 years old, from liver cancer.

``What is the cost when two people perish?'' Maynes demanded. ``Why don't they take a survey of every home? I think we've put up with this long enough.''

Bernie Sumbler, another Atlas retiree, had a more immediate concern. ``I live over on Rodney St.,'' he told the meeting quietly, ``and I end up with cancer and I find out today.''

The shocked silence was broken by Al Kuja, a scientist in the environment ministry's standards development branch who became well-known here as he investigated soils across Port Colborne for the ministry's studies in 1998 and 1999.

``I might get into trouble for this but there's something going on,'' a worried Kuja said. ``There's areas where every single household has someone sick, every single family, some member has something - cancers, rashes, leukemia . . .

``Personally I think that something is going on.''

The Niagara health department has compared health statistics for Port Colborne and the rest of Ontario and found no evidence of a higher incidence of cancer, birth defects or any other disease here.

However, medical officer Williams concedes, the small size of the city's population does mean variations could be missed in the statistics.

Inco's Conard does not believe that the heavy metals in Port Colborne's soils have led to health problems but, he said, Inco agreed to fund a health study because of ``public anecdotal evidence, family history evidence and perceptions about health.''

The day after Kuja's outburst at the citizens' meeting, health and environment officials were in damage-control mode.

``Al won't be speaking for the ministry for a while,'' stated Dave McLaughlin, co-ordinator of field investigations in the soil standards section.

Kuja ``spoke from the heart,'' he explained, but, as a soils specialist and not a health expert, he was out of line.

From the heart. For locals, that suggested that someone, finally, was telling the truth. They were stunned that a government employee was expressing their deeply felt convictions.

Wells of the citizens' committee is one of many Port Colborne residents who don't doubt for a moment the truth of what Kuja described.

In his own family, Wells can list cancers and other medical problems suffered by his mother; his wife; his two daughters; a niece; his sister and her three children who lived on Rodney St. for years; and his father and a brother, though the two men had worked at Inco and therefore wouldn't have been exposed to metals only outside the plant.

Wells said he was ``surprised and pleased'' to hear the environment ministry official speak out - but he expected Kuja to pay a price. ``He fell off the fence,'' Wells said.

It was Inco vice-president Conard who, when presented with the environment ministry's evidence, agreed ``there was no doubt it was coming from us.'' To stonewall would have been the old-style approach, Conard said, and he saw no point to it. ``I believe in science and the validity of information. That's the way I live my life.'' Still, he agreed, ``there's a great amount of distrust out there - and that's understandable.''

Inco employees talk of how the company fought the union for decades in Sudbury and Port Colborne to deny compensation for workers and pensions for the families of those who suffered early and horrible deaths from lung, nasal and larynx cancer.

A deep emnity was forged. It's apparent in the skepticism of Jay Ayrs, former president of the steelworkers local in Port Colborne, himself in remission from a cancer of the lymph glands.

``Mr. Conard is there for a reason,'' Ayrs said. ``I think he will delay things as long as possible. People will lose interest and the company will get what it wants.''

The distrust is as persistent as the nickel in the soil.



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