30 Years After Discovering Massive Toxic Site In Lake Ontario, Canada Moving Towards Containment
A federal government scientist named Tom Murphy was out on his boat on Lake Ontario in 1988, taking samples of lakebed sediment, when he pulled up a scoop of oozing black goo. His upper lip went numb. He detected the pungent, sour smell of mothballs — naphthalene, a carcinogen produced in coal tar distillation. “We quickly could smell that there were a lot of volatile compounds,” Murphy says.
Murphy was sampling in Randle Reef, which along with Hamilton Harbour around it had been listed among 43 “areas of concern” for pollution in the Great Lakes in 1985, one of the 12 wholly located in Canada. Murphy had found the toxic site’s oozing epicentre.
The humongous blob of coal tar had already been releasing contaminants on the bottom of Lake Ontario for decades in the inner harbour next to one of Hamilton’s oldest steel mills. Coal tar is a by-product of coal gasification — a viscous, sooty reminder of the industries that have been operating here for more than a century. Randle Reef is now considered the largest contaminated site on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes and the second-most contaminated site in Canada after the Sydney Tar Ponds in Nova Scotia. The volume of contaminated sediment in the Hamilton Harbour could fill up three hockey arenas.
The 60-hectare blob at Randle Reef is a so-called “spill in slow motion,” releasing cancer-causing chemicals into the water and creating an ecological dead zone. But a solution is in the works. More than 30 years have passed since the toxic site was formally identified but it took until 2016 for Environment and Climate Change Canada, along with other groups at the table, to put a plan in motion to deal with it. Rather than remove the blob of black sludge, the $139-million plan is to build a box around it. And the Steeltown solution to the Steeltown problem? Make that box out of steel.
EDIT
https://thenarwhal.ca/lake-ontario-aquatic-landfill-toxic-blob-steel-mill/
