Dump site bad for health: residents

Despite best and consistent efforts, an Annapolis County community group says asbestos and other unsafe material is still being buried in their backyards.

“Our concern is simply that the dump is unsafe,” said Kip Mccurdy, who lives in St. Croix Cove, less than a kilometre downhill from the Arlington Heights C&D site.

“There are currently three formal complaints about operations at the dump,” said Mccurdy, part of a community group of more than two dozen residents called the Annapolis Waterkeepers who live on the North Mountain on the Fundy shore.

“First, the place stinks, literally,” Mccurdy said. “We think the odours are a combination of nasty organic disposals, like expired lobster, and the acrid stench of a stills mouldering fire that was never fully extinguished.

“Second, the place continues to accept autofluff in defiance of (Environment Minister) Gordon Wilson's order to cease and desist. The manager claims in her Facebook post that she has permission to dump fluff.”

Autofluff is a mixture of materials including plastics, foam, textiles, rubber and glass that make up the 25 per cent of an automobile's components that can't be recycled. Autofluff is contaminated with rust, dirt and a variety of fluids and is not recyclable.

Much of the autofluff dumped at the Arlington Heights site, loccated some 10 kilometres north of Bridgetown, is trucked about 175 kilometres from Halifax.

In a correspondence to Mccurdy sent from the environment minister on Oct. 1, 2019, that is available on the Waterkeepers' website, Wilson said the autofluff material already received at the Arlington Heights site had been tested and that the risk of environmental impact was deemed low.

In a Nov. 14 reply to Mccurdy, the minister said that when the department was made aware of the autofluff material at the Arlington Heights site, it conducted a review.

“Once it was decided that this was not an acceptable material, the owner of the facility was advised to no longer accept the material," Wilson wrote.

The last complaint, Mccurdy says, is that asbestos waste is being off-loaded prior to proper cell disposal in or near public access areas of the dump.

“Some plastic bags break when loads are dumped, more break when the material is reloaded for transport to the proper disposal cell,” Mccurdy said.

“Patrons of the dump, therefore, may be unknowingly exposed to asbestos contamination as they drive on dusty roads or kick up contaminated dust as they work to unload.”

The biggest concern is for dump employees and people who use the facility, Mccurdy said.

“Some of them will doubtless suffer asbestos-related illness in years to come.”

The fire that Mccurdy referenced happened in September 2018, when about 70 firefighters spent 12 hours extinguishing hot spots from an underground fire at the C&D site.

Jennifer Poole, who has owned the C&D operation for more than two decades, didn't respond to requests for an interview Thursday but said after the fire that it was deliberately set and that the operation, which was granted a permit for an adjacent asbestos waste disposal facility in July 2017, is in compliance with her permit to operate.

In his correspondence with Mccurdy from October, Wilson said groundwater and surface water monitoring is required at the facility in accordance with its approval and that annual reports are compiled by an environmental professional and provided to the department for review by professional engineers and hydrogeologists as required.

“Currently accepted scientific study supports that asbestos fibres are not water soluble, do not bind to soils and as a result do not move through groundwater to any appreciable extent,” Wilson wrote.

The minister wrote that the ingestion of asbestos fibres that Mccurdy and his group alluded to in earlier correspondence “appear to refer to contaminated food or liquids, such as water that flows through asbestos cement pipes, or food which has been subjected to airborne asbestos particles.”

Mccurdy said the three most recent complaints launched are currently being assessed by a new inspector. Mccurdy said he expects the former inspector may have been reassigned after the Waterkeepers levelled pointed question that included how could the inspector not notice that 70 per cent of the material in the dump (autofluf) was non-compliant and why residents complaints led to “more time inspecting their properties than the dump itself.”

The newly assigned inspector's report seems to be delayed by the COVID-19 crisis but two questions hover in the background, Mccurdy said.

“Why has (the Environment Department) consistently bent over backwards to waive its own ‘conditions of approval' in order to keep the dump operational,” he said. “For example, (the department) required rebuilding Arlington Road before additional asbestos disposal would be allowed. Two years later, the road remains unrepaired but the asbestos keeps coming.”

Mccurdy said the second unanswered question is why Premier Stephen Mcneil, the MLA for the area, “is willing to throw the communities of Arlington, Rumsey Lake, and St. Croix under the bus.

“Why is the health and safety of the residents less important than maintaining the dump.”

The Arlington Heights C&D facility north of Bridgetown.