A decade ago, Wally Davis bought this Port Hope house for about $125,000. It took one year and $464,615 of public money to clean up the radioactive contamination here. Next year, 4,800 more properties are due to be checked for contamination. It’s not cle
PORT HOPE, ONT.— It started in the attic. Wally Davis wanted to build a room in the attic of his house. Since he lives in Port Hope, he couldn’t just go ahead and do it. He went to the Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office, a federal agency. He requested the file on his property and asked them to test for remnants of historic radioactive waste.
“There was contamination in the roof, on the floors, in the walls . . . everywhere in the house,” said Davis, 75.
In July 2011, the retired Ontario Hydro employee and his wife, Carole, were relocated to neighbouring Cobourg as agency staff started remediation work. The couple returned to their two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot home this July and discovered that except for the outer walls, it had been essentially rebuilt. “They did a superb job,” Davis said. They did indeed. The waste management office spent $464,615 to clean up the house Davis bought a decade ago for $125,000 — or $130,000. He can’t remember. “We didn’t have a clue how much they spent,” said Davis when the Star told him that almost a halfmillion dollars had been used to remediate his home. “They didn’t tell us,” he said. “That is a lot of money.” The Davis home on Bruton St., in a leafy old part of town, is about two kilometres from the waterfront. It has a red-brick facade, an attached garage and large front and back yards. There’s a shed in the back and a Canadian flag fluttering on a tall post. Port Hope, the picture-perfect lakeside town about 110 kilometres east of Toronto, will soon see the biggest cleanup of historic radioactive waste in Canadian history. Fifty years of radium and uranium refining at the Cameco refinery, formerly Crown corporation Eldorado Nuclear Ltd., has left contamination spread around the town. According to Judy Herod of the Port Hope Area Initiative, the agency in charge of the overall cleanup, the Davis house was “basically gutted” with work done on every part. Workers also removed asbestos found in the floor coverings. But the Davis house — built in the 1940s with tainted lumber — is an anomaly in terms of contamination, Herod said. The Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office had never done a remediation on this scale since it was formed in 1982, said Herod. What that means for the $1.2 bil- lion budgeted for the town’s cleanup isn’t clear but more will be known once a survey — set to start next year — of 4,800 properties is complete. About 10 per cent of the properties are expected to require “some degree of remediation . . . at the most, six to 10 properties will need extensive work,” said Herod — the kind of work done on the Davis house.
The cost of that remediation was released to John Morand, Davis’s former lawyer, after he made a freedom-of-information application. Morand said he was interested because it would give an idea of the extent of contamination in the other properties. The lawyer said he represents the owners of nearly 90 properties in Port Hope.
“At the most, six to 10 properties will need extensive work.” JUDY HEROD OF THE PORT HOPE AREA INITIATIVE, ON FUTURE REMEDIATION
As part of the cleanup, 1.2 million cubic metres of soil will be dug up and trucked to a new storage facility north of town, where it will be sealed and monitored for centuries.
The cleanup is expected to be finished in 2019.
Meanwhile, Davis’s neighbours are glad the couple is back. “Everyone knew there was a cleanup on,” said Peggy Hay, who lives down the street. “There was fence around the house . . . they were here for a while.”
But Hay said the cleanup of a neighbour’s house didn’t concern her at all. “I’m happy it was cleaned up but I don’t have any overall concerns about the town,” she said. “I feel Port Hope is safe.”
The Davises are thrilled with their new digs. Everything is newly built and looks great, said Wally.
The couple had no complaints about living for a year in Cobourg, where Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. paid their rent. They were well looked after, Wally said. “It was just too long drawn out.”