Quebec has three plans for the lagoons of toxic Mercier

Photo archives, BEN PELOSSE
The écotoxicologue Daniel Green shows the pipe through which the department of the Environment, discharges pollutants into a ditch, agricultural Mercier, Montérégie.

Anne Caroline Desplanques

Tuesday, 5 December 2017 22:01

UPDATE
Tuesday, 5 December 2017 22:01

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The minister of the Environment ensures that work on three options to address the contamination of the lagoons Mercier, without specifying when and how it should intervene.

“When I’ll be ready to make an announcement, of course, that you will be made aware,” said the minister Isabelle Melançon Journal on Tuesday.

Without saying what are the three possibilities to the study, Ms. Melançon supports want to set the folder Mercier ” well before the elections “, due out next year.

The minister is intended to be reassuring after the publication of a series of articles in the Newspaper about the contamination of the lagoons of Mercier, the worst site toxic of Quebec, where the pollution that has been accumulating for nearly 50 years.

The Newspaper has revealed in particular that the factory operates to the department on the site drains to the water authority to be carcinogenic in nature, while its mission is to pump pollutants into the groundwater and to prevent that they disperse more.

Health and safety

The department does not, however, revise its methods. “According to science, currently, with this industrial heritage terrible that we have, this is the best we can do,” replied Mrs. Melançon, ensuring that the process ” ensures the safety and health of citizens “.

But André Belisle, the president of the Association québécoise de lutte contre la pollution atmosphérique (AQLPA), is not convinced. According to him, maintaining the current methods without clean deeply the site, ” puts the lives of people and livestock in danger.”

“There may be a resurgence of the water table around a bit, he says. The water does not go down. Sometimes it goes back, according to the topography of the land, and it brings contaminants with it to the surface. “

Maude Laberge, the mayor of Sainte-Martine, a neighbouring municipality of Mercier also be affected by the contamination, also argues for the decontamination deep in the site to defuse “a ticking time bomb,” she said.

Excavation

“We don’t want to scare the population, but as we have seen in other cases, there are entire neighbourhoods that had to be closed because the contaminants break down in soil contaminating houses,” she explains.

The minister Melançon, however, shows that an excavation of the site to extract the contaminated soil would be risky, because the contaminants have slipped up in the rock, very deep into the soil. Dig, therefore, could be traced to contaminants in the rock to the water table.

The excavation is the only solution when PCBS are involved, as is the case in Mercier, indicates the écotoxicologue Daniel Green, since PCBS do not break down.

He recalls that 573 barrels and 355 of capacitors contaminated with PCBS have been buried in the lagoons of Mercier, according to a survey by the ministry of the Environment.