Discharges continue, samples taken at Port Granby waste site

Mark and I left Toronto at 8:30am and arrived at the Port Granby site at 9:30am. The weather was approximately 10 degrees and overcast. We witnessed what appeared to be a contracted company locking the gates and mowing the lawns on-site, and proceeded to the East side of the site. We drove down the edge of a farmer?s field, parked at the edge of the ravine, and walked down to the beach from there.

At the bottom of the hill approaching the beach, we observed a black pipe that appeared to have drifted East from the actual site (as we have seen similar pipes on site before, and went on to see later today).

We also observed a fish swimming (weakly) in the shallows, and took photos of it as it washed up close to shore. The fish was a sickly sucker, approximately 5 lbs., and was covered in welts and blisters.

We proceeded to walk west along the beach, inspecting the site throughout. We observed discharges from pipes and out of the banks. At the west end of the site where the discharge point of the facility is, we observed that the discharge was pooling on the gravel at the beach and actually discharging out of the gravel into the lake directly. We took pictures of this discharge as we recognized the importance of connecting the discharge of the pipe to the discharge into the lake. Today there was a clear and visible connection between the two. We sampled the discharge from the pipe in a one litre brown jar (after rinsing the jar 3 times with the discharge) and a small clear plastic jar (labelled 10:00am May 24, 2002 PG 1 LOK MM) we obtained from Xenon to have observed for metals testing.

While at the site we also observed a small campsite where a fire had been built and some stone figures had been created, and VANDEWATER was spelled out in stones on the sandy beach. This site is directly below parts of the bluff where leachate was seeping. We took pictures of that as well.

We then proceeded up to the car, stored the bottles in the cooler and drove to Port Hope. When we reached the car, we observed a wild turkey running/flying east to west across the field and into the fenced in waste site.

Kevin Tuohy is a University of Toronto law student, working with Lake Ontario Keeper during the summer 2002.