Work starts on $63.5M-cleanup of PCB dump

London Free Press Sat, February 21, 2009

By JONATHAN SHER

Trucks carrying PCB-laced soil will soon snake through east London as contractors remove about 78,000 tonnes of the toxic compound from the former Westinghouse plant. Work on the $63.5-million project began yesterday at Ontario's largest PCB storage dump, as contractors walked past four mounds of soil, its harmful contents a legacy of a plant that built capacitors and transformers from 1957 until it was closed more than 30 years later. While the mounds are called "vaults" by Ontario's Environment Ministry, there's no enclosure of steel or concrete or even plastic. Instead, there are liners and a system of collecting runoff before it can contaminate surrounding soil. "They are controlled landfills," said Larry Rodricks, a regional manager of Quantum Murray, a Toronto firm hired by the province to lead the cleanup. Work will begin next month to build a temporary building over one of the vaults. When that's done, the trucks will start to come, increasing when a larger building is erected over the other three vaults. Click here to find out more! At peak, three or four trucks an hour will enter the site on Clarke Road south of Huron Street and into one of the two buildings -- one, the length of three football fields -- where they'll be loaded, dusted off and washed before leaving. The operation will run five or six days a week from about 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.. While the firm hasn't finalized its exit route with city officials, it would prefer trucks turn left on Clarke, left again on Oxford Street and right on Veterans Memorial Highway to Highway 401, their final destination St. Ambroise, Que., where the PCBs will be incinerated. "The goal is to remove all the soil by the end of the year and to do so in a manner that protects the community, protects our workers and prevents any releases to the environment," Rodricks said. The contract requires the soil be removed by Dec. 11. Banned in 1977, PCBs are toxic to fish and birds and likely cause cancer in humans. JONATHAN.SHER@SUNMEDIA.CA