Cleaning up a contaminated site in Brandon

Monday this week I was in Brandon. There was much discussion about the proposed use of a contaminated site for a new fire hall. I met with members of the Firefighter's Union to hear their concerns. For a number of reasons, they are strongly opposed to the use of this contaminated site for the new fire hall. I also talked to a variety of other people about this issue.

This site has been evaluated and found to have considerable heavy metal contamination as a result of its use by previous industries. There is considerable amounts of lead as a result of batteries and battery material disposed at the site. Dr. Pip's report also mentions concerns over levels of silver, aluminum, arsenic, zinc, molybdenum, bariu, cadmium, copper, iron, manganese, selenium, thallium and uranium.

Reports by Wardrop and by Dr. Eva Pip which review an earlier assessment have left concerns about certain aspects of the earlier studies, most notably the impact on groundwater and on the Assiniboine River, and about the overall cost to clean the site to the degree needed if the site were to be used for the firehall.

As noted in Monday's Brandon Sun, Deveryn Ross, a candidate for Mayor of Brandon has been calling on the province to formally call the site a "contaminated site", and oversee the cleanup - since the provincial Contaminated Sites and Remediation Act says municipalities are not responsible for cleaning up sites acquired through back taxes (as was the case for most of this site). Yet to date, the provincial NDP government has been absent from the discussion.

In a meeting which I attended as an observer, Brandon City Council voted to reverse its decision to use this site for a firehall, and instead decided to proceed with cleanup of the site.

There is a provincial responsibility to identify contaminated sites and to ensure a cleanup process is in place and carried out. To date the province has been not been adequately invovled. It is time the province get involved to ensure the site is properly cleaned up.