Mark A MacDonald Doesn’t Believe Cornwall Officials Were Powerless Over Illegal Chem Tanks on Waterfront – Letter to the Editor

mark sept 2013Are you kidding me, city officials are powerless to stop the construction of the illegal chemical storage tanks that are being built on our waterfront!

 

This is insane. The company ignores the “Stop Work Order” and they forge ahead with the tank farm. If an ordinary guy ignored an Order, he would have been arrested and in jail by now.

 

I call on our elected officials to use all means necessary and immediately stop any further construction at the site. Who the heck is in charge?

 

If our elected officials have given up, we deserve to know.

 

Mark A. MacDonald

Cornwall ON

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via medica

8 Comments

  1. The harbour area where the tanks are being built is owned by the federal government. So, the construction company is taking it’s orders from either the federal government and / or TDC via the federal government. Cornwall can issue all the by-laws they want, but senior levels of government do not have to answer or obey lower levels of government. Once this case goes to court that is what Cornwall will be told.

  2. Hugger|: I do think you are right… but it is my belief from what I have heard that if Cornwall wants them removed they will have to buy the land… Who does that affect? We the tax payers..

  3. Council has shown that they really do not care,Mayor lied about when he was first contacted about the tanks,He never even as much as discussed this with council who claim that they were never told.Now any normal mayor would not just roll over & play dead,He/She would have consulted council first & look for ways to rally the troops of interested Cornwall citizens to come together for a common cause,Maybe just maybe this is the price that Kilger had to pay back to Gov for all favours & saves shown him over the years

  4. Jane Doe;

    If Cornwall was to buy and take over the harbour the bad thing is that they would have to take the contracts that are currently in place with the current owner, the federal government.. That would include the tanks currently being buily. It would cost us enormous amounts of money to get rid of them. So, the tanks will be staying.

  5. Author

    Sadly Simon Chuck Charlebois and his friends at the Chamber were not interested in working together to do that exactly.

  6. @ Simon…

    when does the federal government follow it’s own rules?

  7. And so it goes…

    Dioxins (TCDDs), Furans (TCDFs), Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), and more zinc, mercury and crud than you can imagine is resting on the riverbed; from the RCAF Wing to Farlinger’s point, and beyond.

    And even though government and international studies have shown the huge amounts and toxicity of the sediment that hugs the Cornwall shoreline, it cannot safely be removed. The only course of action (until now), has been to ensure that the acres and acres of toxic material off our waterfront were undisturbed.

    But with the ships and tugs that will soon be coming and going ,and with some added spills and filth, that mess is on it’s way to Glen Walter and more.

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