Tagged: Sydney Tar Ponds
Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill
Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called “the indispensable (and highly controversial)” Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as “hazardous,” and warranting “health warnings of emergency conditions.”
What caught my attention was Fallows’s assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is “the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China.” That is astounding: one PM2.5 meter for a nation of 1.3 billion people. By contrast, Sydney, Nova Scotia, population ~27,000,* has seven instruments that monitor PM2.5.
Bear with me for a brief technical digression. PM2.5 is a measure of the concentration of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a metre)—tiny particles that can find their way deep inside people’s lungs. It’s the air quality scientist’s indicator of choice for air pollution most likely to damage health.
To confound matters further, Sydney’s closely monitored air quality appears to be quite good. Here is the most recent publicly available data, from a 24-hour sample collected on October 12.
Each column represents a different monitoring station, each of which has two types of monitors. The highest reading among them was less than 1/1ooth of that registered this week in Beijing. These monitors run for 24 hours once every six days, a schedule that coincides with Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network. A seventh Sydney-based unit operates continuously and contributes data used to calculate Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), but the PM2.5 results are not reported separately.
This appears to be a clear case of underkill in Beijing, where much better data is warranted, and I would argue, overkill in Sydney, where air quality has been unremarkable by North American standards for the last two decades. Over-measurement in Sydney reflects the public panic over the Tar Ponds cleanup in the late ’90s and early ‘oughts. A few environmental activists persuaded residents that air-quality impacts from the Tar Ponds were putting their health at risk, a falsehood Environment Canada has been loathe to correct. Ironically, back before Sydney’s coke ovens closed in 1988, the city’s air likely did pose a health hazard, but went largely unmonitored.
The relative hazards of air quality in China vs. Nova Scotia show up clearly in this NASA map compiled from satellite readings of average PM2.5 levels around the world between 2001 and 2006:
I would ascribe both conditions — Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill — to the politicization of environmental monitoring. Back when Sydney’s polluting steel mill and coke ovens were the largest employer in a region short of jobs, few people wanted to hear about associated environmental concerns, and government was content to turn a blind eye. Similarly, the Chinese government is reluctant to highlight the environmental costs of its spectacular economic growth (although, as Fallows often points out, its environmental record is not so indifferent as some in the west assume).
In subsequent posts on Beijing air monitoring, Fallows has subtly adjusted his claim about @Beijingair’s putative uniqueness in China. He now describes it as “the only public readings of PM 2.5.” The controversial feed is based on an air monitoring unit on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Official chinese annoyance over it was the subject of a Wikileaks cable, and may have contributed to the Chinese government decision to block access to Twitter in 2009. There are welcome early signs, here and here, that China may soon begin more appropriate monitoring. I would be surprised if they are not secretly monitoring PM2.5.
My point here is that citizens should take care to view environmental hazards in context, and always remain mindful that any chemical hazard is proportional to dose.
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*Sydney no longer exists as a municipal unit, having been amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in 1995. Wikipedia puts the “Sydney area” population in the 2006 census at 33,012, but this is suspiciously high. I was unable to ferret out local population numbers from StatsCan’s online census information, but will be delighted if readers can steer me to them.
A contaminated silt plume no one seems concerned about
A 100-hectare sediment plume kicked up by the Sydney Harbor dredging project, and presumably laden with industrial contaminants, has some officials annoyed over Environment Canada’s failure to regulate the project.
Gerry Langille, a Sydney-based industrial photographer often used by government agencies, snapped the photos Wednesday in calm conditions at slack tide. They have since circulated widely among federal and provincial bureaucrats.
The Google Earth screenshot at left shows the approximate location of the upper photograph. The photo below shows the shoreline at Pt. Edward where the dredged material makes landfall, and where most of the sedimentation appears to originate. The infilled material will supposedly form the foundation for a container pier, but provincial and federal officials are privately skeptical it will ever be built.
The $38-million dredging project, condemned by some as a costly boondoggle raising false hopes for economic revival in Sydney, was widely seen as an effort to elect Conservative candidate Cecil Clarke in last spring’s federal election. Clarke lost narrowly to five-term Liberal MP Mark Eyking, but was subsequently hired as a $135,000/year consultant to the Cape Breton County Economic Development Agency. The position is funded by Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, the federal agency funding Ottawa’s share of the dredging project.
The Sydney Tar Ponds were first identified as an environmental problem in 1982, when fisheries scientists found high levels of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in lobster caught in Sydney Harbor. They fingered the Tar Ponds as the probable source. A 2002 report by Kenneth Lee of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography found harbor sediments contaminated with widely varying levels of industrial chemicals, particularly PAHs.
Contaminant levels are thought to have declined since the coke ovens stopped operating in 1988, thanks to dispersion from tidal action, storms, and the prop wash from the large cruise ships that regularly dock just outside the Tar Ponds. The dredging project, sold as a first step to the container terminal, received provincial environmental approval in 2009, based on an environmental assessment prepared by the engineering firm Jacques Whitford.
In 2009, and again last February, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency approved the project based on an environmental screening, the lightest form of environmental assessment, but the screening report does not appear on the agency’s hard-to-navigate website.
Officials of Public Works and Government Services Canada, the federal department responsible for the Tar Ponds cleanup, threatened to suspend marine effects monitoring of that project Friday because uncontrolled sedimentation from the nearby harbor dredging would obliterate the small amount of sediments escaping the Tar Ponds.
One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue, complained of a double standard by Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Just last week, Environment Canada ordered the provincial Sydney Tar Ponds Agency to lift a control boom at the outer edge of the Tar Ponds so a Cape Islander could enter the North Tar Pond and collect sediment samples. Meanwhile, the same agencies took no action as the dredging project kicked up a huge plume of presumably contaminated sediments a few hundred meters away.
“We are pumping all the water from Coke Ovens Brook and the Wash Brook around both Tar Ponds,” the official said. “The South Pond is completely filled in. How could our project possibly be doing anything but reducing the amount of sediments moving into the harbor?”
[Disclosure: I managed communications for the Tar Ponds cleanup from 2001 to 2007, when the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency terminated my contract.]
Chernobyl wildlife sanctuary
When Henry Shukman, a writer for Outsideonline.com, visited the 30 km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, here’s what he found:
The wild boar is standing 30 or 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me. Even from this distance I can see its outrageously long snout, its giant pointed ears, and the spiny bristles along its back. It looks part porcupine, a number of shades of ocher and gray. And it’s far bigger than I expected, maybe chest-high to a man. The boar is like some minor forest god straight from the wilderness, gazing wild-eyed at the strange spectacle of a human being. For a moment it seems to consider charging me, then thinks better of it. When it trots away, it moves powerfully, smoothly, on spindly, graceful legs twice as long as a pig’s, and vanishes into the trees.
Keep people out of an area, and wildlife moves in.
It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale….
Frogs plop into the water, boatmen skedaddle across the surface, dragonflies hover—it’s like a weight has been lifted from the world. A sparrowhawk turns in lazy circles; a pair of ducks race by, low down, necks stretched, and make it to a willow on the far bank with a clatter of relief.
I experienced the same thing working on the Sydney Tar Ponds from 2001 to 2006. Until cleanup efforts moved into high gear last winter, a fence kept people at bay, with the unintended consequence of creating a refuge for wildlife. This had a delightfully confounding effect on visitors. Media reports and environmentalist hyperbole had led most newcomers to expect a roiling cauldron of bubbling tar. Instead, they found a water body teeming with wildlife: foxes, feral cats, raptors, water fowl, shorebirds, and a dozen fish species. Lush wildflowers blanketed the edge of the pond, nourished by a continuous flow of raw sewage until the Battery Point treatment plant went into service.
Sporadic studies failed to turn up much in the way of chemically induced injury to wild animals in the Tar Ponds Exclosure. Not so in Chernobyl:
On the surface, Igor says, the wildlife seems to be thriving, but under the fur and hide, the DNA of most species has become unstable. They’ve eaten a lot of food contaminated with cesium and strontium. Even though the animals look fine, there are differences at the chromosomal level in every generation, as yet mostly invisible. But some have started to show: there are bird populations with freakishly high levels of albinism, with 20 percent higher levels of asymmetry in their feathers, and higher cancer rates. There are strains of mice with resistance to radioactivity—meaning they’ve developed heritable systems to repair damaged cells. Covered in radioactive particles after the disaster, one large pine forest turned from green to red: seedlings from this Red Forest placed in their own plantation have grown up with various genetic abnormalities. They have unusually long needles, and some grow not as trees but as bushes. The same has happened with some birch trees, which have grown in the shape of large, bushy feathers, without a recognizable trunk at all.
Photo credit: S. Gaschak. H/T: Arts and Letters Daily.
Rabbit-proof wall
Polish filmmaker Bartosz Konopka recounts the history of the Berlin Wall from the perspective of rabbits trapped in the no-man’s land created by the structure. Freed from hunting pressure, they multiplied and prospered. After all, no one was shooting at them.
Such structures, known to biologists as “exclosures,” often belie their brutal genesis with an unintended beneficial impact on wildlife. After all, they exclude the most destructive of predators: people. The DMZ between North and South Korea is said to be teeming with otherwise endangered wild animals. Until the cleanup began last summer, the fenced-off Sydney Tar Ponds was home to large populations of foxes, feral cats, muskrats, voles, field mice, and a multitude of ducks, gulls, and shorebirds.
Konopka talks about the rabbit project here.
A crat’s a crat for a’ that
In his game effort to wish away the cheque-writing scandal, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor posts a telling email from an anonymous Harper MP:
When we formed govt the crats stopped bringing cheques to announcements & we were FORCED to cough up the $ to buy our own. Specifically, at [a government department I was involved with] the crats used to like to be in the photo ops giving out chqs, as though it was coming from them. They detested Conservatives being photographed handing out chqs, so they stopped bringing the chqs – when they even bothered to show up for announcements. They’ve screwed up dates for announcements so badly (trying to schedule announcements while the House is in session) that we don’t even bother to include them, thereby saving taxpayers thousands of $s in travel claims from the crats.
Two things leap out at me from this screed: (1) The seething rage of the unreconstructed Reformer who wrote it; (2) How sharply it deviates from my own experience with federal bureaucrats and political announcements, both Liberal and Conservative.
For six years, I directed communications for the Sydney Tar Ponds cleanup, a $400-million, joint federal-provincial project. Over that time, we endured many federal-provincial announcements. These were invariably ordeals, mainly because of heavy-handed micromanagement from Ottawa. Not once did I see a “crat” elbow his way into a photo-op. On the contrary, unelected officials were exquisitely deferential to their elected bosses, whether Liberal or Conservative.
We never produced mega-cheques for photo ops under either party’s guidance. Doesn’t everyone regard these as cheesy relics, whatever logo they bear?
The one salient difference after Harper took office was that decisions concentrated obsessively in the PMO. Officials of the many federal departments with a role in the cleanup had to clear the minutest detail not just with their departmental head office but with Harper’s—a process that often produced less than optimal outcomes.
