
What’s a city to do when it turns out the crown jewel of a beautiful waterfront park is lying on top of a toxic mess that’s bubbling up from underground to menace locals and visitors alike?That’s the question dogging Sarnia’s city council as it prepares to decide on Monday how to restore sections of Centennial Park, the city’s waterfront promenade along the St. Clair River, which was featured in the VICE documentary about the Chemical Valley last year. Centennial Park has been closed to the public for the last year due to the discovery of toxic chemicals—a legacy left from decades of indiscriminate dumping.
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In spite of his reading and research, Beaudet hasn’t found a sympathetic ear with city engineer Morin. “Trace asbestos is not safe. It’s a risk (to citizens) and a liability (to the city government),” he told Beaudet, as the mayor and several councilors listened from the audience. The area’s chief medical official and Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment also agree something must be done, he said.Asbestos may be a touchy word for most folk in the developed world, but it has particular poignancy in Sarnia. Just ask Margaret Buist and her friends who filled up part of a row at the public meeting. All four lost their husbands to either lung cancer or mesothelioma, a cancer of the tissues around the lungs that has long been linked to asbestos exposure. The material was used in the Chemical Valley until the early 1980s as an insulator. A few years later, occupational health advocates started noticing this especially ugly cancer was killing off industrial retirees in the area at an alarming rate; a rate tabulated at between 4 and 6 times the provincial average. Some victims would endure dozens of radiation treatments, lose their teeth, and suffer tumours on their faces before the inevitable. Over 600 cases turned up in this city of 74,000 between 1999 and 2007, an epidemic delayed until later in their lives due to the long latency period of the disease.Sarnia’s asbestos didn’t just stay inside the walls of local industry either. The fibres have been known to stick to workers’ clothing making their family members sick at home, and the lighter-than-feathers strands may have blown around Sarnia in years past coming to rest in Centennial Park. Paul Beaudet remembers a business known as Holmes Insulation was once operating next to the park, making an asbestos-based product that was heated for drying, forcing the air from drying ovens up stacks and into the open air. Are you wincing yet? This reporter’s children, growing up in Sarnia, still remember the man down the street “with no nose.”
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