Sarnia's First Nation Residents Are Demanding Local Officials Do a Better Job Of Monitoring Air Pollution

Chemical Valley at nightfall. All photos via author.
You’ve heard the sirens sounding; you’ve a funny taste in your mouth; or maybe it’s stinging in your eyes. The radio says there’s an “incident” at a local oil refinery but not-to-worry; the company says there’s “no off-site impact” and their air monitoring machinery at their fence line detects nothing. Who do you turn to?   This scenario plays out much too frequently in the south end of Sarnia, according to residents of the Aamjiwnaang native community whose boundaries are surrounded by the cluster of refineries and petrochemical plants known as the “Chemical Valley.” And often enough they turn to Ontario’s Environment Ministry, whose 16 listed local employees try to keep tabs on local industry, and whose Spills Action Centre takes spill reports and answers residents’ questions about leaks 24/7.

Fears, tears, and frustration were the unplanned order of business this week as Ministry officials met with citizens at the First Nation to discuss new standards for certain cancer-causing chemicals, including the gasoline additive benzene. “It seems they [industry] can put out as much black crap [in smoke] as they want and nobody’s monitoring it,” long-time Aamjiwnaang activist Ada Lockridge told the Ministry group.

The Ministry has two air monitoring sites in Sarnia, for over 60 industries in the area, a level that’s not good enough to reassure people in event of chemical leaks, she told VICE.  People are concerned the only Ministry monitoring site at Aamjiwnaang is at the edge of the reserve, Lockridge said. The monitors are over 2 kilometres from Lockridges’s and others’ homes that are cheek-by-jowl with industries such as Suncor’s Sarnia refinery.

If a serious air leak occurs, the Ministry can call in a specially-equipped monitoring van from London, Ontario, an hour’s drive away from Sarnia, to add to the two fixed sites, said Mike Moroney, the M.O.E.’s Sarnia office manager, a fact that doesn’t satisfy Ada Lockridge.  “When Shell had an incident with hydrogen sulphide, that van couldn’t even get by their [Shell’s] roadblocks,” shouted Lockridge, challenging the government reps. The van can’t go into an area when a “shelter-in-place” order has been issued in order to protect staff, replied a Ministry official. The air monitoring reserve at the south end reserve.
While the two monitoring stations are supplemented by others run by a Chemical Valley cooperative, the Ministry relies too much on industry to monitor themselves, she says. “The M.O.E. just says “They’d better not lie,” she scolded the officials at the Wed. meeting.

“We need to do better,” admitted Scott Grant, engineer specialist with the Ministry, to Lockridge and others at the meeting. The message was “loud and clear,” that people want more air monitoring, he said in an interview with VICE. Public input from the meeting will go back to the Ministry, and will be used to help formulate policy in the future, he said.

The province will also spend $18,000 to bring in U.S. experts and hold a 2-day workshop in Sarnia next November to discuss how to improve air monitoring, Grant told the meeting.

The province began bringing in the new rules in 2006 to reduce the amount of chemicals such as benzene and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP) released to the air by oil refineries to levels to where there’s a “one in a million chance” of exposure causing cancer, according to Denis Jugloff, a Ministry toxicologist.

Yet the government changed this approach when refinery representatives complained in 2012 they couldn’t meet that standard, according to Grant. Instead the Ministry is now planning to impose a “technical standard” that expects companies to use the best available technology to  prevent leaks, instead of holding them to an exact amount of discharge allowed annually, Grant told the audience.

While that might sound like the province is backing down, that’s not the case said Ministry scientist Jugloff. The one/million chance is like a speed limit, not a “red line,” he explained to this reporter. “If the speed limit is 50 miles an hour, the wheels don’t fall off your vehicle if you drive at 51,” he said by way of comparison. The Ministry will be doing additional monitoring at plants to see if there’s a difference between the science-based “speed limit” and the technical standards, he said.

The new regs take effect in 2016, covering six refineries in Ontario; Suncor in Mississauga, Imperial Oil in Nanticoke, along with Imperial, Suncor, Shell, and Nova in the Sarnia area.

So why is it 14 years into the new century and Ontario is getting the first regulations limiting the known carcinogen benzene? “It was going to cost too much to comply,” in earlier years, came the Ministry answer.

That OK with you? Well, benzene may be the nasty, possibly leukemia-causing, quickly-evaporating chemical  the Ministry’s briefing papers told this reporter, but we can take some comfort in knowing that in the 21st century we’re breathing the results of frying in the frying pan rather than cooking over the fire. Benzene has turned up more and more on air monitors across North America in the last 20-25 years because it’s a replacement for that well-known poison that may have done-in ancient Rome and still causes fear among parents of toy-tasting toddlers;  lead,  according to Scott Grant.  More good news: levels of benzene have also declined in urban areas across Canada four-fold since 1991, according to data from Environment Canada.

Still, benzene is being detected at Aamjiwnaang at double the provincial recommended yearly limit of 0.45 micro-gram/cubic metre,  Ministry testing shows. Concentrations there are  around 1 mg/m3. Yet that may well be lower than people who live near a 400-series highway in Ontario, because of benzene in auto exhaust, and results in the Montreal area have been found as high as 5mg/m3, said Scott Grant.

Try as they might to stick to their agenda, discuss the new provincial rules, and collect the neat-and-tidy type of “input” governments always seem to want, people living in the Chemical Valley spent the evening determined to bring the government specialists back down to earth; or at least the part they live on and the air above it. Consultation burn-out leads to frayed nerves.

“Why do we have to keep doing this over and over again for each company, each chemical, each new thing they want to do,” called-out Lockridge, voice rising, tears in eyes. “How many people have to die here or suffer from all these illnesses before somebody does something,” she scolded.

Ada Lockridge.
“I don’t see any other community surrounded by 63 industries where people never get an answer to their questions,” said mother-of-four Vicki Noel, who remembers one teenaged son walking home during the January 2013 leak of mercaptan and hydrogen sulphide from Shell in Sarnia, feeling sick for two days after with the taste of sulphur in his mouth. Officials at the community day-care weren’t  informed of the shelter-in-place order from their municipality and only began shutting down their ventilation system after the local fire department tested their air for a natural gas leak. By that time, some of the children were suffering from sore throats and red eyes. Over 30 residents complained of symptoms after the leak.  Protests took place later that week, remembers Noel. “It’s not right when five year old children have to be protesting in the streets, she complained to Vice.

Ada Lockridge is trying to make up for what she sees is a lack of Ministry monitoring. Linking up with the non-governmental group Global Community Monitor,  when leaks occur, she opens up a “bucket” to take her own samples. At $30 a bucket, $40 for shipping, and $500 for analyzing the samples, the NGO is paying a hefty price to fill the gap.

Still, it may not be the leaks that are the biggest worry for Aamjiwnaang. Lockridge remembers recently taking a background air sample at the community’s cemetery, tucked in a corner behind the Suncor refinery, and finding “quite a few toxins.” “This is really scary if we’re not tasting, seeing, or smelling [the chemicals]. “We don’t even know we’re being exposed to anything.”

Knowing what’s going on in the air around them; timely and trusted information, is the one thing she and her community are looking to the province for. Even after years of living with fear, anxiety and frustration, Aamjiwnaang is still begging the watchdogs to keep better guard, start barking a little louder, and perhaps add a little more bite.