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05 | 12 | 2012 VOLUME 17 | ISSUE 22
collecting their accolades and saying goodbye SPORTS PAGE 13
COMMENT PAGE 10
Township has to justify its hiring practices
www.OBSERVERXTRA.com
Chemtura pledges to meet 2028 cleanup deadline STEVE KANNON
Grade 2 students from John Mahood Public School show some of the 2,000 food items the school collected for the WCS food bank. The WCS collected enough food over the last week to keep its shelves stocked through out the summer months. [colin dewar / the observer]
Spring drive tops up supplies at food banks COLIN DEWAR More than 52,000 lbs of food was donated to the Waterloo Region food banks during the annual Dig In food drive. In Woolwich Township close to 2,500 lbs were collected over the one-day event. The Woolwich Community Services also received $354 in cash donations, which will be used to purchase additional food. Combined with the totals from other
food drives and campaigns across the township, WCS is confident it will have adequate supplies to support those in need over the summer months. “This is such a great drive for us to hold in the springtime because in the summer people tend to go to the cottage, out doing other things and perhaps not shopping as much and we don’t get a lot in the way of donations over those months. So this drive allows us to top everything up now and
lets us get through the summer,” said Don Harloff, executive director of the WCS. In Elmira, Chemtura Co. held an employee-initiated food drive within its Erb Street plant, collecting two large bins of food. “We are always looking for community events to participate in and I saw the Dig In for the region’s food banks and thought food drive | 4
An Elmira chemical company says it’s committed to cleaning up the town’s contaminated groundwater by the provinciallyset 2028 deadline, arguing its current approaches will be sufficient to reach that goal. The township’s environmental watchdog, however, wants the Ministry of the Environment to force Chemtura Co. to do more, including the digging up and removal of source material, to ensure the work gets done. In voting on the issue this week, Woolwich councillors sided with the Chemtura Public Advisory Committee, despite a call from the company to stay the course. They did, however, welcome Chemtura’s commitment to the cleanup project. The company has been using a pumpand-treat process to remove a pair of toxins – NDMA (nitrosodimethylamine) and chlorobenzene – from the former drinking water aquifers underneath Elmira. The discovery in 1989 of the carcinogenic NDMA precipitated the water crisis in Elmira, leading to the construction of a pipeline from Waterloo, which supplies the town with water to this day. An MOE control order sets out the company’s responsibility for dealing with CPAC | 4
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