12 August 2008
Junction Creek Bed Free of Creosote
Junction Creek.
Sudbury Ontario - Junction Creek is
creosote-free, and that's worth celebrating, city officials and area residents agree.
Greater Sudbury hosted a celebration on the banks of Junction Creek between Lorne and Copper streets to mark the successful completion
of a $3.3-million project to remove creosote from the creek bed Monday.
Peter D'Aoust and Danny Beltrame have lived on Copper Street for 15 years. They have witnessed improvements in the creek.
"We saw fish jumping out of the water already here last month," said D'Aoust.
But he admitted they weren't big enough for him to get out his fishing rod.
Carrie Regenstrief is the acting co-ordinator of the Junction Creek Stewardship Committee.
She said the committee's summer students have observed a healthy diversity of fish species in this stretch of the creek, but they are
not as abundant as in the upstream reaches. The committee plans to plant some more trees and make additional improvements to the creek
to enhance fish habitat in the area.
The contamination was discovered in 1999 by a group of volunteers from the Junction Creek Stewardship Committee, a
non-profit organization working to improve the environmental quality of the Junction Creek watershed.
Regenstrief said volunteers were cleaning garbage out of that section of the creek when they noticed an oily film on the water and what
looked like oil seeping up from the sediments.
Further testing confirmed the presence of creosote, an oily wood preservative.
The creosote was at levels less than those that would pose a risk to human health, but at levels that could be hazardous to aquatic
life in the creek.
Regenstrief said the committee played a major role in first discovering the contamination and in convincing the responsible parties to
clean it up.
Nine years later, the committee celebrated its achievements by releasing a bucket of fish collected from a healthy upstream region of
the creek into the remediated section.
"This is an incredible example of how private companies, the municipal government, and the local people can work together,"
said Jorge Virchez, one of the co-chairs of the committee.
"Two or three years ago, we were thinking it was impossible, but now we are here to see that it is done."
Domtar operated a creosote plant in that area between the 1920s and the 1960s where railway ties were treated. Canadian Pacific, the
current property owner, and the city were also deemed responsible for the clean-up by the Ontario Ministry of the
Environment.
About 14,000 tonnes of contaminated soil were removed. The soil was trucked to the Sudbury landfill.
The remediation project was not easy, said Terry Fellner of Clean Harbors, the general contractor who completed the construction work
last year.
The biggest challenge was damming off the sections of the creek requiring soil removal and pumping the water through more than 300
metres of large-diameter pipelines, so they could remove the contaminated sediments from the creek bottom.
"We moved a lot of water. It was very challenging... I was glad to turn the pumps off at the end," said Fellner.
Now that the site has been cleaned-up, Rainbow Routes is in the process of negotiating with landowners in the area to get
permission to build a public trail beside Junction Creek from Martindale Road to Kelly Lake Road.
Deb McIntosh, executive director of Rainbow Routes, said this piece of the Junction Creek Waterway trail system is crucial to connect
to the existing trail on the other side of Martindale Road and a new section of trail currently under construction from Kelly Lake Road
to Copper Cliff.
"I hope people are going to keep it clean now," said Beltrame.
"I think the name of Junction Creek is not the same as it was 40 or 50 years ago. I think people realize now it's a creek that's
supposed to be kept clean."
|
