'Waiting for a miracle'

Marlene Brown has lived in the same house in Harrietsfield for more than 30 years.

It is the house that her father built, where she grew up and where she raised her children.

“It’s got a lot of meaning," she says. "But if I could afford to move, I would, because it’s dangerous to everyone’s health living here.”

Harrietsfield is a rural community southwest of the Halifax peninsula, still within the boundaries of Halifax County. For more than a decade, many residents here and in Williamswood, a neighbouring community, have been living off groundwater that has been contaminated by a nearby waste materials disposal site.

Brown travels more than five kilometres to the closest source of uncontaminated water, St. Paul’s Church in Spryfield. She has arranged for people in the area to fill up jugs to take home with them for drinking and cooking.

“Let’s just say when I get down to one jug of water, I actually feel myself getting anxious,” she says. “We go through two maybe three a day, depending what we’re doing. And it causes unnecessary anxiety. And it’s constantly on your mind. Constant.”

Brown washes her dishes with the contaminated water coming out of her taps. She showers in it too, even as her pipes, toilets, bathtubs and faucets deteriorate in front of her eyes.

“I see my home being deteriorated daily,” she says.

Brown and two neighbours have been in and out of court trying to bring uncontaminated water to the community. Many others have tried to mobilize support from the municipal and provincial governments over the years. Still, nothing has changed.

Brown says she’s stuck in her family home in Harrietsfield.

“I can’t see anybody buying the home,” she says. “I can’t afford to move and I can’t afford to fix it up. So I’m here waiting for a miracle to happen.”

Detecting a problem

Brown grew up in Harrietsfield, and after briefly moving away, returned to her father’s home for good in 1992.

The home is down the hill less than 500 metres from 1275 Old Sambro Rd., the location of the waste site. When she was young and up until 1997, the site was an auto salvage yard owned by Ernie Nickerson.

Brown, 55, recalls tobogganing down the hill behind the site with childhood friends.

“We even found the old bonnet to a top of a car and flipped it over and a whole bunch of us went down the hill in it,” she recalls, smiling.

Brown and her neighbour and longtime friend, Debbie Irons-Kelly, remember when people used to fish trout in one of the nearby lakes.

“There was one time we used to swim in the lake and it was very crystal clear. We could see the leeches, and all that,” says Irons-Kelly.

The car salvage lot was purchased by Mike Lawrence and Roy Brown of RDM Recycling in 1997.

A lot of what is known about the story of the site can be found in a Nova Scotia Supreme Court ruling from May 2015.

According to the ruling, RDM asked Nova Scotia Environment for a licence to dispose of the demolition waste materials it had been collecting on its property in Harrietsfield in the spring of 2000. Examples of the kinds of waste materials collected include gyproc, roofing tiles, household appliances, tires and carpets.

At this point, the site was an approved waste materials transfer site, but the company wanted to be able to legally dispose of the waste at the site itself, so it sought the necessary approvals from Nova Scotia Environment and HRM to do so.

However, the department refused RDM request, determining that the activities at the site, such as burying the waste into the ground and putting demolition debris into an unauthorized settling pond, were “having a detrimental environmental impact.” The environment minister ordered RDM to begin quarterly and yearly surface water and groundwater testing on wells located on and next to the site.

Brown’s well was part of the water monitoring program, along with several others. Irons-Kelly, who also lives close to the site, was not included.

As required, RDM also approached the Halifax Regional Municipality for a licence to turn the site into a disposal facility.

In June 2002, municipal staff recommended against it. Several councillors, along with the Halifax County Watershed Advisory Board, cited concerns such as the site’s close proximity to a residential neighbourhood and the fact that it borders the Terence Bay Wilderness Area and Long Lake Provincial Park.

Brown says many residents tried to dissuade their municipal councillor, Stephen Adams, and Nova Scotia Environment from approving disposal activities at the RDM site. They were concerned about the possible harm it would cause to the environment and their health. Many wrote letters voicing their health concerns if the site were to be approved, and dozens of people living in the region signed a petition against it.

In March 2003, council granted RDM its disposal licence. Now, RDM had one of the two licences it needed to legally dispose of the non-recyclable waste at the site.

When council granted RDM the licence, there was reportedly 120,000 tonnes of waste materials already collected at the site, which the department also became aware of. Further, specialists from the department who did an assessment of the property said that if RDM were to become a disposal facility, it “may pose a risk to some private wells on Old Sambro Road” and that the contaminated groundwater leaching from the site “could reach residential wells in as little as one year.”

By September of 2004, RDM built and stored the accumulated waste in a clay-lined cell, as mandated by the department. Prior to this, the materials were on the ground, exposed to the elements, for more than five years, which violates a municipal bylaw requiring that demolition waste disposal sites only store materials of this kind for a maximum of one year.

Brown only found out in 2013, through the help of her lawyer, that HRM and Nova Scotia Environment knew about the harm the activities at the site could cause to the surrounding environment and the residential water supply. In the documents she gained access to, she saw all the recommendations against granting the site its licences and that the department had water sample data for the area dating back to as early as 2001.

Brown says she never drank her well water out of fear that it would be harmful to her health. She says her neighbours who were also a part of the monitoring program were drinking their well water, even though their test results indicated they didn’t meet drinking water standards. It was up to each individual to decipher what their results meant and what to do about it.

Irons-Kelly also had concerns about a strong foul smell that would waft over the community.

“It was unbearable, the smell,” she says. “I would have to turn off my air exchanger. I’d be nauseated. I’d have cognitive difficulties concentrating, irritability, feeling low — many, many cognitive deficits.”

Worrisome test results

In June of 2003, Brown’s water test results noted four health hazards concerning the levels of iron and manganese detected, as well as the colour and pH of her water. By June 2009, there were more than a dozen issues flagged.

Brown got suspicious when she saw a spike in any area.

“Only four days out of 365 days do we actually know what’s actually coming into our water," she says.

The colour of water considered to be safe for drinking should not exceed 15 TCU (True Colour Units), according to Canadian drinking water quality guidelines. Brown’s water colour was 45 TCU in 2003 and 329 TCU in 2009. According to the guidelines, the higher the level the more likely the water is displaying signs of contamination.

Below are some of the results from Brown’s water tests, from June 2003 to June 2009.

The shaded areas indicate when levels exceed guidelines. From April to June 2009, Brown saw substantial changes in areas other than colour: iron concentration went from 2890 to 9470 micrograms per litre, while levels of zinc went from 56 to 618 micrograms per litre, for example.

For iron, levels that exceed 300 micrograms per litre can mean there are contaminants present that can harm your health.

After receiving those worrisome test results, Brown started to take matters into her own hands. She put letters in her neighbours’ mailboxes, urging them not to drink their water. Then she stopped using the water from her taps for brushing her teeth and rinsing her vegetables.

Next, neighbours brought Brown the water sample results they have been collecting since 2003. She compared the data and noticed there were patterns of rising levels and other similarities to her results.

Brown then contacted Nova Scotia Environment for help.

“From 2009 to 2010, we had several meetings at my home and we were able to meet with the department and prove to them there was something major going on, and they agreed to investigate. So June of 2010, we all went up to the community centre and the Nova Scotia Environment said ‘Yes, your wells have been impacted,” Brown says.

Also in the summer of 2010, the department refused RDM’s request to reduce the number of tests it must perform each year as part of the monitoring program.

Melanie Haggart, a hydrogeologist hired by the department to assess the situation, noted that the contaminants responsible for these increases were “sourced from the RDM site.” She identified a “growing plume of impacted groundwater both on site and leaving the site towards the south.”

One of the homes most affected by what happened at the site saw an increase in uranium by 500 per cent from 2003 to 2010, according to Haggart, who says that she also identified “upward trends in calcium, alkalinity, sulfate, chloride, conductance and hardness” in that particular well.

Linda Passerini, an environmental health consultant, told the department that there were “clear” exceedances of the drinking water guidelines in some cases and that she was “concerned about residents’ health,” according to a court document from 2015. Uranium, arsenic, copper, lead, zinc and cadmium were specifically mentioned to be exceeding the guidelines for certain homes that were a part of the monitoring program. When levels of these heavy metals exceed the guidelines, exposure to this water can cause serious adverse health effects.

In Brown’s case, Passerini suggested that she continue to monitor the levels of lead in her well, since they exceeded the guideline standard of 0.01 milligrams per litre. Lead is a cumulative general poison, most poisonous to pregnant women and infants. For adults, exposure to high levels can result in kidney problems or high blood pressure. Passerini said that those with high levels of lead in their wells needed to continue to monitor its levels and “use alternate source of water for drinking, food preparation and infant formula.”

Health fears

There have been no health impact studies done in the area to date, despite all of the recommendations about continued water monitoring due to the water’s potential adverse health effects.

Brown says several of her neighbours who lived within 700 metres of the RDM site have developed cancer or have died.

Irons-Kelly says they're "all dying of a slow disease."

In 2010, there was a community meeting with representatives from Nova Scotia Environment at the community centre. Brown says no one from the department told her that she should not be drinking her water.

Brown says she saw one of the representatives approach her neighbour, Hector Marryott, and tell him that he should not be drinking his water.

“He had been drinking it all along,” Brown says.

In addition, she says, Marryott was told that his well was one of the most severely contaminated among all of the homes being tested.

By that November, Marryott was too ill to walk across the street to visit her. He drove over and handed her a letter she had asked him to write.

“In the letter it stated that he had lived out here for 65 years and he blamed himself for his brother-in-law’s death, who just lived across the street (and) who also has contaminated water,” she says.

“I walked Mr. Marryott down to his car, and just before he got into his car, he shook his fist at me, and he says ‘You go get them!’”

Brown’s eyes fill up with tears.

Marryott died a month later. Both he and his brother-in-law, who lived their entire lives in Harrietsfield drinking their well water, suffered from liver and kidney disease.

Brown says she keeps fighting for people like Marryott. She wants a health impact study done for the people living in the area.

“We found out that it would cost $20,000 to get the study done, so, I’m still working on that,” she says.

“There’s something serious going on around out here,” says Brown. “But nobody’s listening, nobody’s doing anything.”

Going to court

In November 2010, a ministerial order was issued to the owners of the RDM site — a total of three parties — for violating Section 67 (2) the Nova Scotia Environment Act, which states that “No person shall release or permit the release into the environment of a substance (...) that causes or may cause an adverse effect.”

A month after the order was issued, Brian Dubblestyne and Kurt Jacobs filed an appeal. They started leasing the property in 2005, and took over the RDM name. They argued that they were not responsible for the damages caused by the site, and therefore should not be ordered to clean it up.

Brown and her neighbours on the monitoring program were then told that everyone was responsible for looking after their own water situation, and that financing the necessary treatment systems they needed to mitigate the effects of the groundwater contamination was in their hands.

Brown says that the systems themselves cost roughly $4,000 each, and do not last for more than a few years before needing to be replaced.

The fact that Brown's father dug the well on her property many years ago puts her in a unique situation: RDM isn't required to pay for any post-treatment tests to her water because her well is dug, not drilled. The order states that they're only required to pay for such tests on drilled wells .

Brown says she can’t afford any additional tests so she isn’t able to compare the results from before and after any treatment done to her water, and thus currently does not know how well her system is working, if it is at all.

Recycling and disposal activities continued at the RDM site until it was shut down in January of 2013, three years after the ministerial order was issued.

“They were allowed to remain open until we complained enough,” Brown says.

That year, Brown and others who were a part of the monitoring program received letters from the department, notifying them of the appeal to the order and inviting them to participate in the hearing. They went to court to fight the appeal, arguing that Dubblestyne and Jacobs should remain on the order with Ernie Nickerson as well as Mike Lawrence and Roy Brown of RDM.

Marlene Brown and neighbours Melissa King and Jonathan Andrews then sought legal representation through Dal Legal Aid and ECELaw, which led them to Ecojustice, who provided them with two lawyers.

“That this situation has gone on for so long is truly unacceptable and that is why Ecojustice became involved,” Kaitlyn Mitchell, one of the Ecojustice lawyers, said in an email.

They went to court for the hearing of the appeal in February 2014. On May 6, 2015, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court upheld every clause of the ministerial order except for one relating to the containment cell. This matter remains under review by the minister and companies listed on the order.

Mitchell sees the court ruling as a “92 per cent win” for the people living in Harrietsfield.

Representatives from RDM, including their listed attorney, did not respond to repeated attempts for comment for this story.

There have been two environment ministers since the decision came out in May. Neither of them have been made available for an interview, despite numerous requests.

In an email from July 2015, Heather Fairbairn, a spokesperson for the department, said staff are working with the companies listed in the order to develop action plans. She said once the department reviews the completed action plans, it will be responsible for ensuring that the companies follow through with their commitments.

In June 2015, Brown sent Adams and the area’s MLA, Brendan Maguire, a petition containing 97 signatures, asking that all wells within a two mile radius of the site be added to the monitoring program. People living in the area fear that what’s happened at the site has caused far more extensive damage than the department has accounted for, and that more wells have been harmed by the groundwater plume from the site than have been made a part of the program.

Brown feels that sending this petition to the elected representatives “made little difference.”

She says that she feels residents of Harrietsfield have been betrayed by Nova Scotia Environment, HRM and their municipal councillor.

“When we first went to court, in the court there was the Nova Scotia Environment’s lawyer and RDM’s lawyer. So the three of us — myself, Jonathan, Melissa — are sitting back here, just before the judge asked us if we want to intervene, and on this side of the courtroom is Coun. Steve Adams with one of the owners of the site,” Brown says.

“We were shocked. His community was divided, and he chose the side he wanted to take part in.”

Still waiting

After all these years, Brown and her neighbours are still waiting for their miracle.

Brown is one of eight homes still on the monitoring program. She continues to receive water test results four times a year.

“I invited Randy Delorey, the old Nova Scotia Environment minister, to come out and have a glass of our water," she says. “He never showed up.”

While the final clause of the ministerial order is being reviewed by the minister and RDM, there have been no discussions about what it will take to grant residents access to safe drinking water.

Brown has not heard anything back from Maguire or Adams in response to the petition.

Adams has told several members of the community that he would bring up their concerns to council. In May, at a community meeting, he told the group he would look into getting city water trucked out to the area.

The next month, Adams put forward a motion to council asking staff to explore options for people on private wells who have contaminants in their well water “including but not limited to uranium and arsenic.” He did not mention Harrietsfield specifically.

Adams says he expects the report will be released sometime in December.

Adams has not made himself available for an interview about the ongoing issues in the community despite numerous requests.

Brown says in the short term, people in Harrietsfield deserve to have drinking water trucked to them. In the long term, she hopes the city hooks them up to the municipal water supply for free.

Further, Brown says she would like to see HRM and Nova Scotia Environment held accountable and take responsibility “for this tragedy.”

Meanwhile, Brown continues to rely on bottled water and the tap at the church in Spryfield — just as she’s done for years.