Aug 31, 2008 - 04:30 AM

By Reka Szekely

DURHAM -- Fighting to protect the Great Lakes in the early 90s was a lonely endeavour, said environmental lawyer Mark Mattson.

“We weren’t winning the public, although we were enforcing the rules,” said the president of Lake Ontario Waterkeeper, an organization dedicated to tracking polluters.

But that’s all changing, he said, pointing to the fight over the Oshawa harbour as one example of residents speaking up for their community.

“There are signs there is this public will to win back the Great Lakes and it’s finally been awakened and I don’t think its going to be put back down.”

And Mr. Mattson can point to another local success story.

“A big, big success story would be the clean up at Port Hope. The federal government is finally beginning the process of cleaning up the radioactive waste site.”

The Port Hope harbour was contaminated by a uranium and radium refinery in the 1930s and 1940s and, as it stands, there’s approximately 90,000 cubic tonnes of contaminated sediment in the harbour. In 2001, the federal government and local municipality signed an agreement to clean up the low-level radioactive waste.

If it’s successful, it will mean Port Hope will be removed from a list of 14 trouble spots along the Great Lakes in Canada labelled Areas of Concern (AOC). Also listed along Lake Ontario in Canada is the Toronto area, Hamilton Harbour and the Bay of Quinte to the east. Canada has one area in recovery, Spanish Harbour on Lake Huron, and two areas that have recovered enough to be delisted, Severn Sound and Collingwood Harbour, both on Georgian Bay.

But cleaning up the AOCs is no small task, said John Jackson, program director for Great Lakes United, a coalition of citizen’s groups in Canada and the U.S. working to protect the lakes.

“We’ve been working on the clean up of those for 20 years ... we still have major problems at all but three sites,” said Mr. Jackson.

In addition to three rivers shared with Canada (St. Mary’s, St. Clair and Detroit rivers), the U.S. has 25 AOCs, one area in recovery and one delisted area, the Oswego River. Each AOC has a rehabilitation plan, but it will take decades to fix the problems.

“The hard and expensive issues that are still outstanding in all of the AOCs is what we do with the contaminated sediment, they’re very expensive to clean up,” he said.

In Toronto, where the AOC stretches from Etobicoke Creek in the west to the Rouge River in the east, part of the problem is wet weather management. Stormwater, contaminated with spills and road runoff, and sewer overflows are dumped into the rivers and into the lake when it rains. Also, as the area urbanized, wildlife and fish habitats were destroyed along the shorelines, parts of which were irreversibly hardened.

One of the challenges for Toronto is to upgrade its infrastructure.

“It’s very expensive and it means the federal and provincial government need to come through with the financial support for the municipalities in order to make the improvements to their infrastructure,” said Mr. Jackson.

Though not an AOC, John Presta, Durham’s director of environmental services said the Region is working on upgrading its older plants, such as the Pringle Creek plant in Whitby, which still occasionally discharge overflow into the lake during storm conditions, perhaps a half dozen times a year. The discharge would receive primary treatment, including chlorination which kills bacteria such as E. coli, but would not have nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus removed.

“The new plants, such as the Courtice Water Pollution Control Plant, will now treat wastewater so it’s a non-toxic effluent,” said Mr. Presta.

In other areas, such as Hamilton Harbour, Mr. Jackson said the industries that originally contaminated the harbour should pay for part of its rehabilitation.

“Municipal money needs to go into fixing up the sewage system, not paying for contaminated sediment which they didn’t put there in the first place.”

But it’s not simply what’s going into the waters that affects the lakes, but what’s going into the air as well.

“We’ve made progress in terms of the discharge of toxic substances to water, but unfortunately we haven’t been making progress in the discharge of toxins into the air,” said Mr. Jackson, though he adds governments are finally starting to take air quality seriously.

Also of concern are new substances going into the waters such as chemicals that act as flame retardants and pharmaceuticals entering through the sewage system.

Douglas Holdway, a specialist in environmental toxicology at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, said studies in Lake Scugog have shown bacteria in the lake developing resistance to antibiotics.

“The bacteria there had developed resistance to nine different antibiotics,” he said.

Other studies have shown hormones, such as those found in birth control pills, could adversely affect the reproductive health of fish, even at the low levels present in municipal wastewater.

Another key to protecting the lakes is ensuring environmental laws are kept strong.

“Every time government proposed to weaken or roll back environment laws, we make people aware of it,” said Mr. Mattson.

Both Lake Ontario Waterkeeper and Great Lakes United are fighting a U.S. Coast Guard rule that would allow ships to continue to dump cargo waste into the water. The Waterkeeper organization said 70 years of dumping has resulted in 550 tons of coal, limestone, iron ore and taconite going into the Great Lakes waters annually.

“It will just allow the shipping industry to basically use the Great Lakes as a dump to clean their ships in,” said Mr. Mattson.

The overall goal is to ensure all residents receive what they’re entitled to under the law, swimmable, drinkable and fishable lakes, he said.

“It took a long time to destroy the Great Lakes and it’s going to take a while to win them back.”