en

HUNTER

IT IS one of the weirdest sights I’ve seen, all the weirder
because it exists in Scarborough, otherwise known as
“‘Scarberia,”’ the Burnaby of Toronto.

Along a street called McClure
Crescent, one drives slowly, listen-
ing to a man in the back seat
describing the ‘‘hot spots’’ in the
various backyards we pass, mean-
ing RADIOACTIVE hot spots.

The man is George Heighington,
until a couple of years ago, a
longtime resident of McClure
Crescent.

Although he controls his rage
well, he is an angry, embittered
man. He has seven sons — each of
which, he says. is a “living time

bomb.”? They were raised on’Mc- _

Clure Crescent, which means they
were exposed to radiation as
children.

Symptoms of cancer wouldn't
show up, under the circumstances,
for at least 15 years. None of
George Heighington's sons is 15
yet. He and his wife live in dread
of the day. .

George has his rap down nat. He
has repeated it a thousand times
over the years. Mostly to media.
The government guys tried their
best to avoid him, The various en-
vironmental groups to which he
turned had other fish to fry. Even
legal aid turned him down.

“Half of that house over there is
considered radioactive,’’ George
notes as we drive, ‘‘but the other
isn’t, Figure that one out. Starting
at that yard, the backyards are all
hot for the rest of the block. Yep.
Still,”

Yet everything looks totally

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North Vancouver
987-7917

3230 Connaught Cres.

norma), Clothes are hanging on
the lines, bare-footed kids are
running around in their bathing
suits, mothers are wheeling baby
strollers along the street.
What’s going on here? Don’t
these people KNOW?

ae

ee

of the first people to plunk down a
certified cheque for $100 in 1975 to
get in on a government-backed
home ownership scheme, a@ once-
in-a-lifetime chance to grab a little
brick house in suburbia.

It was a low-cost housing devel-
opment, involving the construction
of 270 homes. Even back then, the
price of property in Metro Toronto
was skyrocketing and people were
desperate. Thirty thousand of
them applied for the homes in
what was to be called the Malvern
subdivision.

Little did any of the happy new
homeowners — the **winners’? —
suspect, but they had just entered a
phase of their lives that would
seem in retrospect like a bad low-
budget science fiction horror
movie.

it seemed great at first. The
bubble didn’t break until 1980,
when reporters from a local news-

The bubble didn’t break until 1980, when
reporters from a local newspaper arrived on
the doorsteps along McClure Crescent, asking
the folks how they felt about living on top of
an abandoned nuclear dump site.”’

They do, Heighington explains
wearily. But these are new home-
owners, and they all signed a
release absolving the Ontario gov-
ernment of any responsibility,
should anything happen to them or
their children due to radioactive
materials still in the soil along
McClure Crescent.

Heighington and 47 other fami-
lies moved out as soon as they
could after they found out about
the radioactivity. But there were
plenty of other low-income fami-
lies waiting in line to take over
their old places, radiation be
damned. :

A teacher by profession, George
Heighington had in fact been one

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paper arrived on the doorsteps
along McClure Crescent, asking the
folks how they felt about living on
top of an abandoned nuclear dump
site.

_The true story of how that dump
site came to be will probably never
be known, It is too convoluted,
with too many players, including
enough spies and agents to pack a
thriller.

The story goes back to the Se-

.cond World War, when the

Malvern Site was used by some
clever inside operator ; as a place to
burn radioactive ma‘ rials some-
how removed from \} 2 Eldorado
Refinery at Port Hope.

The site was used, in secrecy,

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from 1943 to 195].

The crudely-processed stuff was
sold in the United States, not only
to hospitals and industrial clients,
but to the U.S. Army, in con-
travention of Canadian regulations
prohibiting the transfer of nuclear
materials for miiitary purposes.

The use of the site for burning
may in fact have been nothing
more than a ruse, allowing the
transfer of high-grade radioactive
materials from Canadian to Amer-
ican hands.

At onc point an experiment was
apparently carried out to see if ra-
dioactive wastes would make good
fertilizer.

As early as 1945, the federal and
provincial governments were

‘warned by medical authorities that
the site posed a serious danger to
public health. Again in 1975 both
levels of government were advised
to have the land scraped clean and
trucked away to a proper dump
site.

Instead, the Ontario government
decided to sell the land, divided in-
to city lots, to those 270 unsuspec-
ting homeseckers, inluding George
Heighington.

Once they knew the truth about
the land they’d bought, 48 Mc-
Clure Crescent families banded
together to demand compensation.
So far, they have racked up
$300,000 in legal fees.

The nightmare should have end-
ed two years ago when an Ontario
court ruled that the government
had been negligent in selling them
radioactive land and ordered com-.
pensation for property loss of be-
tween $20,000 and $60,000 per
family.

Astonishingly, the attorney-
general’s department is appealing
even that niggardly award, on the
grounds that it set a precedent that
would affect all other land-fill sites
in the province.

So the sorry tale of the radiation
refugees of Scarberia has not quite
ended. They may yet find
themselves in debt and empty-
handed, as well as probably ir-
radiated. A true Canadian story! @

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