The theme: a late 19th century
redstone brick village where Men-
nonites cloppity-clop by in their
black carriages, where there is, in
fact, a stable downtown kitty-
corner to city hall where they park
their horses for 25 cents while they
go and do business.

The countryside around the
town, an hour and a half’s drive
northwest of Toronto, just above
Waterloo, is situated amid vintage
rolling farmland. The sort of place
where smog- and traffic-weary ur-
banites pass through, muttering to
themselves: ‘* Why the hell don’t
we move out of the city to a place
like this?"”

Yet, as Mayor Bob Waiers puts
it, life in Elmira has become some-
thing like ‘‘a science fiction horror
story.”

Milk trucks from Kitchener
drive into the town every morning
to park at the two firehalls where
citizens queue up with plastic bot-
tles and jugs to be given fresh
water.

This has been going on since
Sunday, Feb. 4, when municipal,
regional and provincial authorities
evoked emergency peacetime
disaster regulations to start pro-
viding water.

It will go on ‘‘indefinitely,’’ ac-
cording to Mayor Waters, whose
municipal offices are located on
Water Street (as though some
director with an eye to visual
subtext had been scripting reality).
‘“Indefinitely’’ means until at least
next October, which is how long it
will take to build a seven-mile
pipeline from an entirely new
source of water.

Elmira’s water supplies have
been contaminated by a chemical
known as N-Nitrose
Dimethylamine (DMN), used in
the preparation of industrial sol-
vents and in the plasticizing of
rubber at the Uniroyal Chemical

. Ltd. pliant which is the town's big-
‘ gest employer.

Uniroyal general manager Wally
Ruck admits — somewhat reluc-
tantly — that the problem was
caused by the burial of cannisters
containing DMN starting some 20

ELMIRA, ONT. — Over a million tourists flock to this
town of 9,000 souls every summer, not because there are
beaches or theme parks, although maybe, in a sense, the
place itself is a sort of theme park, come to think of it.

years ago. He quickly adds that the
burial was done in accordance with
provincial regulations: the deadly
stuff was sealed in drums, laid on
top of clay beds and wrapped in
plastic before being buried. “Of
course, the things leaked, but back
then nobody thought about that."’

Well, not quite nobody.

I talked to one grandmotherly
old lady who says she’s been
drinking bottled water since the
1960s, shortly after the drums were
laid to rest. ‘You could taste it in
the water,"’ she said. **And the
tomatoes, everything.’* But she
was just considered eccentric.

L ncredibly, the
residents of Elmira
were left to go on
innocently gulping
down poisoned water
for another full
decade.”’

a
The scientists, politicians and
bureaucrats didn’t become involv-

ed until at least 1979, when the
first report surfaced indicating that
there might be something invisible
and evil in the water of otherwise
idyllic Elmira.

‘The traces of DMN that turned
up in tests were so minuscule —
something in the order of lower
parts per billion — that the report,
like the drums before them, was
buried.

Incredibly, the residents of
Elmira were left to go on innocent-
ly gulping down poisoned water
for another full decade. [t wasn’t
until last October that the Ontario
Ministry of the Environment final-
ly got on to the case.

The local environmental group
that has been in the forefront of
the battle to get action taken is
called APTE, an acronym for
Assuring Protection for Tomor-
row's Environment.

APTE got started last summer

as an all-purpose grassroots eco-
group, headed by resident Susan
Rupert, but no sooner had it Muff-
ed its organizational feathers than
the lid was blown on the watet
issue and APTE has been so busy
since then that the group still
hasn’t had time to get its board of
directors together.

DMN, according to Ms. Rupert,
is both carcinogenic and
mutagenic. That is, it not only
causes cancer but can twist the
genes as well.

One of the most frustrating ele-
ments of the drama so far, she
says, has been the intransigence of
medical authorities, who claim that
the town has had no measurable
increase in either cancer or birth
defects — but the figures are based
on regional data that includes
Kitchener-Waterloo.

The stats for Elmira are a drop,
as it were, in the bucket, and until
the town is studied specifically
there is no way of knowing the ef-
fects of that tainted drop.

According to interim provincial
guidelines, established last fall
when the DMN story broke, there
should be no more than 14 parts
per trillion of the chemical in the
water. .

Ministry of the Environment
studies show that the drinking
water contains 20 ppt. Uniroyal
disputes this, saying its figures are
Jower, but Wally Ruck concedes
there are ‘‘spikes’’ in the graphs
where the level rises sharply.

{t was those spikes that spooked
researchers. Within three days of
the emergency water supply pro-
gram going into effect, one inter-
nai memo handed over to en-
vironment ministry officials
recommended an evacuation of the

entire town, an event that would
have put Elmira on the map in the
category with the Love Canal.

As things stand, the residents of
Elmira face nine long months of
waiting in lineups for drinking
water, and nobody is talking about
the effects of DMN on all those
tomatoes whose bad taste one
grandmother noticed as much as
20 years ago, or, for that matter,
the effects on the health of the
sleek horses pulling those quaint
Mennonite buggies in and out of
town®

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