Residents in a Northern Quebec mining city were recently told they should move out of their homes and into a new neighbourhood amid concerns that pollution from a nearby copper smelter was contaminating their properties and making people sick.
The province is providing roughly $85 million to the city to pay for the new neighbourhood. Mining company Glencore Canada is expected to buy up the old polluted properties — about 80 buildings — clean up the arsenic contaminants in the soil and create a new green space buffer. While the three-nanogram limit is recognized as a formal limit in Quebec, there is also recognition that if Glencore was forced to meet that standard immediately, it could force the shutdown of the Rouyn smelter.Burgess Hawkins is a manager at Public Health Sudbury and Districts's Health Protection Division. He said despite the three-nanogram limit in Quebec, there is a much stricter standard in Ontario.
"We are definitely involved. We work very closely with the Ministry of Environment on an assortment of subjects, including air quality." "For almost 100 years, Sudbury’s community and environment were blanketed in sulfur dioxide and metals released from the smelting of nickel ore. The sulfur acidified the soils, rain and lakes. The pollution triggered the complete loss of vegetation, leaving barren rolling hills of blackened rock. It was a devastated landscape.