The day-by-day countdown to the closing of Boat Harbour happens on a large painting erected in front of the Pictou Landing First Nation band council office. The painting depicts Boat Harbour as it was before it was dammed (and damned) in 1966, transformed from a healthy tidal estuary to a stinking lagoon for the toxic...
Boat Harbour: How to clean up a toxic soup
Fifty-two years of toxic sludge — enough to fill 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools to the brim. That’s the cleanup job now in the late planning stages for Boat Harbour. Boat Harbour is an expanse of stanky brown holding ponds or “lagoons” at an effluent treatment facility located next-door to the Pictou Landing First Nation. “Nova...
Containing Northern Pulp’s mess
A half century of toxic waste in Boat Harbour, a leaky pipeline, and what happens next in the mill saga.
The numbers are staggering. Over the past 51 years, the bleached kraft pulp mill on Abercrombie Point in Pictou County has piped about 1.25 trillion litres of toxic effluent into Boat Harbour.[1] That’s enough to fill about half a million Olympic-size swimming pools, or a pipeline one metre in diameter stretching about 1.6 million kilometres, […]
Dirty Dealing
Part 3: Elevated Levels of Cancer-Causing Air Emissions Coming from Abercrombie Pulp Mill, Peer-Reviewed Study Reveals
In a study published in 2017, Dalhousie University researchers reported that air levels of three volatile organic compounds (VOCs) near the Abercrombie pulp mill in Pictou County exceeded cancer risk thresholds and “are of primary health concern in terms of population risk.” Over an eight-year period (2006-2013), 1,3-butadiene, benzene, and carbon tetrachloride were found to […]