Province Calls Tenders to Contain PCBs at Former New Harbour Dump
The provincial government will call tenders on Saturday for a company to contain PCBs left in the soil at the former landfill in New Harbour.
The dump was closed in 2009 and garbage re-routed to Robin Hood Bay in St. John’s as part of the province’s regional waste management strategy. The government has spent $1.8 million since then to compact the waste and cover it with soil.
But one section of the old dump is contaminated with PCBs, a result of scrap metal and transformer casings dumped from 1992 to 1995. Environment Minister Tom Hedderson announced a plan Wednesday to deal with that last part of the cleanup.
“Which will see the design and implementation of a final engineered cap and cover for the PCB-impacted areas,” Hedderson said.
The plan calls for a company to install a plastic liner covered with soil to contain the PCB-contaminated soil and prevent it from getting into the water. The job should take about six weeks once the contract is awarded, and the site will be monitored every year after that. A consultant’s report said there would be no danger to human health once the cap is installed.
“We have engineered a cap and a system that is going to make sure that it stays encapsulated and there’s no migration of it offsite,” Hedderson said. “It was the best solution to a very significant risk.”
NDP MHA George Murphy says the plan is the best that can be done under the circumstances, but he wants the province to take legal action against the polluters that dumped the PCBs in the first place.
“At the time, government was told that these items were cleaned of any PCBs and they were all neutralized, if you will, and as it turned out they weren’t,” he said. “So somebody who dumped these transformers left us with an environmental time bomb that still exists.”