On Tuesday morning, staff at the Northern Pulp-owned Abercrombie Point pulp and paper mill in Pictou County, Nova Scotia, observed that a pipe carrying raw effluent to its final destination of the Boat Harbor Treatment Facility had sprung a leak and was spewing its contents into the adjacent waters of Pictou Harbor. Northern Pulp spokesperson Dave MacKenzie could not verify how many hours the leak had been going on for, nor if the pipe itself had been absolutely severed — and was thus spewing its total contents into the harbor. The official mill stance is that the leak was discovered at about 7AM and the shutdown process: “began immediately and took a couple of hours.” Pictou Landing First Nation resident Jonathan Beadle, however, suspects that the leak had gone undetected through the previous night — and that the pipe itself was completely ruptured at the leak point.