By David F. Rooney
Brian Laurence of Silverline Auto Repair & Transmission Centre received an unpleasant surprise Monday morning when he arrived at work at 8 am to discover someone had dumped about 20 boxes containing dozens of empty Husqvarna chain saw oil containers. But they weren’t empty; small quantities of oil remained in the bottom of each litre container.
Laurence said he planned to report the incident to the provincial Report-A-Polluter-&-Poacher program and the local RCMP. And he thinks he may know — at least in general terms — who might had dumped the environmentally harmful waste at his shop on Lundell Road.
“It was probably a faller,” he said, adding that he had recently turned away someone who wanted to drop off similar containers so he could recycle them.
Laurence used to recycle oil but stopped providing that service last month.
He hopes the guy who dumped this toxic waste on his property is caught and prosecuted.
“I’ll follow this to the end,” Laurence warned. “I will see you go to court. The fines for this kind of thing must be huge.”
They may be huge but first someone has to be caught. And that can be difficult to do. There are still no suspects in the recent dumping of 33 – 400 litres of used motor oil in a ditch near Wright Machine Works in the Big Eddy. And, if you go to the right locations in the back woods you can find old drums of fuel and chemicals slowly rusting away, sometimes right beside creeks and brooks where people had been working. Back about 10 or 11 years ago CMH guide Hank Krawczyk organized a party of volunteers to help cleanup an old placer mining site at McCullough Creek. it took two flights by a helicopters to remove much of the rusted and dangerous trash and they didn’t get it all. Some of it is still there.
