And speaking of under-reported stories from the south peninsula, here's the latest chapter in a long-running tale of intrigue, some news out of the U of T Student Union on Chris Radziminski and his struggle to get to the bottom of the disinformation published in the 2000 Wiarton waterworks chlorine-dioxide study, and how it happened that his paper should get usurped and edited into a glowing endorsement completely omitting all the dire and serious health-risks warnings:

Thirty-year-old Chris Radziminski, who conducted his own chlorine-dioxide, water-treatment study in Toronto, Ottawa and Indiana from 1998 to 2000 as his thesis for a Master of Applied Science degree at U of T, contends that the Drinking Water Research Group ... failed to acknowledge complaints from residents in Wiarton ...

A survey, requested by Wiarton's town council to address residents' concerns and conducted following the 2000 experiment revealed reports of damaged laundered clothes, a "bleachy" smell and "an odd taste" to the water treated by ERCO's chlorine-dioxide disinfectant.

"With all the water troubles happening in Walkerton, you'd think [Wiarton] would inform their tax-paying residents that they're doing something pretty significant to their water," wrote one survey respondent...

When the Drinking Water Research Group conducted tests to duplicate the laundry-damage phenomenon, researchers could only do so when chlorine dioxide levels were 0.8 milligrams per litre or higher.

While Health Canada is looking at the Wiarton study in drawing up new drinking water guidelines for the country, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set 0.8 mg/L of chlorine dioxide as the maximum concentration that may leave a drinking water plant and warns of "harm to human health based on short-term exposures" to the disinfecting agent at or above 0.8 mg/L.
Neither the link between stained laundry and the 0.8 mg/L level, nor the complaints from Wiarton residents are mentioned by the U of T and ERCO researchers in an article published four years ago in the National Research Council Canada's peer-reviewed Journal of Environmental Engineering and Science.
"No consumer taste and odor complaints were reported during the study period," wrote the authors, including Prof. Andrews (chair of the NSERC research grants selection committee for civil engineering) and Christian Chauret, an Indiana University microbiologist, who also served as Mr. Radziminski's graduate thesis supervisor.
[ via Student Union Fears Multinational Donor Compromised University's Water Research ]

If you haven't heard of this before, it's my bad: Chris first contacted me a couple of years ago asking if I had any means to help dig out a copy of that fabled study; I didn't and couldn't, and while I did find local residents who remembered the chlorine damage (I'm on a well myself) sadly there wasn't a lot I could do to help him out.

Despite legal setbacks, recently he's had some traction with the media, a piece in the national news services, a few mentions in student journalism, but very curiously not much traction elsewhere. You have to admire his tenacity; academic whistle-blowers have their work cut out for them, it is a politically dangerous and too-often thankless job, and even more so when the corporate opponent is large and powerful. Out of the U of Sask student paper, here's just a sample of the background:

shortly after completing his Masters of Engineering degree at the University of Toronto, Radziminski was surprised to find that portions of his thesis published in two peer-reviewed journals and that he had been unknowingly credited as an author. Further yet, portions of his findings had been omitted and his conclusions subsequently altered; the articles, submitted and allegedly co-authored by Radziminski's thesis supervisors, Drs. Robert Andrews and Christian Chauret, were altered to produce results favorable to the business interests of ERCO Worldwide (formerly Sterling Pulp Chemicals LTD.) ... a major sponsor of Andrews' research group.

Radziminski's thesis found that chlorine dioxide could be used to effectively treat water only if used in quantities that violate the American EPA's safety standards. ERCO, which produces large amounts of chlorine dioxide for use in the pulp and paper industry, was and is hoping to promote the use of the chemical in water treatment. For reasons which may be speculated, Andrews and Chauret distorted the findings of his thesis and continued their research.

Bizarrely, this research included the experimental use of chlorine dioxide to treat the town of Wiarton, Ontario's water supply, which resulted in national media attention being drawn to the bleaching effect attributed to the town's water during the trial.

Radziminski's attempts to expose the truth have borne little fruit to date. Both the University of Toronto and NSERC, which provided funding for his thesis and continues to provide funding for Andrews' research, have proven unco-operative and evasive; his small-claims case ended without going to trial after he, unable to afford legal council, was outmaneuvered by the U of T's legal council.
[ The Sheaf - University of Saskatchewan Student Newspaper - Bad water, bad research ]

Emphasis is mine; other references cite those safety standards as warning of damage to clothing, health hazards to the young and elderly, and birth defects. Not precisely the sort of thing I would really want edited out of an environmental assessment of any sort, and call me a luddite, but I would think that most people who might care about their community health will notice that this slight-of-hand science is from the hands of the same sorts of people who will be designing, building and operating the proposed waterworks. Worth a note maybe too to remember that the Walkerton e coli deaths were not caused by either broken sceptics or bad farm drainage, but by deliberate human intervention altering the monitored data to their own personal advantage.