Province to monitor St. B air quality in response to residents’ complaints

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This article was published 07/12/2017 (2872 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sustainable Development Minister Rochelle Squires said Thursday her department is buying a mobile air-quality monitoring unit to investigate long-standing complaints about odours, dust and haze in south St. Boniface.

“There’s a long history going back a decade,” Squires told reporters after meeting with a delegation of residents and St. Boniface New Democrat MLA Greg Selinger.

Squires said she wants to “hit the reset button” on 10 years of failure to solve the area’s problems and resume air-quality monitoring drastically cut under the previous government — led by Selinger — in 2009.

The province is also obtaining environmental research on automobile recycling operations, which are part of the industrial park, she said.

“There’s 115 years of industry in St. Boniface industrial park. We know a residential area has grown up,” she said.

In October, Squires told a news conference that soil samples taken from eight sites in the area in the summer showed metal contaminants posed no health risks for residents, assuring them that it was safe to eat their garden-grown vegetables and allow their children to play at Happyland Park.

The only place where raised levels of contaminants were discovered was in an industrial park, which came as no surprise, she said then.

Air quality and noise are now the concerns, area resident Michelle Berger said Thursday.

“There are a lot of residents (who have) complained about not being able to be in their yards, about going to hospital with sore eyes and throats,” she said.

Selinger declined to discuss Squires’ finger-pointing at his government; what matters is getting help for residents now, he said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca