Underwater Explosives Put Environment at Risk, Says Expert

By Steve Rennie, THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA – Canada could be on the brink of an “ecological nightmare” as chemicals and explosives from submerged military boneyards seep into the water, says a retired U.S. navy bomb disposal expert.

Jim Barton, a senior technician with the U.S. navy’s explosive ordnance disposal unit between 1975 and 1999, says the clock is ticking to clean up hundreds of thousands of discarded weapons from the floors of Canada’s lakes, rivers and ocean areas.

“If you wait . .. one day, you wake up and you’ve got an ecological nightmare on your hands,” Barton said in an interview from Norfolk, Va.

A Defence Department list of 731 sites, prepared last April, cites 92 underwater spots across Canada potentially laden with unexploded explosive ordnance, or UXOs – military jargon for weapons that have yet to detonate.

The department refused to grant an interview on the subject. But in an e-mail to The Canadian Press, it noted that Second World War-era weapons likely contain the explosive trinitrotoluene, or TNT.

The discarded weapons – including anti-aircraft explosives, mortars and air-to-water depth bombs – could also contain metals such as lead and mercury, said Robert Enman, a retired Canadian Forces captain and head of a Calgary-based bomb disposal company.

“But in terms of quantity, that’s very minute,” he said.

Although individual weapons may only contain trace amounts of these substances, Barton said collectively they could pose an environmental risk.

He pointed to parts of the Baltic Sea – heavily mined during both World Wars – where fishing is off limits because of environmental contamination.

The Defence Department wouldn’t say how many discarded weapons are at each of its sites. Barton estimates there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, in some spots.

That estimate jibes with a report on the Defence Department’s website, which notes there are 300,000 projectiles in Lac Saint-Pierre, Que., a former weapons testing site located about 150 kilometres north of Baie-Comeau.

“Sure, the amounts coming from an individual munition are minute,” Barton said.

“But when you start talking about having hundreds of thousands, or even in the millions, in a small area . . . . when does minute add up to a substantial impact?”

The precise impact hasn’t been widely studied, and it’s not known what environmental and health problems arise from exposure to unexploded ordnance.

What is known is that prolonged exposure to lead and mercury can cause a range of health problems, including damage to the nervous system, kidneys and liver.

Some have suggested ties between military dump sites off the East Coast – where Canada disposed of thousands of chemical and biological weapons after the Second World War – and cancer rates in the Atlantic provinces, although there’s no conclusive link.

The Defence Department says “thousands of samples of water and sediments” have been studied in Lac Saint-Pierre and no “energetic materials” – such as explosives or fuel – have been found.

Some metals were found in the water, but the department says it believes they came from “upstream industrial activities” and not from abandoned weapons.

Asked about the ecological impact of leaking unexploded ordnance, an Environment Canada spokeswoman said she’d been told to refer all calls to the Defence Department.

Salt water can corrode weapons’ casings over years or decades, the Defence Department acknowledges, depending on how much seabed sediment covers them.

Abandoned explosives are less of an overall ecological concern than more widespread problems like industrial waste, said Roger Woeller, head of the environmental firm Water and Earth Science Associates .

But the scope could extend beyond waterfront communities to people who eat fish and seafood harvested from contaminated waters, said Susanna Fuller, the marine conservation co-ordinator for the Ecology Action Centre in Halifax.

“I know what seafood gets tested for. It certainly doesn’t get tested for accumulations of munitions and chemicals,” she said.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency tests fish and seafood for lead, mercury and a wide array of pollutants – but not TNT or mustard gas, said spokesman Alain Charette.

Fish and other seafood metabolize pollutants differently, he added, so “some of them (pollutants) concentrate more than others, some hardly ever concentrate at all.”

The federal auditor general will report next month on the Defence Department’s progress in identifying and assessing the risks of underwater explosives and chemical weapons.