Thoughts on the CIP, cement plant

The Editor,
Normally, I don’t get involved in things that are no longer my business, but when someone calls me a NIMBY, I have to take exception! Having worked for 31 years for C.I.P. (Canadian International Paper Company) in Hawkesbury as an engineer in the steam plant for 22 years and nine years as a production supervisor, I know a bit about pollution, air and water and land.
In the boiler house, we had eight boilers, five on coal and three on oil, bunker C. We changed from coal to all oil in the 1960s. Of the five coal burners, two also burned bark and for a while, P.C.B’s, which was nowhere hot enough to break down the P.C.B.’s, which went out the stack and over the countryside.
There is a lot more.
Now to get to L’Orignal. One of our boilers was a 100,000-pound-per-hour pulverizer coal-fired boiler, which burned a railroad car of coal a day, sound familiar to the L’Orignal operation? When you pulverize coal you get a lot of fly ash. We had a very efficient way of getting rid of this ash. We had a seprator hopper which caught the ash and deposited it  . . . guess where? Into the sewer and into the river. Where will L’Orignal put it? When we changed to oil, of course, it cleaned all of this up.
Why the plan in L’Orignal chooses to use coal in their operation, I don’t know.
As for the town lagoon on the C.I.P. property, I can’t say if any P.C.B’s will be found; however, on the upper lagoons, they will probably find some.
Will there be ash and dust from the L’Orignal operation? I would say yes, there will be.
Yours truly,
Gerald Boone,
New Brunswick