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A federal report recently obtained a Vancouver newspaper shows environmental problems exist on more than half the reserves in British Columbia.
The Indian Affairs document obtained the Vancouver Sun last month outlined about 500 pollution problems on 200 Indian reserves in B.C. including:
- Sewage disposal and industrial landfill problems on the Coquitlam Reserve that have tainted drinking water.
- A hospital waste dump site on the same reserve, the contents of which are not known.
- Three company dumps operated the Okanagan Band, where garbage fires regularly go unmonitored.
- A wrecked car lot on the Sliammon Reserve near Power River that houses more than 1,000 wrecks, some of them leaking toxic fluids.
- - An abandoned sawmill on the Esquimalt Reserve which is contaminated with cancer-causing substances like dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Industries like lease-operated gas stations, agriculture, sewage treatment operations, pulp mills and other effluent-producing facilities on reserves are monitored Indian Affairs to make sure they meet current environmental standards, said department spokesman Brian Martin.
Indian Affairs has contacted all 196 bands and 31 tribal councils in the province to help identify the number of potential hazards.
"We want to see the environmental standards on Indian lands are at least as good as those for other British Columbia residents," he said.
But there are contaminated reserves in B.C. and Canada where there have been sawmills and other industry that has never been addressed, said Esquimalt Chief Andrew Thomas.
"This is something that this generation was born into. Now we've got to live with the kind of mistakes that happened in the past. The First Nations were never allowed to negotiate the (land) lease. Now we are stuck with this. We didn't have a say in it."
Much of the surface debris from the Esquimalt site has been removed, he said. But soil samples from the compound have shown concentrations of PCBs 300 times higher than the maximum safety limit.
"I don't know how PCBs will affect people. We're just trying to use the science available to make sure that people are not in danger here."
The band is currently negotiating with the province to clean up the contaminated soil at a projected cost of more than $2.5 million, Thomas said, so the site can be used as part of the Commonwealth Games in August 1994.
Indian Affairs has set aside $890,000 for inspection costs to cover 170 of the 196 bands in the province, said Martin.
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