The following item appeared in the May 7th edition of the Guelph Mercury.
A historic landfill site has been swept under a carpet of grass at Joseph Wolfond Memorial Park, according to a park side resident. Lift it up and you will find old glassware, bricks and rusty metal — and maybe something much more harmful.
The city is aware there is only a thin veneer of greenery over the garbage, says Rita Wensler, because crews dug it up in the early ’90s as part of a park remodelling project, only to cover it over again with an inch or two of soil and grass. Wensler has lived directly across from the park since 1973 and has picked up and dug up assorted relics from the park’s past over the years.
A walk along the banks of the Speed River, which runs along the park’s boundaries, turned up evidence of landfill materials — rusty metal, bricks, limestone and some old brown glass.
“I think the neighbourhood and the park patrons should know that the city chose this garbage dump as a location for a park,” Wensler said. “It could have been put somewhere else.”
“The area between Pearl and Derry streets was used as a garbage dump by the city,” Wensler said, relating information she gathered from an elderly resident who remembered the dump. “The area has always had the necks of bottles showing up. The playground was built over this dump area.”
Park users over the weekend seemed to think old garbage is less harmful than the contemporary stuff we throw away, but some thought the matter should be looked into, just to be on the safe side.
“It concerns me a little bit, especially if there is any potential pollution,” said Miles MacCormack, as he played with his kids in the park. “Hopefully it’s not a bunch of industrial stuff, or big barrels of oil, and hopefully it’s buried deep.”
Ward 2 Councillor Ian Findlay confirmed that Joseph Wolfond Memorial Park is built over a landfill site.
“One particular resident has told me many stories of that area,” he said.
But, he added, vast stretches of the Speed River were once used as a garbage dumping area. The potential for buried contaminants along the banks of the Speed, he said, is very real, and concerns him.
“Just to put this in perspective, the whole river valley, probably from Riverside Park down to the Hanlon, at one point in time was a landfill site,” Findlay said. “That one park is not unusual.
Findlay said he hopes to learn more about the issue through a study that was prepared some years ago and is somewhere in the city archives.
“I’m actually looking for that,” he said.