Researchers who studied three generations of mothers and their children from the community of Grassy Narrows, Ontario, have concluded that sustained exposure to the toxic metal helped cause a suicide rate three times higher than any other First Nations community – which are already far higher than among the country’s general population.
Absolute tragedy.
Grassy Narrows was the site of mercury dumping for nearly a decade after 1963, when a paper company released more than 20,000lb of mercury into the Wabigoon and English river systems. … A single gram of mercury is sufficient to make all fish in a 20-hectare radius unsafe for consumption – but the Grassy Narrows dumping was 9m times larger.
A corporate crime on the grandest scale. The paper doesn’t say whether there were any repercussions. Meanwhile…
For years, Grassy Narrows has battled the provincial and federal governments to have their water system cleaned. In 2021, the federal government agreed to fund a $C90m “mercury care home” to help those living with the effects of poisoning, a project that faced repeated delays.
How long do you think the delay would be if it concerned the families of the government officials ‘responsible’ for cleaning the water or building the care home? So much for transparency and accountability in Canadian government.
released more than 20,000lb of mercury into the Wabigoon and English river systems
That’s weird considering mercury was and is kinda valuable.
I didn’t think of it like that. Maybe it was mixed up and hard to separate from something else? Or maybe there were high taxes, etc, on commercial waste? Something like that?
Maybe it was mixed in with something else and wasn’t considered valuable enough to salvage/filter out. I also wonder if the 20,000lbs number is over a period of many years. Super messed up either way though, I don’t even know where one would start cleaning this up. :(
That’s…worse in a lot of ways. Mercury compounds are way way fucking bad and are even more dangerous than “just” straight elemental mercury.
Maybe/probably but on the scale of 20000lbs that still seems odd. Although at 113lbs/gal that’s only 175 gallons but still, mercury is usually used in extremely small quantities.
Typically as a vapor, even. And it has a fairly low vapor pressure for a liquid. Not even that much vapor is needed.
It’s an immense amount of liquid mercury - especially since it probably had organic compounds in it too. Bioavailable mercury is truly fucked stuff, and those responsible for this should live the rest of their lives in a chemical shed.
Aren’t native Americans like famously resilient against suicide?
Resilient??! What are you trying to say exactly, what is your point?
As in they don’t usually give in to that? Thought I saw that before, that suicide was way more of an old world thing. Might have been about Amazon natives though.
Oh! That word means the opposite of what you thought.
These are Indigenous Canadians for starters, and resilient against suicide? My brother in Christ, they’ve been brutalized by the Canadian government for hundreds of years. Generational trauma is their normal.
Yeah, I looked it up, it was from the Amazon, so different natives.
