by Miles Howe

K'jipuktuk (Halifax) – An email conversation disclosed through an Access to Information request has revealed that an undetermined amount of “brine water,” originating from the Kennetcook and Noel area frack waste-water holding lagoons, has already been shipped to the Town of Windsor's waste water treatment facility.

The emails, dated May 10, 2011, confirm that Nova Scotia Environment has been aware for at least 18 months that a quantity of the waste-water has been shipped from Atlantic Industrial Services' (AIS) treatment facility in Debert, NS to Windsor's sewage treatment plant. These are the same waters that have been determined to be radioactive due to an elevated amount of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material.

These emails are problematic because they fly in the face of the public position that both Nova Scotia Environment, AIS and Triangle Petroleum Corp have taken to this point vis-a-vis the 4.5 million litres of waste-water supposedly now at Debert, and the 11 million litres still requiring attention in holding ponds in the Kennetcook area. The public has been misled to believe that this 15.5 million litres is the sum total of all the waste-waters that the two fracked wells in Kennetcook produced. These emails speak to the contrary, as the Town of Windsor acknowledges having received “brine water” (read: frack waste-water) from AIS.

“When I ask, when I request information, Nova Scotia Environment has always said they don't have any information on where any of the waste water went,” Ken Summers of the group NOFRAC told the Halifax Media Co-op. “This is the only document we have that ever mentions where the waste ends up. And when I say, 'There's a lot of waste that left various drill sites, where did it go?', they tell me, well you'll have to ask the company. And [Triangle Petroleum is] not required to tell us.”

Neither Nova Scotia Environment or the Town of Windsor was available for comment as of press time.