KAHNAWAKE NATION

Asbestos report delayed ‘at least a few weeks,’: Diabo

A report into the dumping of asbestos containing materials into the community will be delayed slightly after the transition between councils and extra documentation caused the report’s reception to lag slightly, said the Chief responsible for the file said in an interview last week.


“With the orientation of the new Council and entering the fourth wave of the pandemic,” Mohawk Council of Kahnawake Chief Cody Diabo, who is the lead on the environment file for the MCK, said. “We didn’t want it to drag on too long, but we understood there would be delays.”

Since the report will not arrive by September 30, MCK issued an announcement last week saying the Deloitte Forensic report would be delayed due to ‘community issues,’ among other reasons. In addition, Diabo said there was far more documentation for Deloitte Forensic to sift through than was anticipated.

“The goal was to start in May and not have it dragging on too long. Originally, we thought there would be about 15 interviews to do,” he said, but that number nearly doubled when work began in earnest and investigators did 29 interviews, he added.

“The goal was those soft targets,” he said “We’re suspecting mid-October. That’s kind of what we’re shooting for. About two or three weeks for that (to arrive). We don’t have an exact date set yet.”

At that point both the MCK and community observer Doug Lahache will look at the reports and then it will be released to the community, Diabo added.

It’s been about two years since the discovery that old sewage pipes that were crushed and disposed of in the community were contained asbestos, which was used as a bonding agent in concrete in the past. Asbestos can be hazardous to health in humans.

“In 2019, this all came to light, and since April of 2020, we’ve been looking at how to address it,” but the COVID-19 pandemic took some of the focus off that project.

Diabo said he’d like to have a plan in place for ridding the community of the ACM by November of this year.

“We’re working now on the global strategic plans in place to address it,” he said. “More areas sort of came to light. We had the 106 area, more pipes were found on the island and so my goal, my deadline is sometime in November, maybe around the end of November we will have that plan presented to council.”

Diabo said he would like to finalize the plan for disposing of the ACM over the winter and be ready to go when the snow melts in 2022.

“Then we can take the winter to really work out the schematics and be ready for next Spring,” he said.

Marc Lalonde, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Iori:wase