Letter to the Editor – August

Oak Ridges Moraine

One of the most important points that usually gets forgotten about wind plants being allowed on the Oak Ridges moraine, is the fact that the moraine is exactly that, a moraine. The entire length of 160 kilometres and one million acres is full of Ontario’s largest fresh water reserves. Even Premier McGuinty was well aware of this fact, along with his caucus members which included the now Premier Kathleen Wynn. Premier McGuinty promised never to allow industry on the largest Green belt in the world and stated that the Oak Ridges would be saved for the children of Ontario’s future.

Directly north of Pontypool will be WPD’s wind plant, approved by Miss Wynn and her Ministries of Environment and Energy. The village of Pontypool is only several kilometers from this Industrial Wind Plant site, and has cast an astonishing and dangerous future risk upon our village in the not too distant future. Not mentioned ever, is the fact that this company got away with little or no testing of many important issues pertaining to the villagers safety and other concerns. The most important and least mentioned is the fact that each turbine must operate with three to four hundred litres of toxic gear oil in its nacelle (gear box) and is a necessary evil to keep the gears from overheating and exploding.

All of the wind Companies will say that this risk is practically zero. Yet last year two or three turbines were known to have exploded in western Ontario, spilling their flaming gear oil contents onto farm land. I cannot tell you what the outcome was as regards to the ground water contamination, but if this were to happen on the WPD site. It would be a calamity of astonishingly and major proportions, as the site they are going to construct their plant on is the main aquifer that supplies the entire village of Pontypool with its single source of water, and does not include the many outlying private properties that also get their water supply from. No studies to my knowledge either, have been carried out concerning the Pigeon River water supply, nor the Ganaraska River, or the Fleetwood Creek supply, as all of these too, begin their journey’s to various lakes from the Oak Ridges moraine.

I am most definitely not convinced that Premier Wynn has the right to risk one of Ontario’s major water reserves, in order to supply us with more electricity that we don’t require and that she will only end up paying someone to take it off our hands.

If these wind turbines are only going to last for twenty years, would someone please tell me why we are not building some of the fifty dam sites that Ontario Hydro’s civil engineers had surveyed and approved, before Premier McGuinty gave Ms. Wynn the nod for the premiership. We would have been well on the way to cheap and lifetime electricity, just like Quebec is now, if only she had done the right thing instead of following the rest of the crowd.

Graham Hawkridge, City of Kawartha Lakes


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