The Way We Were: Spraying Agent Orange on Farms in the 60’s
by Diana Zlomislic, TORONTO STAR, February 26, 2011
Ontario Hydro used Agent Orange to clear power line corridors across the province, through city backyards and thick rural brush.
Hydro’s own records, obtained by the Star, boast that in one 12-year period, the power company dropped enough chemicals in Ontario to cover a 30-metre-wide swath travelling “four-fifths the distance around the world.”
The Ontario Hydro revelation moves health concerns over the toxin closer to highly populated areas of the province, with spraying on hundreds of thousands of kilometres of hydro corridors looping through parks and farmers’ fields.
For months at a time, summer students and salaried Hydro labourers would fan out across Ontario with metal knapsacks filled with poisonous chemicals strapped to their backs. The company also loaded hundreds of gallons of herbicides onto all-terrain vehicles, helicopters, army trucks, swamp tractors and even horses to help workers access every nook and cranny, according to the Star’s ongoing investigation.
“Every power line in Ontario was sprayed,” said Sidney Rodger, a former Hydro supervisor who worked in eastern Ontario from 1958 to 1968.
“All this spraying was done in urban and rural areas with no regard for creeks and streams or residents and wildlife.”
The Toronto Star interviewed former Hydro employees, including summer students and senior managers, who were assured the chemicals were harmless. The illnesses they’ve been dealing with the past few decades tell a different story.
The men came forward after a Star investigation published last week revealed that the most widely used chemical in the Vietnam War was also employed at large by Ontario’s Department of Lands and Forests to strip massive plots of Crown land during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.
A Hydro One spokeswoman confirmed the utility also used Agent Orange across Ontario from 1950 to 1979.
Daniele Gauvin said anyone with concerns can contact Hydro One, a company created in 1998 to replace Ontario Hydro. Gauvin said people are welcome to call the “corporate switchboard.”
Meanwhile, government officials are probing the effects of Agent Orange use by provincial ministries in northern Ontario and along roadsides across the province.
“Spraying can be a bitter pill to the public,” states an Ontario Hydro training document from 1962. It advised spraying supervisors “to practise courtesy, care and common sense.”
To convince farmers to allow Hydro spray crews onto their pastures, some supervisors would dip a cup into the chemical tank and take a swig.
“We were just young, single guys making big money,” said Orval Newton, 64, who earned $2.06 an hour as a labourer power-spraying trees and brush beneath high-voltage lines from Parry Sound to Toronto in 1967.
Bread cost 25 cents a loaf at the time and regular gasoline was 41.9 cents a gallon.
“We had no protection,” he said. “The drift would come back into your face. You’d finish the day with your clothes soaked.”
Four years ago, Newton was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, one of more than 50 medical conditions the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs associates with exposure to Agent Orange.
George Hambley, 62, spent three summers spraying near Kirkland Lake during the early 1970s.
A massive tractor carrying hundreds of gallons of chemicals rolled through the brush. Attached to the chemical tank were three high-pressure hoses usually carried by seasonal workers like him.
“The guy on the middle hose got it bad,” he said. “Sometimes we’d start to gag because the spray was so thick.
A few years after he finished with Hydro, still in his 20s, Hambley started to lose feeling in his toes. Year by year, the numbness spread to his legs and hands. His official diagnosis is neuropathy, a disorder the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also associates with exposure to Agent Orange.
When Hambley was in his 30s, thick, red patches of skin with flaky, silver-white scales started to appear; they now cover 75 per cent of his body.
“On hot days, and with the blessing of our foreman, we would spray each other with this ‘safe’ concoction,” recalls Bryan Ostrowski, 69, who worked with the chemicals as a teenager in northern Ontario.
“We would spray upwards beneath the trees,” he said. “We did this day in and day out.” He was 15 his first year.
Ostrowski started developing heart problems in his 20s. He had his first bypass at 41 and now has a stent. Polyps riddled his nasal cavities. The polyps were removed in his 30s. [Read rest of story]