The Sydney Tar Ponds are a hazardous waste site on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada.
Located on the eastern shore of Sydney Harbour in the former city of Sydney (now amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality), the Tar Ponds form a tidal estuary at the mouth of Muggah Creek, a freshwater stream that empties into the harbour. Over the last century, runoff from coke ovens associated with Sydney Steel Corporation's (SYSCO) now-decommissioned steel mill filled the estuary with a variety of coal-based contaminants and sludge. Efforts to clean up the waterway have been dogged by false starts, delays, and political controversy. After extensive public consultation and technical study, a $400 million CAD cleanup plan, jointly funded by the Government of Canada and Nova Scotia, was announced in January 2007.
Read more about Sydney Tar Ponds: Geography, History, Cleanup, Controversy, Environmental Impact Assessment, Solution
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“If ever there was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, called New York.”
—O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)
“The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
The gunner and his mate,
Loved Mall, Meg, and Marian and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate;
For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, ‘Go hang!’
She loved not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch:
Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)