CANADIAN PCB EMISSIONS INVENTORY

Sediment | PCBs in Use and in Storage | Fish Advisories | Accidental Spills and Releases | Surface Water | Air

Surface Water - Releases and Facilities

STORET

STORET Legacy database - this is a database provided by the U.S. EPA which has only limited Canadian data. Québec data is very limited, with only 13 stations and no data from the St. Lawrence River. For Ontario, stations are either river/stream or facility-based. There are 500-600 stations listed, but one would have to go through each one of hundreds of individual stations to see if PCBs had been tested. Many of the stations have no data associated with them.

There was some data available on PCB testing at the Don and Humber Rivers in Toronto (Lake Ontario). For the Don River at Pottery Road, for the period 1985 to 1994 (when the data ends), 56 samples resulted in 0.02 micrograms / L. of PCBs in whole water sample, 1 sample result was at 0.054 micrograms / L. and 1 sample was at 0.06 micrograms / L.

For the Humber River at Old Mill Road, sample data is available for 1979 to 1990. Again, most values are at 0.02 micrograms / L. of PCBs in whole water sample, but 1 result in 1980 was at 0.49 micrograms / L. of PCBs.

PCS

There is no PCS information for Canada. The Lake Superior LaMP 1999 has information on PCB sources and estimated emissions to the Canadian portion of the Lake Superior Basin based on updated data from the report, Zero Discharge Strategy for Lake Superior: Fishing for Sources of Contaminated Water / Shirley Thompson, contract #KA401-4-0118, 1994:

PCB Inventory (in Ontario) in the Lake Superior Basin