During repairs near her home, she said a worker stopped to tell her what he had found beneath the surface, close to a water line.
“Hey, chief, I saw the fuel on your property. A pool of fuel,” she recalled him saying.
But there was no equipment to clean it up, she said, so the excavation was covered again.
For community leaders, these discoveries are reminders of what they describe as a decades-long problem of diesel contamination beneath Attawapiskat, a Cree community in Ontario’s Far North on the western side of James Bay. It’s an issue both the federal and Ontario governments have known about for years but have failed to fully address.