Mercury rising: how the Muskrat Falls dam threatens Inuit way of life | The Narwhal
Flowers wanted to buy all her food from local grocery stores, “the price
of food here in Goose Bay is just outrageous,” she said. “We’re paying
$30 for a small chicken.” A medium-sized cabbage costs $4 or $5, while a
package of cheddar cheese fetches $18.
“Half the
people here can’t afford to buy from the stores,” Flowers told The
Narwhal. “We’ve depended on that food for decades and centuries as a way
of life.”
But this
spring will be the last that Flowers and her daughter, who is five
months pregnant, consume country food from the Lake Melville area
without fear of health impacts from methylmercury, a neurotoxin so dangerous the World Health Organization ranks it among the top ten chemicals of public health concern.
In the next year, when the Muskrat Falls
hydro dam on Labrador’s lower Churchill River floods an area twice the
size of the city of Victoria, methylmercury will immediately start to
contaminate the food chain as microbes feed on inorganic carbon stored
in flooded soils and vegetation, setting off a sequence of events.