![]() “It’s widely known that hydroelectric development has a methylmercury impact,” said Ryan Calder, a Duke University postdoctoral associate and expert on the methylmercury impacts of hydroelectric development. 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. “We’ve depended on that food for decades and centuries as a way of life.”īut 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. “Half the people here can’t afford to buy from the stores,” Flowers told The Narwhal. “We’re paying $30 for a small chicken.” A medium-sized cabbage costs $4 or $5, while a package of cheddar cheese fetches $18. Traditional foods still form the backbone of her extended family’s diet, as they do for thousands of Inuit who hunt seal each April and catch salmon in June.Įven if Flowers wanted to buy all her food from local grocery stores, “the price of food here in Goose Bay is just outrageous,” she said. ![]() Marjorie Flowers grew up in the Labrador community of Rigolet on the shores of Lake Melville, eating nutrient-rich Inuit foods like brook trout and seal. This is part two of a three-part, reader-funded series on the Muskrat Falls dam inquiry. ![]()
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