Saint-Laurent River | A decontamination operation to remove nearly a thousand tires

Webbed feet of an unusual type are invading the Saint-Laurent this weekend.

Led by underwater explorer and filmmaker Nathalie Lasselin, volunteer divers are surveying the bottom of the river near Beauharnois, in Montérégie, to remove hundreds and hundreds of tires that have been polluting the aquatic environment for several decades.

These tires come from a breakwater made up of 40,000 of them, which was installed in 1990 to expand the Beauharnois marina and which has since sunk.

However, the tires were attached to each other with rubber straps containing urethane, a chemical substance that, in too high a concentration, can cause health damage.

Added to this, of course, is the microplastic pollution caused by the tires themselves and the plastic that surrounded them when they were put in the water.

Around twenty carefully selected volunteers make up Nathalie Lasselin’s troops.

Divers who are necessarily experienced, because they have to advance solo with “zero visibility” and the risk of hitting objects or getting caught in fishing lines, explains the diver. She hopes to remove between 1,000 and 1,500 tires from the river during this mission which will last 15 days.

This is a new type of mission for the diver, a member of the non-profit organization Aqua Sub Terra, whose vocation is the protection and promotion of aquatic and underground resources.

The action could be repeated from year to year, the number of tires remaining underwater, out of the original 40,000, being unknown, but well above the thousand that Nathalie Lasselin and her divers hope to recover.