Halifax Regional Municipality crews clean up the illegal dump in Dartmouth. (CBC)Halifax Regional Police are investigating after truckloads of garbage were dumped in Dartmouth, N.S., but not at a landfill.
The illegal dumping occurred just off Highway 118, at the edge of the Burnside Industrial Park, where there's a collection of household and industrial waste.
Much of the dumped garbage seemed to be leftovers from home renovations, including old toilets and sinks.
City crews were at the site Thursday cleaning up the mess.
"We have to determine exactly who owns the property," said Halifax Regional Police spokeswoman Theresa Rath.
The property is owned either by the province or the city.
Scattered among the trash were letters and financial statements complete with names and addresses. But this doesn't necessarily make it any easier for police to charge someone with an offence, Rath said.
"Something with an address on it, a name on it, we will follow up on that," she said. "But we have to prove that that person actually dumped that material. So, in some cases, it doesn't lead us to laying a charge."
On Thursday, CBC News contacted a contractor whose name and address were among the debris. He said he does not know anything about the garbage or how it got there.
Shaune MacKinlay, a spokeswoman with the City of Halifax, said municipal taxpayers will foot the $3,000 bill for the cleanup, regardless of which level of government actually owns the land.
"We'll be using our own crews, our own equipment, so it's a cost we can certainly absorb," she said Wednesday. "That doesn't mean it's not resources that could be better used elsewhere."
MacKinlay said this isn't the first case of illegal dumping in the municipality, but it's one of the largest.
"It's a large municipality," she said. "We have a lot of rural roads where people can quietly go and dump some of their residential garbage. But we don't generally see the scope and scale that we're seeing on this site. It's a real mess."
