David Sydney-Cariglia saw the struggling plane before he heard it.

He’d been focusing on his son playing soccer at St. Patrick Catholic Secondary School in Toronto’s east end. It was a cloudless Monday night in September. As dusk settled in and the floodlights hummed, a strange shape whispered over the field.

Phil Arens spreads a stack of lab reports across his dining room table, jabbing at test results showing how heavily his well has been laced with “forever chemicals” seeping downhill from North Bay’s airport.

“It really bounces around,” says the plumbing contractor. “Here I am at 93, then 48, 11, 35, 31 – then there was 226. That was last August. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

On a drizzly November afternoon last year, Judy Moss burst from her house in Torbay, N.L., sprinted to her red barn and dumped the water she’d drawn for her miniature ponies. Then she hurried up Kelly’s Lane and started knocking on doors.

“Don’t drink the water,” she warned her neighbours.