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05 | 24 | 2014 VOLUME 19 | ISSUE 21
SUMMER CONCERT SERIES SET TO GO FOR FIFTH SEASON THE ARTS PAGE 19
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CANADA POST LOSSES TRUMP HOME DELIVERY POLL
No end-date for cleanup at former Heidelberg Motors site
Breaking the code of silence Memorial planned to honour West Montrose’s Bill Tutte, who was humble to the extreme, never playing up his key role deciphering WWII codes at famed Bletchley Park
Recent legal settlement with region doesn’t alter Imperial Oil’s plan to remediate soil at old gas station on Lobsinger Ln.
WILL SLOAN
STEVE KANNON Underground cleanup efforts at a former gas station in Heidelberg will continue until remediation is completed, unaffected by a legal settlement reached earlier this month between the Region of Waterloo and Imperial Oil. The company is footing the bill for the remediation costs under the direction of the Ministry of the Environment. Work has been ongoing since a 2007 regional project on Lobsinger Line discovered old contaminants, mostly hydrocarbons, on the former Heidelberg Motors site. A settlement reached in April and subsequently approved by regional council, covered legal action stemming from the discovery of the pollutants. Imperial Oil agreed to pay $450,000 to the region, which has run up legal bills of some $260,000. The deal also provides the region indemnity against further contaminants. “I cannot discuss specifics of the settlement in detail without the other REMEDIATION | 4
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Before he was a professor at the University of Waterloo, Bill Tutte broke a Nazi code that helped end the Second World War two years early. [SUBMITTED]
If you had helped bring the Second World War to an end two years ahead of schedule, this might be a fact that you would want to brag about. But William Thomas Tutte – “Bill” to friends and family – lived a life of comfortable obscurity, living in West Montrose and teaching mathematics at the University of Waterloo. But now, a new memorial project in Tutte’s UK hometown of Newmarket, Suffolk aims to put the unknown soldier in his rightful place in history. “‘Modest’ is always the word,” said Richard Fletcher of the Bill Tutte Memorial Fund, speaking by phone from Newmarket. “He could never really discuss what he did, but indeed he never really referred to anything about his wartime work at all. He was a very quiet, humble man who liked nothing better than mathematical puzzles – the more complicated the
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better – and playing chess with his grandchildren.” Tutte was a Trinity College chemistry grad and member of the Government Code and Cypher School in 1941 when he was recruited to join a research team at Bletchley Park investigating enemy codes. The “Tunny” code (now known as the Lorenz code) was being used by the Nazis to connect with elite commanders, with the assumption it was unbreakable. A critical breakthrough came on August 30, 1941, when Hitler sent the same message twice, with the same settings, using abbreviations for common words. Tutte noticed 41 characters used in a repeat pattern, and realized the rotor of the Lorenz machine had 41 teeth. Using “intellect and intuition alone,” Tutte was able to describe all 12 rotors in just a few weeks, and the allies were able to decipher GerCODE BREAKER | 2
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LOCATIONS
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