Part 2: Foot Dragging Produces Dioxin Delays

  • The southeast corner of the Dow Chemical plant, from the vantage of Midland's Whiting Overlook Park, which features an homage to and history of the company and its founder. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

The State of Michigan, the US
Environmental Protection Agency
and Dow Chemical are negotiating
an agreement to clean up dioxin
pollution in towns, two rivers,
and Lake Huron. The pollution
is largely from a Dow chemical
plant in Midland, Michigan. The
government worries the pollution
poses a risk of cancer and other
health problems, and it’s been
found in fish, on property, and
in the blood of some people there.
Residents are asking why it’s taken
so long to get cleaned up. In the
second part of a series on Dow and
dioxin, Shawn Allee went
looking for an answer:

Transcript

The State of Michigan, the US
Environmental Protection Agency
and Dow Chemical are negotiating
an agreement to clean up dioxin
pollution in towns, two rivers,
and Lake Huron. The pollution
is largely from a Dow chemical
plant in Midland, Michigan. The
government worries the pollution
poses a risk of cancer and other
health problems, and it’s been
found in fish, on property, and
in the blood of some people there.
Residents are asking why it’s taken
so long to get cleaned up. In the
second part of a series on Dow and
dioxin, Shawn Allee went
looking for an answer:

If you want to see an environmentalist kinda lose his cool – talk to James Clift of the Michigan Environmental Council.

And bring up dioxin pollution.

Clift: “Um, it’s … people are think, frustrated. It is my entire career of working environmental protection in Michigan, this has been an issue. I’ve been doing this for over twenty years, and from day one I’ve been sitting on meetings about this site.”

Allee: “You’d rather work on something else? Birds or something?”

Clift: “I’d rather work on something else.”

Clift is frustrated with people who could have wrapped this up.

“I believe that each administration at both the state and federal level is culpable in failing to move this forward.”

When I talked to federal and state officials about this, they did some serious finger-pointing.

Let’s start with Steve Chester. He heads Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality. Chester says when people first learned about the dioxin problem at Dow’s chemical plant, the federal government was the lead regulator.

That changed.

“The federal government wanted to transition and hand the project off to the state of Michigan and we were in fact given this corrective action authority in the mid-nineties, and so there was a period of time quite frankly, the agencies didn’t take advantage of moving a little bit quicker.”

Actually, it took Michigan almost ten years to re-license the Dow chemical plant. That meant the state was slow to find out exactly where old dioxin pollution was in the river system, so some people didn’t know there was dioxin in their yards until the past few years. That’s decades after dioxins got into local rivers.

But what about the US Environmental Protection Agency?

Several former officials said the polluter, Dow, slowed things down.

One of these who would go on the record is Mary Gade. She led the EPA office that regulated Dow. Now, in the past we’ve reported Gade said she was fired by the Bush Administration because she got tough with Dow.

The EPA wouldn’t comment on that.

But even today, Gade says Dow slowed down the clean-up.


“I think this corporation is hugely adept at playing the system and understanding how to build in delays and use the bureaucracy to their advantage and to use the political system to their advantage.”

A confidential memo leaked from the EPA says when Dow didn’t like what Michigan’s technical staff had to say, they’d go higher up and try to get rules changed.

For a month, I requested comment from Dow. A spokeswoman said the company is interested in talking about the future, not the past.

People who’ve watched this say, there’s been plenty of foot-dragging.

But why should this dioxin cleanup even matter to people who don’t live there? It’s Michigan’s problem, right?

Well, James Clift, that environmentalist, says, no, there’s a long list of toxic waste sites across the country. And Clift worries the government gets bogged down with big, slow cleanups.

“If they’re not even getting to the big ones which are known to everyone as known as causing widespread problems, that means they’re not getting to the medium sized ones and they’re not getting to the small ones.”

But there seems to be some progress. Recently, the EPA, the State of Michigan, and Dow came to a tentative agreement about cleaning up the dioxin pollution.

That means there’s at least one more delay, that would be public comment until mid-December.

That’s one delay many people don’t mind.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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