Trichloroethaneor TCA, is a solvent that contaminates groundwater and erodes the ozone layer. It is present at many polluted sites across the country. TCA comes from many common products such as glue, paint and industrial degreasers. Now scientists say they’ve found a microbe that can help clean it up. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar Charney reports:
Transcript
Trichloroethane or TCA is a solvent that contaminates groundwater
and erodes the ozone layer. It is present at many polluted sites across
the country. TCA comes from many common products such as glue,
industrial
degreasers, and aerosol sprays. Now scientists say they’ve found a
microbe
that can help clean it up. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tamar
Charney reports:
One way polluted water can be cleaned is to add bacteria that breaks
down the harmful substances. It is a process called bioremediation. In a
recent issue of “Science,” researchers at Michigan State University say
they’ve identified a microbe that could do this with TCA. Benjamin
Griffin is a doctoral student who worked on the project. He says they
found the bacteria in sediment in the Hudson River.
“They actually breathe TCA, so they respire it. They’re using this
chlorinated compound in the same way we use oxygen.”
The bacteria breaks down the TCA into other compounds. Those chemical
compounds can then be further broken down by other pollution-eating or
breathing bacteria. Up until now, scientists though there might not be
a
way to biodegrade TCA. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tamar
Charney.
States have been removing old dams from rivers for safety and environmental reasons. But researchers say water managers should be sure to take a close look when considering dam removal as an option because, in some cases, it might be bad for the environment. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
States have been removing old dams from rivers for safety and
environmental reasons. But researchers say water managers should be
sure to take a close look when considering dam removal as an option
because, in some cases, it might be bad for the environment. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush has more:
This year, 45 dams are slated for removal across the country. Half of
those dams are in this region.
Emily Stanley is a river ecologist at the University of Wisconsin.
She’s been studying rivers after a dam has been removed and recently
published her findings in the journal “BioScience.” She
says in farm country, dams can help trap fertilizers that have been
over-applied on nearby fields.
“Small reservoirs can act like wetlands, and can be effective filters
for removing the nitrogen that has come in off of farm fields through
groundwater into the system, and can be actually some valuable points
of improving water quality.”
Stanley says, in many cases, sediments have been collecting behind the
dams for decades. When the dam is removed, the sediments are suddenly
released downstream and can lead to harmful algae blooms. In some
cases, the sediments can contain more dangerous substances, such heavy
metals and PCB’s. Stanley says communities should be sure to weigh the
environmental consequences before removing a dam.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.
U.S. scientists have identified bacteria that can eat pollution and generate electricity at the same time. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
22 colleges and universities around the country, including three in the Great Lakes region, will be sharing $22 million in grants to help address hazardous waste problems. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
Transcript
Twenty-two colleges and universities around the country, including 3 in the Great Lakes region, will be sharing twenty two million dollars in grants to help address hazardous waste problems. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jonathan Ahl reports:
The U-S EPA is providing the funding for a variety of research projects. Some of the funding will go toward finding better ways to dispose of hazardous waste, both in groundwater and soil. Other projects will focus on ways to find more effective and efficient ways to remove hazardous waste from sediment and at mining sites.
Nearly a third of the total funding will go to outreach programs to help people in low-income communities. The money will be used to help them take an active role in cleaning up waste sites, and to prevent the addition of any more problem areas in their communities.
Purdue University will head up the grant projects in the Midwest. Michigan State University and Central State University in Ohio will also be involved.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jonathan Ahl.
The Alcoa/Reynolds Company removes PCBs they once dumped into the St. Lawrence River. Photo by David Sommerstein.
Polluted sediments sit at the bottom of rivers and lakes across the Great Lakes region. They can affect water quality, wildlife and human health. More than 40 highly contaminated areas in the region have been identified by the EPA’s Great Lakes Office, but so far only about half of those sites have been cleaned up. This fall, dredging is taking place in at least three of those hot spots – all on rivers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports on the challenges of cleaning up a river bottom:
Transcript
Polluted sediments sit at the bottom of rivers and lakes across the Great Lakes region. They can affect water quality, wildlife and human health. More than 40 highly contaminated areas in the region have been identified by the EPA’s Great Lakes Office.
But so far, only about half of those sites have been cleaned up. This fall, dredging is taking place in at least three of those hot spots, all on rivers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports on the challenges of cleaning up a river bottom.
(Sound of dredging)
Geologist Dino Zack stands on the steps of a mobile home overlooking the St. Lawrence River. He watches as barges glide in and out of an area contained by a 38 hundred foot long steel wall. Each barge carries a crane that periodically drops a bucket into the river bottom, pulling up sediment contaminated with PCBs. The goal is to remove 80 thousand cubic yards of contaminated sediment. Zack’s trailer is the EPA headquarters for the dredging project. He’s an independent contractor working for the federal government, which is spearheading the operation. And he’ll spend the next couple of months watching the Alcoa-Reynolds Company remove the chemicals they once dumped in the river.
“I’ll observe them while they’re collecting their data to make sure they’re following the work plan. Then, I’ll bring all the data back, assemble it into tables and review it.”
Zack isn’t the only one keeping a close eye on the dredging project, which began in June.
There’s another EPA scientist here, as well as two members of the Army Corps of Engineers who are supervising the work. There’s also a representative from the St. Regis Mohawk reservation, which is downriver from the contaminated area.
The EPA ordered Alcoa-Reynolds to clean up the pollution in 1993. The PCBs were present in a flame retardant liquid the company used in its aluminum smelting process.
Over the years, the liquid drained into the river, contaminating sediments along the shoreline. The most polluted area contains 2000 parts per million of PCBs. That equals about one bad apple in a barrel-full. The goal is to leave only one part per million of PCBs in the sediment. Anne Kelly is the EPA’s project director for the site.
She says achieving that level in a river environment is a challenge.
“One of the biggest problems with dredging a river is that you’re working without really seeing where you’re working. The other problem is the issue of re-suspension, that whenever this bucket hits the sediments, it stirs up sediments and then it settles out again.”
One of the biggest concerns is that the disturbed sediments will move downstream.
In this case, they’d only have to travel a mile to reach the drinking water intake for the St. Regis Mohawk reservation. That means toxins could make it into the drinking water.
Local people have also expressed fears that the PCBs could contaminate the air as well.
The dredging project was temporarily suspended this summer when residents on nearby Cornwall Island complained of respiratory problems. But air quality tests found the dredging wasn’t to blame. Ken Jock is the tribe’s environmental director.
He says in addition to air and water quality concerns, the local people would like to see a healthier fish population. Some species have been contaminated with PCBs. And he says that’s why the tribe supports the dredging.
“We know the PCBs will be there in a thousand years and we’ll be here, and we’ll still want to eat the fish. So we think that any solution has to be a permanent solution.”
The Alcoa-Reynolds Company had wanted to place a gravel cap over the chemicals rather than dredge. But the EPA ordered them to remove the PCBs. Rick Esterline, the company’s project director, says they’re fully cooperating with the government.
“You’re required to clean it up, that’s the rules and regulations that we have in our country. Whether they come at you with court orders or whether you do it, it’s still you have to do it.”
The project is expected to cost the company 40 million dollars. That includes the eight million dollar reinforced steel wall around the contaminated area. Alcoa-Reynolds is also using a special electronic bucket to remove the sediment. The EPA’s Anne Kelly says this has become the bucket of choice for Great Lakes dredging projects.
“Based on the information that will be transferred to the operator on the barge, he’ll know if that bucket is completely sealed, which is very helpful because a clamshell bucket will begin to close and hit a rock… he won’t know it’s still open partially and begin to pull that up through the water column with materials basically pouring out of it.”
Kelly says every cleanup project requires a different approach. In Michigan, General Motors is using an environmental bucket and silt curtains to dredge the Saginaw River.
Engineers in Michigan’s Pine River built a steel wall and emptied out the water inside before dredging. The dredging in the St. Lawrence is expected to finish in November.
And it’s possible it won’t reduce the PCB levels to one part per million. The cleanup at the nearby General Motors plant fell short of that goal. If that happens, the EPA will require the company to cap the river bottom – and monitor the sediments, the water and the fish indefinitely. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.
Polluted sediments sit at the bottom of rivers and lakes across the Great Lakes region. They can affect water quality, wildlife and human health. More than 40 highly contaminated areas in the region have been identified by the EPA’s Great Lakes Office. But so far, only about half of those sites have been cleaned up. This summer, dredging is taking place in at least three of those hot spots, all on rivers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly reports on the challenges of cleaning up a river bottom:
Aerial view of industry along the Fox River. Photo by Great
Lakes United.
One of the rivers that flows into Lake Michigan is polluted so badly that it’s being treated much like a Super Fund site…an environmental disaster. It’ll be decades before it’s cleaned up, and some environmentalists think it might never be cleaned up properly. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
One of the rivers that flows into the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan) is
polluted so badly that it’s being treated much like a Super Fund site –an
environmental disaster. It’ll be decades before it’s cleaned up. And some
environmentalists think it might never be cleaned up properly. The Great
Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
(Sound of fish splash)
It’s late at night. The moon’s out. And the fish are flopping on the Fox
River. In downtown Green Bay, Wisconsin, Robert Hageman and a few of his
friends have been fishing. A couple of the guys are bragging about the big
fish they caught. But they’re not taking any home with them tonight.
LG: “Had any luck?” RH: “Yeah, I caught 23 fish.”
LG: “And wwhat did you do with them? RH: “Let ’em right back.” LG: “why?” RH: “Because it’s dirty. Fox River’s dirty.”
LG: “What have you heard about the Fox River?” RH: “The fish ain’t good for you. They can’t hurt you, but they ain’t good for you.
(friends in background say “PCBs, man.”) “yeah.”
LG: “What do you know about PCBs?
RH: “I don’t know nothing about it. That’s why I ain’t eatin’ them.” (all laugh)
Hageman and his friends are right when they say there are PCBs in the Fox
River. But apparently they haven’t heard that eating fish from the river
probably can hurt you in the long run. There are 60-thousand pounds of
PCBs, or poly chlorinated byphenyls, in the 39 mile run of the Fox
River. Of that, 50-thousand pounds – that’s 25 tons – is in the sediment of
the last seven mile stretch just before the river flows into Green Bay and
on into the rest of Lake Michigan. It’s that final stretch where Hageman
and his friends have been fishing.
The Environmental Protection Agency says seven paper mills along the Fox
River are the likely polluters. The EPA says PCBs were produced as a
by-product of the paper manufacturing process, and from the 1950s to the 1970s
they were dumped into the river. Now, the agency intends to make those
mills pay for cleaning up the contaminants.
Dennis Hultgren works for Appleton Papers, and is a spokesperson for a group
that represents the seven companies. Hultgren says the paper mills want to
clean up the pollution. But they don’t want to pay more than they have to.
“What we want to do is make sure that the money that we do spend
is spent wisely and it does the most environmental good for the region. And
so, we have one chance to do it right and we want to do it right the first
time.”
The paper mills have been working closely with government agencies to try to
determine where the PCBs are concentrated and how best to clean up the
pollution. Some of the companies have spent millions of dollars on tests in
the river. Just recently, Hultgren’s firm offered 40-million dollars… ten-million dollars a year for four years… for data collection and preliminary clean-up tests. The government agencies praised the decision and some environmental groups voiced their approval. But a local grassroots group, the Clean Water Action Council of Northeast Wisconsin, does not approve. Rebecca Katers is with the council and says it’s a delay tactic by the paper mill companies.
“It makes the company look generous. But, in fact, they should be doing this anyway. They should have done this ten years ago.”
Giving the money now, Katers says, only manages to delay legal action
against the company for four more years. Besides, she says, while
40-million dollars might seem like a lot of money, the estimated clean-up
could cost as much as 30 times that amount.
The Clean Water Action Council says this money and the government’s
willingness to accept it are representative of the cozy relationship the
companies seem to have with regulators. But Katers says the state and
federal agencies are forgetting about the people who live here. She
bristles when she hears the government agencies talk about how close they
are to the paper mills.
“They talked at the announcement about ongoing discussions they
have on a daily basis with the paper industries on this issue. But, they
haven’t met once face-to-face with the public. They haven’t held a public
discussion or debate on this issue.”
And it appears there won’t be many opportunities in the future. Although
the Fox River is not a Superfund site, the EPA is generally following the
process used for Superfund sites. The EPA says that means the public can
submit comments in writing. But there won’t be a lot of public discussion
until the EPA actually has a proposed plan. Katers thinks the people
should have a voice a lot earlier in the process.
But, the paper mills’ representative, Dennis Hultgren says it’s better to
let the experts work first.
“It’s complicated. For the normal citizen, it’s going to be very difficult to comment on it because they’re going to be looking at the technical merits
of their comments. And a general citizen, not having been involved, it’s going to be very difficult to have germane comments.”
The companies say they’ve been studying and testing and they’ve found
disturbing the sediment by trying to remove it proves that the PCBs should
be left in the sediment, allowed to slowly break down… a process called
natural recovery. And where there’s risk that sediment laden PCBs might
be disturbed by the river’s currents, engineered caps could be put in place.
The Clean Water Action Council says the paper mills tests were designed to
end up with that conclusion because that would be the cheaper way to deal
with the PCBs. The council wants the PCBs removed from the river and
disposed of safely… a much more expensive job.
The acting regional administrator for the USEPA, David Ullrich, says
there’ll likely be some combination of natural recovery, capping, and
removal. But, Ullrich says none of that will happen anytime soon. It’s a
big job, and it looks as though it will take up to ten years to deal with
the PCBs. And Ullrich says that’s just the beginning.
“The actual recovery of the resource, getting fish contaminant
levels down to acceptable levels and getting the PCB loadings to Green Bay
and out to Lake Michigan down, could take a longer period of time than that,
perhaps up to twenty years.”
And over that 20 year period, experts say that contamination will
naturally spread farther and farther into Green Bay and Lake Michigan.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
The Environmental Protection Agency says it could be a decade before a river that feeds Green Bay and Lake Michigan will have tons of PCBs cleaned up. And a lot longer before the river recovers from the effects of the pollution. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
The most toxic hot spots around the Great Lakes would receive an extrafifty million dollars in clean-up funds, if a Clinton administrationbudget proposal goes through. But some environmental groups don’t wantthe money dribbled out in small doses. They argue the best thing to dowould be to spend all the cash on comprehensive clean-up projects atjust a few sites. The idea is controversial, as the Great Lakes RadioConsortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Transcript
The most toxic hot spots around the Great Lakes would receive an extra fifty million dollars in
clean-up funds, if a Clinton Administration budget proposal goes through. But some environmental
groups don’t want the money dribbled out in small doses. They argue the best thing to do would be
to spend all the cash on comprehensive clean-up projects at just a few sites. The idea is
controversial, as the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’ s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
The most polluted parts of the Great Lakes are known as Areas
of Concern. There are over 40 of these hot spots in harbors and
bays, or in rivers that dump into the lakes. At many sites, the
pollution has led health agencies to tell people to be careful
about eating certain types of fish.
But that hasn’t stopped some anglers from doing their thing.
“That was the best cast I’ve
seen today.”
Marl and his buddy Paul are standing underneath an elevated
freeway in Milwaukee. They’re casting their fishing lines into
Lake Michigan for brown trout, perch or whatever wants to bite.
Through Milwaukee’s estuary, that’s the harbor and nearby rivers, is a toxic hot spot, Marl says he
pays little attention to fish consumption warnings.
“Whatever I catch I eat, I eat it on whatever basis I feel like eating it. If I want to eat fish
every night for a week, I eat it… doesn’t seem to affect me in any way.”
But nearby in the Milwaukee harbor, researchers point to pollution that seems to make the casual
approach to fish consumption here quite risky.
(sound of horn)
This tugboat is pushing a barge that’s about to take a load of coal from a huge coal pile at the
water’s edge. The pile is uncovered and during heavy rains or snowmelt, there’s runoff from the
coal into the harbor. Great Lakes researcher Jeffrey Foran says that’s hardly the only pollutant in
the area.
“It’s a virtual alphabet soup of pollution and we can name a few. PCBs, PAHs, contaminants from
Foran heads the Great Lakes Water Institute at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. He says
there’s actually been some improvement in the surface water quality over the last couple decades.
But Foran warns the sediment in the Milwaukee harbor by and large remains toxic muck, and those
toxins make their way into the food chain. Foran says Milwaukee’s problems aren’t unique.
“If you took the problems and simply dropped the name Milwaukee harbor, you could insert those
problems into probably the majority of areas of concern throughout the Great Lakes basin.”
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on cleanup work at the various sites, but only one
project – at Waukegan, Illinois – is largely done. So environmental groups hope Congress during its
EPA budget deliberations this spring will approve the extra 50 million dollars in cleanup funds
President Clinton proposed. But Great Lakes United executive director Margaret Wooster says the
money should be targeted to just a few hot spots.
“And do the complete cleanup right. From soup to nuts kind of thing. That is the initial making
sure if there’s a polluter, polluter pays their fair share as has happened in many cases, to good
dredging techniques.”
Wooster also says there needs to be good places to dump the dredged material. Then should come
monitoring to make sure the water body doesn’t become fouled again, if there are more
success stories around the Great Lakes, environmentalists believe
lawmakers will then allocate additional money to finish work on
the other sites. But the Great Lakes community isn’t completely
sold on the targeting of funds. William Smith is a citizen
advisor to the Clinton river area of concern north of Detroit.
He wonders how fast news of complete clean-ups would spread.
“And when these one demonstration projects are done,
they’re distant. You hear about them the transfer of information
is long is coming. And sure it’s nice for some harbor to go after
this. But if you’re looking across the board on the Great Lakes
it would be much better used to go after problems in individual
Areas of Concern instead of 2 to 3 separate sites.”
Smith says
funneling just a million or two dollars to some of Michigan’s
smaller hot spots would move clean-up of those sites forward in a
big way. That’s because state officials would probably match the
federal funds. But whether the federal money is targeted to a
couple sites or divided evenly in all the areas, Smith does agree
with the large environmental groups on one thing. He says the
recreation and drinking water needs of Great Lakes citizens
should prompt Congress to approve the president’s plan.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Chuck Quirmbach in Milwaukee.
Great Lakes authorities are looking for new places to put the
sediment dredged from harbors and channels. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
