Who Gets Great Lakes Water?

  • Lake Superior's North Shore. (Photo by Dave Hansen - Minnesota Extension Service)

For the first time, state legislatures in the Great Lakes region have a set of laws in front of
them that could comprehensively define how and where they can use Great Lakes water.
Melissa Ingells has a look at the document called the Great Lakes Compact:

Transcript

For the first time, state legislatures in the Great Lakes region have a set of laws in front of
them that could comprehensively define how and where they can use Great Lakes water.
Melissa Ingells has a look at the document called the Great Lakes Compact:


For a long time, nobody thought much about regulating the water of the Great Lakes.
They just seemed inexhaustible. There was no firm legal definition of who the water
belonged to, or who could give it away.


At some point, scientists figured out the boundaries of what’s known as the Great Lakes
Basin. It’s like a huge land bowl where all the waterways flow back into the Lakes. It
includes areas of eight states and parts of Canada. Scientists figured out that you had to
leave at least 99% of the water in the lakes in order to maintain all the important
ecosystems that depend on the water.


The natural boundary of the Great Lakes basin started to become a political boundary
when demand for water started rising. The only regulation for a long time was a 1984
federal law that said all the Great Lakes governors had to agree before any water could
be taken out of the lakes.


Then, in 1998, an organization called the Nova Group got a permit from Ontario to ship
water to Asia. People didn’t like that idea at all, and the politicians reacted:


“It seems like every major policy change has a triggering event.”


Dennis Schornack is the U.S. chairman of the International Joint Commission, which
oversees Great Lakes issues:


“The Nova permit granted initially by Ontario to this shipping company to take Great
Lakes water apparently by tanker to the far east… was the triggering event to start the
compact in motion. There have been a number of cases over the years… they all lead
down the same path, and that is that we had to have a structure to manage these waters
cooperatively.”


The Compact Schornack was talking about is the Great Lakes Compact. It’s a
comprehensive set of strict water usage laws. The states realized the need for something
like it after the Nova Group incident, and work on it was completed in 2006. It’s a strong
agreement because each state, and two Canadian provinces through a separate agreement,
must get it through their legislatures and get their governors to sign it. After all the states
have passed it, it has to be approved by the U.S. Congress.


Schornack was one of the people who helped write it. He thinks it’s a pretty good
solution for the lakes:


“This is really a big deal. Whether it’s a perfect solution, who knows, only time will tell,
but it certainly is a very strong and positive step in the right direction. When eight
governors get together and two premiers and decide we’re going to manage a fifth of the
world’s fresh surface water, and we’re going to do it with conservation, we’re going to do
it with very severe restrictions on diversions, this is all very good for the basin, this is
good news.”


The Compact does have its detractors. There are people from the business and
environmental worlds who have problems with some of it, but the general feeling is that
something has to be settled on, and the Compact is a good start. Most states seem
to have bipartisan support in their legislatures, although so far only Minnesota has
actually passed it. Peter Annin is the author of “The Great Lakes Water Wars.” He
thinks that by legislative standards, things are moving pretty quickly:


“The pace of ratification to the average citizen might seem like it’s
painfully slow and laborious. But in fact, with compacts in general, some of them have
taken ten, twenty years to make it through all the various legislatures. And so here we
are about 18 months after the documents were released… if you look at the eight states,
the vast majority of them have some sort of activity going.”


Annin also thinks that given the pressing issues over natural resources everywhere, that
agreements like the Compact will change the way other regions think about their
resources:


“Why it’s a model I think is because it’s encouraging to people to think not just in
political boundaries, but in watershed boundaries, in that the Compact encourages people
to work communally to a greater social and sustainability good on behalf of the regional
water supply and water resources and I think that’s going to be a model for the future no
matter where you are.:


Annin thinks there will be a flurry of activity in the legislatures in the next year or so.
That’s because after the 2010 congressional redistricting, the water-hungry Southwest
will likely have more power in the U.S. House. So it’s in the interest of Great Lakes
States to get the Compact through Congress before those political changes happen.


For the Environment Report, I’m Melissa Ingells.

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Mysterious Disappearing Bees

  • Brownish-orange bumps on the backs of these bees are Varroa jacobsoni mites, a possible cause of CCD. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:

Transcript

Millions of honeybees across the country are dying
mysteriously. Entire hives or colonies of bees are
collapsing. Scientists say it’s some new threat. They’re scrambling to find answers.
As Bob Allen reports, bees are crucial in pollinating billions of dollars worth
of crops every spring:


That fresh crisp apple you bite into for lunch comes from
a bee pollinating an apple blossom, but honeybees in the
U.S. are under tremendous stress. A new threat is
devastating them. It can wipe out entire colonies.


There’s plenty of honey still left in the hives to feed
the bees, but the bees have vanished. Scientists are
baffled. They’re calling it “Colony Collapse Disorder.”


Dennis van Englesdorp is bee inspector for the state of
Pennsylvania. He says the disorder first showed up in his
state last fall. But it’s now threatening the entire
beekeeping industry:


“We could not sustain the level of loss we’re seeing this
year several years in a row. And there are crops that are
90 to 100% reliant on honeybees for pollination. You need
bees for apples. And if you don’t have bees you don’t have
apples.”


A research team at Penn State University has given
themselves until fall to come up with some answers.


On a hilly farm in northern Michigan, Julius Kolarik raises
apples, cherries and honeybees. It’s a sunny day with the
temperature nudging near 50 degrees:


“So, no, it’s a beautiful day for bees. Makes you feel
good when you see bees flying. Makes me feel good
(laughs).”


This is the first time Kolarik has checked his bee yard
since fall. He uses his hive tool to pry the top off each
three-foot high colony to see how the bees are doing:


“We can see that they’re alive and that’s the main thing.”


It used to be considered an embarrassment if a beekeeper lost more
than 10% or so of his bees annually, but things have
gotten a lot tougher in recent years.


Parasitic mites have infested honeybees just about
everywhere. They’ve weakened the bees and left them
vulnerable to diseases and that’s meant annual losses
double what they used to be.


Now on top of that, there’s this new disorder. But Julius
Kolarik is not so sure how new it is. He’s been
raising honeybees since he was a kid:


“We’ve seen some of the same symptoms, so uh, through the
years. Even before we finally said that we have mites, uh.
We were getting unexplained losses. But now it’s come back
again. ‘Cause other years guys have lost whole yards but
left one or two hives.”


Bee researchers say previous outbreaks of colony collapse
were isolated incidents. This time it’s spread across the
country.


Tom McCormick’s small beekeeping operation supplies honey
to local markets in western Pennsylvania. That is, it did
until two years ago. That’s when he says collapsing
disorder killed half his colonies, so he bought more bees
to replace them. They did OK last year, but this spring
he’s looking at an 80% loss:


“To me it doesn’t make sense to go buy more bees and throw
them right back into the same situation without any idea
what the cause is.”


McCormick says two of his beekeeping friends have been
totally wiped out. And they’ve been seeing more than one
thing going on in their hives:


“One, we see hives full of honey and no bees. Totally
gone. We see other situations where we have a nice large
cluster of bees with honey all surrounding them and the
bees dead.”


When he reported this two years ago, he says, state
officials ignored him. Pennsylvania state beekeeper Dennis van Englesdorp admits
he thought McCormick had a serious mite problem at first.


But now researchers at Penn
State are checking other possible
environmental stresses that could be killing honeybees.
van Englesdorp says pinpointing the cause can be just
as difficult with bees as it is with humans:


“You can get a heart attack if you don’t eat well, if you
drink too much, if you smoke, you’re genetically disposed
to a heart attack. It could be one of those factors. It
could be a lot of those factors combining together.”


For this year, he says, the disorder means the number of honeybee colonies will be lower,
but he expects there to be enough to meet pollination
demands.


For The Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.

Related Links

Highway Debate Dividing Communities

  • Landowners who are opposed to the beltway say no matter which route it follows, it'll be cutting through prime farmland. Proponents of the beltway say the highway is needed to support the already fast-growing suburbs. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

As suburbs grow, politicians and city planners often promote new highways as a way to ease congestion and encourage more economic growth. Rebecca Williams reports on the struggle between local officials who want to encourage that growth and people who worry a new highway will fuel more sprawl:

Transcript

As suburbs grow, politicians and city planners often promote new highways as
a way to ease congestion and encourage more economic growth. Rebecca
Williams reports on the struggle between local officials who want to
encourage that growth and people who worry a new highway will fuel more
sprawl:


The Census Bureau says commutes to work are getting longer in the nation’s
biggest cities. Demographers say that’s because people are moving
out farther and farther from their jobs in search of more house for the
money or a quieter way of life. More people moving out to the fringes of the suburbs
means more pressure on two-lane roads and more congestion.


New highways are one of the tools local officials reach for when traffic
gets worse. People living in the fast-growing suburbs west of Chicago have
been debating a proposed new highway nicknamed the Prairie Parkway. The
four-lane beltway would connect these outer suburbs.


Jan Carlson is the Transportation Commissioner for Kane County, about 40
miles from downtown Chicago. He’s been looking forward to the beltway since
plans were unveiled five years ago:


“If you listen to the complaints, as I do, of people stuck in traffic and if
you consider the many economic advantages that moving that traffic brings to
us, it appears to me that the greater good is to move forward with the
project.”


Carlson says he knows new highways can rapidly speed up development in an
area, but he points to census data that show his county and others nearby
are already among the fastest-growing in the nation without a new highway:


“I am not one of those who subscribes to the theory that if you don’t build
it, they will not come.”


Jan Carlson says the new highway will make the local economy stronger,
bringing in much needed jobs to the suburbs, but many people are strongly opposed to the
beltway. Marvel Davis lives on a farm that’s been in her family for 170 years. Some of
her farmland lies within a corridor that the state has set aside for the proposed beltway.


“I tell people that’s the way sprawl happens. You think, well I’ve lost
that field to the farm, so the first guy that comes along and offers you
$50,000 an acre, your temptation is going to be pretty great, isn’t it?”


Davis says even though construction on the beltway isn’t expected to begin
until 2009, she’s seen a lot of new buildings spring up. She says it’s true
the area’s already growing, but she thinks the prospect of a new highway
might be encouraging more growth:


“So which comes first, the chicken or the egg? If word goes forth this
road’s going to happen and you come in with all kinds of developers, it’s
almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”


And urban planners agree it really is a chicken and egg relationship. It’s
hard to say which comes first. Highways speed up the pace of growth. And
growth causes a need for more highways.


Bill Klein is the director of research with the American Planning
Association. He says new highways do ease traffic congestion, but only for
a short time, before those highways get packed with people driving out to
their new homes in the suburbs.


“It’s very difficult to build your way out of sprawl. The more highways you
build, the more sprawl you get. Intellectually we’ve known this stuff for a
good long time but sometimes the political will to do anything about it is
the bigger problem.”


In the case of the Prairie Parkway, there is a political heavyweight in the
parkway’s corner. US House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been promoting the
concept of an outer beltway in his district since he went to Congress in the
late 1980’s. Just last year, Speaker Hastert earmarked 207 million dollars
for the beltway in the federal transportation bill.


Landowner Marvel Davis suspects the beltway might not go forward if it
weren’t for the Speaker’s support. She says if someone could show her the
beltway was in the country’s best interest, she’d support it.


“But if I’m going to lose my farm and my community to make a few people
multimillionaires then I’m not willing to do it.”


Marvel Davis says she knows she could make a lot of money if she sold her
land to developers, and she did actually sell more than 100 acres recently.
But she sold it to her county’s forest preserve for half of what she could
get from a developer.


Even though it’s years away, the promise of a new highway is sharply
dividing these communities. Whether or not they see growth as a good thing,
almost everyone agrees a new highway will speed up the pace of that growth.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Cash Strapped Biologists Lean on Volunteers

  • The lynx was recently considered extinct in Michigan until a trapper caught one. (Photo courtesy of USFWS)

For years, federal and state governments have cut funding for wildlife protection. That’s led to complaints from biologists who say they don’t have enough money to adequately do their jobs, but it’s also led to a new movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports on how citizens are starting to take over duties once performed by trained scientists:

Transcript

For years, federal and state governments have cut funding for wildlife
protection. That’s led to complaints from biologists who say they don’t
have enough money to adequately do their jobs, but it’s also led to a new
movement. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee
reports on how citizens are starting to take over duties once performed by
trained scientists:


Ray Rustem says wildlife biologists these days are often chained to their
desks.


“Years ago, when I first started with the Department of Natural
Resources, wildlife habitat biologists spent quite a bit of time in the field
actually doing fieldwork. With the types of things that are going on now,
they’ve become much more in getting the planning done and we’ve had
to shift some of that fieldwork done to the technician level. Frankly,
yeah, we could always use additional people out there.”


Rustem is with the Wildlife Division of the Michigan Department of
Natural Resources. He says state funding has fallen steadily for years,
and one way he’s made up the difference is by involving Michigan
citizens. Rustem says the DNR uses dozens of volunteers for its frog and
toad survey in the early part of the summer.


“This is our tenth year and we’ve got at least 120 people who’ve been
doing this all ten years. That’s a tremendous amount of data that’s being
provided for us on information about species and where they’re located.”


Many groups are now using so-called citizen scientists to collect data.
Sally Petrella is a biologist who works with the non-profit organization
the Friends of the Detroit River.


“We’ve cut out so much of the funding for regular science that there’s a
real lack, and citizen scientists can cover far more areas than
professionals can, at a much lower cost.”


Petrella is standing beside the murky, reed-choked waters of the Rouge
River Watershed. It’s home to six species of frogs and toads. Every
summer, Friends of the Detroit River enlists the help of 700 people to
listen for the creatures as they call to each other from the marshy
grasses.


Petrella is standing beside one of her more loyal volunteers… Al Sadler.
Sadler admits that part of the appeal is the walk along the banks of the
river… but he also believes that public participation in wildlife
protection has become an absolute necessity.


“I think that it’s required if we plan on keeping any wildlife areas
around. I think that if citizens don’t get involved, I think that people
won’t know what they’re going to miss, and before we know it, there
won’t be much wild places left.”


Sadler is a fairly typical citizen scientist. He has a day job as an engineer
and volunteers in his spare time, but there are also people with advanced
degrees in biology and wildlife management who are called citizen
scientists simply because they don’t work for the government.


Dennis Fijakowski is one of those people. He’s the executive director of
the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy.


“We can’t count on the government to do everything for us. We have to
be a part of the solution.”


Fijakowski says ordinary people have made important contributions to
wildlife conservation. He says the lynx was considered extinct in
Michigan until a trapper caught one, and a rare Great Gray Owl was
discovered on a national wildlife refuge last spring by a photographer.


“You look back at the conservation history of our state and it was citizen
led. All of the important, the milestone decisions, legislation… it was
citizen led.”


John Kostyack with the National Wildlife Federation says involving
citizen scientists is great, but…


“They’re not really a substitute for having staff in the wildlife agencies…
state and federal and tribal. Because they are the ones who are going to
take this initial data, which is going to be very rough from volunteers,
and then use it to decide upon where to take the research next.”


And there have been cases in which citizen scientists have clashed with
state and federal governments. They are consistently at odds with government
officials over issues related to global warming and the Michigan Wildlife
Conservancy is locked in a bitter battle with state biologists over whether
the state is home to a viable cougar population.


The Conservancy’s Dennis Fijakowski acknowledges that the union
between government biologists and citizen scientists may not always be
an easy one, but he says the involvement of residents in the protection of
their state’s wildlife can only be a good thing.


“Because all anyone of us wants is that we pass on a wild legacy to our
children and grandchildren… and we’re not going to if we don’t get our
acts together.”


Many organizations offer citizens the opportunity to get involved in data
collection, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.


For the GLRC, I’m Celeste Headlee.

Related Links

Ten Threats: Chemical Valley Spills

  • Sarnia, Ontario's shoreline with Lake Huron. (Courtesy of the EPA)

Most people think the days of industry polluting rivers and lakes are past, but that’s
just not the case. There’s a lot less pollution spewing out of factory pipes, but there
are still some real problem areas. Rick Pluta reports on how one of those areas is not
in the U.S., it’s in Canada, but the pollution ends up in the Great Lakes:

Transcript

Here’s the next report in our series Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. The series
guide is Lester Graham. He says our next piece reveals we still have a long way to
eliminate pollution in the lakes.


Most people think the days of industry polluting rivers and lakes are past, but that’s
just not the case. There’s a lot less pollution spewing out of factory pipes, but there
are still some real problem areas. Rick Pluta reports on how one of those areas is not
in the U.S., it’s in Canada, but the pollution ends up in the Great Lakes:


North of Detroit, just across the border from Michigan is Canada’s Chemical Valley. It’s a
complex of dozens of petro-chemical factories that employ thousands of people near Sarnia,
Ontario. Chemical Valley is the center of the economy here, but it also has a major
environmental effect on the Great Lakes.


That’s because Chemical Valley sits on the Saint Clair River, one of the rivers that connects
Lake Huron to Lake Erie. What happens on the Saint Clair River affects thousands of people who
downstream from the plants. Chemical spills from Sarnia have polluted the shorelines of both
countries.


Jim Brophy is the director of a health clinic for people who work in the sprawling complex of
factories on the Canadian side of the Saint Clair River. Brophy says he’s seen people suffering
and lives shortened by cancer, respiratory failure, and neurological disorders.


“It’s an unbelievable tragedy because these diseases are all completely preventable, but arose
both because of government and industry negligence over the course of 30 or 40 years, or even
longer.”


Brophy says many of those health problems are also being exported downstream to other
communities.


The Aamjiwnaang tribe makes its home right next to the Chemical Valley complex. A recent
study of Aamjiwnaang birth records found that, in the last decade, instead of births being about
half girls and half boys, only one-third of the babies born on the reservation were boys. Shifts in
reproduction patterns often serve as a signal of an environmental imbalance.


Jim Brophy says that suggests the impact of Sarnia’s chemical industry on the environment and
people deserves more attention.


“We cannot put a particular exposure from a particular place and link that at this point, but what
we are putting together are pieces of a puzzle, and I think that’s becoming a major concern not
just for our community and not just for the American community on the other side of the river,
but I think for people all along the Great Lakes.”


Environmental regulators agree. The province of Ontario recently ordered 11 facilities to clean up
their operations so there are fewer spills and emissions. Although the provincial government has
little power to enforce those orders, officials say it’s a step in the right direction.


Dennis Schornack is the U.S. chair of the International Joint Commission. The IJC looks to
resolve disputes and solve problems in the Great Lakes international waters. He says that, since
World War II, Chemical Valley has changed the character of the Saint Clair River.


“We really have to watch this for drinking water – that’s the main thing. Canada does not draw its
drinking water from the river and the U.S. does.”


So communities on the U.S. side have to deal with chemical spills and other pollution in their
drinking water, but they have no control over the polluters on the other side of the border.


Peter Cobb is a plant manager who sits on the board of the Sarnia-Lambton Environmental
Association. That’s a consortium of Sarnia petro-chemical operations. He says the problem is
spills into the Saint Clair River peaked in the 1980s, when there were roughly 100 spills a year.
He says now that’s down to five to 10 spills a year.


“We have made significant progress. Having said that, our target remains zero spills per year,
and industry is well aware that our current performance does not meet our own target as well as
the expectations of the public.”


Cobb also acknowledges there have been some major setbacks in the last couple of years. Some
big spills have forced downstream communities to once again stop taking their drinking water
from the Saint Clair River. Cobb says Chemical Valley will try to do better.


For the GLRC, this is Rick Pluta.

Related Links

Ten Threats: Pollution Hot Spots

  • Ruddiman Pond has been listed as a Great Lakes 'Area of Concern' for more than 18 years. (Photo by Michael Leland).

For decades, heavy industries made the Great Lakes a center of manufacturing
and employment for the United States. Those factories also left polluted waters
in many areas. In 2002, Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation
that promised to clean the Lakes’ pollution hot spots, known as Areas of Concern.
So far, work has only begun at three of those sites. Reporter Michael Leland
visited one of them:

Transcript

We’re continuing our series Ten Threats to the Great Lakes. Our guide
in the series, Lester Graham, says one of the threats identified by experts
across the region is known as “Areas of Concern.”


For decades, heavy industries made the Great Lakes a center of manufacturing
and employment for the United States. Those factories also left polluted waters
in many areas. In 2002, Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation
that promised to clean the Lakes’ pollution hot spots, known as Areas of Concern.
So far, work has only begun at three of those sites. Reporter Michael Leland
visited one of them:


Picture what you might think one of these heavily polluted sites looks like.
Did you think of a big park in a quiet neighborhood, with lots of tall
trees, and a bandstand next to a lagoon? No? Well, welcome to McGraft Park
in Muskegon, Michigan, the home of Ruddiman Pond, one of the most polluted
spots in the Great Lakes.


“This little lagoon here is a sediment basin. It is a sediment trap.”


Rick Rideske is a research scientist at the Annis Water Resource Institute
in Muskegon. It studies the quality of Michigan’s lakes and rivers.


“All of the contaminated sediment from the upper part of the watershed has made
its way down here and is being deposited. They are taking out, in some places,
15 feet of contaminated sediment.”


Beginning in the 1930’s, heavy industries began setting up shop along
Ruddiman Creek, a few miles from the park. Many dumped their toxic wastes
into nearby storm sewers, which emptied into the creek, and flowed toward
Ruddiman Pond. Toxic heavy metals like chromium and lead, along with
hazardous chemicals like PCB’s, settled to the bottom. It’s been a long
time since the pond has been safe for swimming.


Rideske points to a yellow sign nailed to a tree next to the pond. It says,
“No entry. Hazardous substances.”


“If you look at that sign over there, that sign was put up in maybe 1997, 98.
You can see the tree has grown over the sign.”


But beyond that sign is some hope for Ruddiman Creek and Pond. Workers are
scooping toxic mud from the bottom of the lagoon. The material is trucked
to a landfill licensed to receive toxic stuff like this. The project should
be finished by next summer.


Ruddiman Creek and Pond make up one of 43 pollution hot spots in the Great
Lakes that the U.S. and Canada call Areas of Concern. So far, two in Canada
have been cleaned up. Ruddiman Creek is one of only three in the U.S. being
cleaned.


David Ullirch would like to see that work move a lot faster. He directs the Great
Lakes Initiative. It’s a group of mayors and other officials from the U.S. and
Canada that works to preserve the Lakes.


“This is a serious problem, not only in terms of a threat to the natural environment,
there are public health issues associated with them and often, even worse, is that
they are a stigma to those areas, whether it is Waukegan Harbor, or Gary, Indiana, or
Ashtabula Harbor, these are things that these cities have had to live with for
years, and it’s time to get them cleaned up and get on with it.”


The government is supposed to provide 270-million dollars over five years to
clean up the Areas of Concern in the United States, but so far, congress
has appropriated only about 35-million dollars. That relatively small amount
of cash has limited the number of cleanups that can be started, and it frustrates
Dennis Schornack. He’s the U.S. chairman of the International Joint Commission.
It’s a watchdog group that monitors the water quality treaty between the U.S. and
Canada.


“These areas were identified back in 1987, and only two, both of which are in Canada,
have been delisted since that time. At that pace of progress, it will be 400 years
before we are so-called clean, and I think that is very disappointing.”


In the case of Ruddiman Creek, they’re glad at least one site is being cleaned up.
Rick Rideske of the Annis Institute says the fact that it’s in a neighborhood park
played a big role in attracting the attention, and government cash needed to clean
it up.


“It really took the local residents, public advisory council, we have a Ruddiman
Creek Task Force, which is made of local people from this neighborhood. They called
frequently state representatives, federal representatives. Getting this site on the
priority list was a community effort for a lot of people.”


Rideske and people who live near McGraft Park are looking forward to celebrating a
small victory in the fight to restore the Great Lakes, and they’re looking forward to
taking down that yellow warning sign next year.


For the GLRC, I’m Michael Leland.

Related Links

Epa Completes Toxic Sediment Cleanup

The Environmental Protection Agency says it has completed
toxic sediment cleanup at one of the most polluted sites along the Great
Lakes. There are 31 such sites in the U.S. known as “Areas of Concern.”
Officials say this site is one step closer to being cleaned up. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Michael Leland reports:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency says it has completed toxic sediment
cleanup at one of the most polluted sites along the Great Lakes. There are
31 such sites in the U.S. known as “Areas of Concern.” Officials say this
site is one step closer to being cleaned up. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Michael Leland reports:


The Black Lagoon along the Detroit River in Trenton, Michigan, got its name
because years of industrial contamination had discolored the water. Months of
dredging has changed that.


Dennis Schornack is the U.S. chairman of the International Joint Commission.
It monitors the water quality treaty between the U.S. and Canada.


“Over 115-thousand cubic yards of muck, heavily contaminated with
PCB’s, oil, grease, mercury and other toxic metals, have been removed from
the Detroit River, and disposed of and secured in a facility that will be operated
by the Detroit district of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.”


Three years ago, the Great Lakes Legacy Act authorized 270-million dollars
over five years to clean up the pollution hot-spots. It’s never been
fully funded, and is currently paying for cleanup work at only two other
sites along the Lakes.


For the GLRC, I’m Michael Leland.

Related Links