Neighbors Take Dow Chemical to Court

  • A Dow Chemical sign next to a river in Michigan contaminated with dioxin. Homeowners downstream are still waiting for their case against Dow to be heard. (Photo by Vincent Duffy)

The world’s largest chemical company is fighting a lawsuit filed because of dioxin pollution. Rick Pluta reports neighbors downstream from Dow Chemical’s headquarters in Michigan want something to budge in the case:

Transcript

The world’s largest chemical company is fighting a lawsuit filed because of dioxin pollution. Rick Pluta reports neighbors downstream from Dow Chemical’s headquarters in Michigan want something to budge in the case:

A Dow chemical plant near the company’s headquarters in Michigan produced all kinds of products over decades, including Agent Orange. Dioxin polluted the Tittabawassee River and its flood plain. A group of 173 people have sued, after learning their property is contaminated. Many of these people have been involved in this litigation for six years. The courts still have not gotten around to their case. Attorney Theresa Golden took their case to the Michigan Supreme Court.

“The clients obviously are concerned and disappointed that it’s taken us long to get to this point.”

The group wants class action status, so every single homeowner does not have to take on the corporate giant. There are a couple thousand property downstream of this plant. And Dow does not like the idea of potentially having to pay every one of them.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rick Pluta.

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Living Downstream From Dow Chemical

  • A Dow Chemical sign on the Tittabawassee River stating 'Enter At Your Own Risk' (Photo by Vincent Duffy)

It’s been more than 50 years since Dow
Chemical Company stopped dumping dioxin into the
river flowing past its plant in Michigan. But the
company and government regulators are still arguing
over how to clean it up. Vincent Duffy reports:

Transcript

It’s been more than 50 years since Dow
Chemical Company stopped dumping dioxin into the
river flowing past its plant in Michigan. But the
company and government regulators are still arguing
over how to clean it up. Vincent Duffy reports:

(sound of backyard)

Kathy Henry’s backyard runs down to the bank of the Tittabawassee River.
It’s a beautiful view, but that’s not what Kathy Henry sees.

“When I look back there now, I see dioxin.”

You can’t really see the dioxin, but it is there. Dow Chemical started
dumping dioxin into the Tittabawasee river in the 1890s. Dioxin is believed
to cause cancer and damage reproductive systems. And, there are high
concentrations of dioxin not only in the Tittabawasee, but in all the water
and floodplains between the chemical plant and Lake Huron 50 miles
downstream.

Kathy Henry first found out about the dioxin seven years ago when a
whistleblower at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality
warned local environmentalists about the contamination. She has wanted to
sell her house ever since.

“We’ve lived here for 24 years. We loved living in here. Now I’m afraid to
go out in my own yard. I just, psychologically, couldn’t stand living here
anymore. I had to get out.”

Dow says it will clean up any dioxin that’s proven to be dangerous to human
health, but the company has spent decades fighting with Michigan and the
US Environmental Protection Agency over how much of it is a threat.

Dow spokesman John Musser says there’s no proof anyone has gotten sick
because of the dioxin.

“We’re not seeing any impacts. We’re not seeing any cause for alarm. We’re
not seeing any imminent health threat. If it’s not a problem for humans or
the environment, then maybe the best thing to do is to leave it alone.”

But Michigan environmental officials are not so laissez-faire about the
contamination. They continue to warn residents about eating fish from the
rivers, about eating wild game killed in the region, and about swimming at
some beaches.

Robert McCann is with the state of Michigan. He says science is way past
the point of debating whether dioxin is dangerous.

“Study after study has shown that there are some very serious potential health
effects from being exposed to it, even at some lower levels over a long
period of time and those health effects do include things like cancer and
diabetes as well as some more minor health effects that can be caused from it.”

But Dow does debate whether dioxin is dangerous. John Musser says
Michigan and the EPA are using bad science based on dioxin exposure to lab
animals. He says Dow has human data from employees that show dioxin is
not as dangerous as people think.

“They were exposed at extremely high levels. And we’ve tracked their
health and their death records for 60 years and we’re not finding any ill
health effects.”

Attacking regulatory science is a common defense for industries. David
Michaels is an epidemiologist at George Washington University. He says
just like big tobacco questioned the link between smoking and lung cancer,
big business always questions the science.

“Companies know that by putting off the scientific debate for as many years
as they can they can keep doing the work that they’re doing and not be
disturbed. It works.”

For example, a recent meeting supposed to update residents about clean up
efforts turned into more of a debate between government scientists and scientists
hired by Dow. One member of the audience got sick of it.

“I’m not a geologist, I’m not a toxicologist, I’m just a resident that lives on
the river. And the last I knew dioxin was the most toxic substance known to
man. And what I’m seeing here is you guys trying to find excuses to justify
poisoning us.”

The EPA recently forced Dow to clean up four hot spots along the river,
including one spot with the highest concentration of dioxin ever found in the
United States.

But the last few months have had more set backs than
progress. In January, the EPA gave up trying to negotiate a clean up
agreement separate from Michigan’s. It said Dow’s proposals were going
backward.

Earlier this month the Region 5 director of the EPA was fired. Mary Gade
says it was because of her tough stance against Dow Chemical.

For The Environment Report, I’m Vincent Duffy.

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How Far Will Dow Chemical Cleanup Go?

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:

Transcript

For years, a big chemical company has been negotiating
with government officials on cleaning up an area contaminated
with dioxin. Environmentalists say Dow Chemical has used its
power and influence to drag out the talks. The chemical company
has agreed to plan for some kind of clean-up… but it’s still
not clear how far that clean-up will go. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Rick Pluta reports:


Dow Chemical is a huge employer in Michigan, it employs almost 60 thousand people, not including outside suppliers. In a state that has lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, a big company like Dow is important. The state of Michigan has been negotiating with Dow for nearly a decade over cleaning up dioxin downstream from the company’s big plant in the central part of the state. Just recently Dow and the state struck a deal on the next phase of coming up with a clean-up plan. But it’s not clear how long it will take to design the plan and it’s not clear exactly how far the plan will go to clean up the contamination.


The people who live in the floodplain of the Titabawassee River, downstream from the Dow Chemical plant in Midland, Michigan, say they’ve waited long enough for a cleanup plan. Almost a decade has passed since dioxin was first discovered in the river sediment.


(sound of river)


At Immerman Park in the town of Freeland, downriver from Dow, signs dot the riverbank. They warn parents to keep their children from playing here, because there’s dioxin in the soil.


(sound of hand-washing)


An earlier agreement with the state led Dow to put handwashing stations up here for children to clean up after playing in the dirt. Mary Whitney lives nearby. She says the sinks and faucets in the hand-washing stations are too high and too complicated for children to use, and they’re located too far from the banks of the river. She doesn’t think the kids are getting the dioxin contamination off their hands let alone off their shoes and clothes. She says it’s typical of how the dioxin question’s being handled in Michigan.


“It’s like, well, let’s do a little bit to show we’re doing something, but let’s not maybe address the whole issue. We’ll do just a little but to keep the peace and to keep everybody from not getting so much up in arms. But I think, they’re trying to do, Dow is, trying to do some things to help. But it’s just putting a little Band-Aid on the whole issue. It’s not fixing the main problem.”


For decades one of the by-products of the chemicals Dow produced was dioxin. It’s believed dioxin has been in the soil around Midland since the early 20th century. The fact that dioxin contaminated the sediment along the river downstream was only discovered within the last decade.


Studies have linked dioxin to health problems, including cancer and damage to the nervous system. The state says dioxin has spread to the environment round the Titabawassee River to the point that it issued warnings to hunters to limit how much wild game they eat from the area. That’s because the state says deer, squirrels and other game might be contaminated with dioxin.


Dow and its supporters say the risks posed by dioxin are being overstated. Dow officials say there’s no evidence that the dioxin levels in the Titabawassee floodplain pose a threat to the public health. Dow researcher Jim Collins says the company has six decades of research on employees who’ve been exposed to high levels of dioxin, and the worst health effect is a mild form of chloracne in some of the company’s employees.


Chloracne is the skin condition that disfigured Ukraine’s president, Victor Yushchenko, after he was poisoned by a large dose of dioxin.


“We’ve studied heart disease, diabetes, immunologic effects, reproductive effects, and cancer. And other than some increased risk of chloracne in these workers, we find no health effects that have been related to dioxin exposures.”


Backers of the company say critics should be careful about calling for penalizing Dow. Janee Valesquez is the the local economic development group “Midland Tomorrow.” She says Dow’s impact on the local economy amounts to almost a billion dollars a year.


“So Dow is absolutely… an anchor for mid-Michigan.”


Businesses and workers don’t want to damage relations with the chemical giant. Jim Ballard is an economist at Michigan State University. He says there is some risk that Dow could abandon Michigan. Texas is the new home of the chemical industry, he says, because energy’s cheap and it doesn’t burden industry with a lot of environmental regulations.


“I think Dow might consider leaving if they felt the business regulatory climate in Michigan was excessively onerous. On the hand, it would be very costly for them to leave. They’ve got a large investment in infrastructure and human capital in the Midland area, and to reverse would be a decision that I’m sure they would not take lightly.”


But critics of how the dioxing clean-up has been handled think the economic concerns should not be more important than the health risks to people who live nearby – people such as Mary Whitney. She and others filed a lawsuit seeking a lifetime of medical tests paid for by Dow. That case is before the state Supreme Court. Whitney says she’s afraid a cleanup plan will get bogged down in talks, or delayed by studies.


“We want them to clean it up. Take responsibility for what they’ve done and clean it up and make it safe for all of us. Now I’m not sure what all that would entail. Surely maybe dredging the river to make it deeper. Shoring up the shores, so it doesn’t flood any longer. And fill in the yards with clean soil. And that’s going to be a big thing to do.”


Many critics of the state’s handling of the dioxin clean-up believe anything less than an extensive clean-up is putting business and jobs ahead of the health of the people in Midland and downstream along the Titabawassee River.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Rick Pluta.

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Epa to Lift Termite Pesticide Ban?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering
extending the use of a pesticide that the agency once decided was
not safe around children. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering extending the use of a
pesticide that
the agency once decided was not safe around children. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports:


The pesticide Dursban is sprayed on the ground during construction to protect new
homes from
termites. Four years ago, the EPA and Dow had agreed to phase out that use of the
pesticide by
the end of this year. Exposure to children was considered risky. Now, the EPA is
reportedly
considering lifting the ban. Jay Feldman heads up the environmental group Beyond
Pesticides.
Feldman says this would be like testing the safety of Dursban on humans without their
knowledge…


“They really should stop production, then stop use, do all the studies they want to
do with full
public disclosure and then revisit the issue. Not retain the use, allow people
unknowingly to be
exposed and then obviously put children at serious risk.”


In a report in The Washington Post, a Dow spokesperson indicated using new EPA
computer modeling, Dursban now “falls within an acceptable range” of federal
guidelines.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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Biotech Companies Agree to Regional Moratorium

Several biotech companies have agreed not to grow genetically modified crops in Corn Belt states, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, parts of Kentucky, parts of Nebraska, and Minnesota. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:

Transcript

Several biotech companies have agreed not to grow genetically modified crops in Corn
Belt states, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, parts of Kentucky, parts of
Nebraska, and Minnesota. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:


Twelve biotech companies including Monsanto and Dow agreed to the moratorium. In
states where the corn might contaminate nearby fields planted with crops for human
consumption.


Lisa dry is with the Biotechnology Industry Organization in Washington, D.C.
She says the companies won’t grow corn and safflower used for medicines.


“This is pharmaceutical production, it is not agricultural or food production. We are
taking every single possible precaution to make sure that it stays in its intended use
channel and does not end up in the food or feed.”


Dry says commercial grocers, exporters, and food processors have been concerned about
the Starlink scandal of 2000, when genetically modified corn approved for animal feed
turned up in 300 varieties of taco shells, tostadas and chips. The biotech companies say
they will grow crops in non-traditional areas such as Hawaii, Arizona, and Puerto Rico.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Natalie Walston.