C O V E R F E A T U R E
Don't Call It a Cleanup
The
Army Corps of Engineers plans to dredge five million cubic yards of
toxic mud out of the Indiana Harbor Canal. But five million cubic
yards of toxic mud on land becomes five million yards of toxic dirt.
Author: Harold Henderson  Date: January 21, 2005
Appeared in Section 1
Word count:
4855
 Warning, reads the sign on the Indianapolis Boulevard
bridge 19 miles southeast of the Loop in East Chicago, Indiana.
UNSAFE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT SWIM IN THESE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT
EAT FISH FROM THESE WATERS. The channel under the bridge is the Lake
George branch of the Indiana Harbor Canal, which slowly empties into
Lake Michigan. It's still OK to toss a rock into the water, and if
you do, bubbles swirl up, pop, and leave a rainbow slick.
The mud at the bottom of the canal may be the biggest
single source of pollution in southern Lake Michigan--a black,
sandy, pungent pudding that's 5 percent oil and grease. It also
contains mercury, lead, arsenic, zinc, chromium, benzene,
naphthalene, and PCBs--all "legacy pollutants" from the steel mills,
oil refineries, and city sewage plants that spent most of the 20th
century spewing their wastes with abandon.
Over the past few decades the polluters have cleaned up
their acts somewhat or gone out of business, but the black pudding
still oozes toxics into the water, the air, and the food web. If
you're a kid--or if you ever plan to have a kid--you should never
eat any brook trout, brown trout, lake trout, carp, channel catfish,
chinook salmon, or coho salmon from Lake Michigan. And nobody should
ever eat anything from the canal.
The biggest reason for such warnings is the presence of
PCBs, which start having biological effects at 50 parts per billion
parts of water. The canal mud contains up to 100 times that much.
According to a 1996 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report, many of
the carp and goldfish in the canal had "eroded fins, swollen eyes,
deformed lower jaws, and evidence of internal hemorrhaging." More
problems would no doubt be found, the report added, if more fish
could live there.
Back in 1969 researchers put small water-dwelling midges in
a laboratory tank with some of the canal sediment. The little bugs
tried to stay above the mud, but 70 percent of them died within a
day and 90 percent were dead within two. If the experiment seems
cruel, bear in mind that for decades this stuff has been flowing
from the canal into the lake in giant belches after every big
rainstorm.
Small wonder the Sierra Club, Lake Michigan Federation,
Save the Dunes Council, and many well-known environmentalists want
the sediment out of the canal, and the sooner the better. "The
residents of East Chicago as well as around Lake Michigan will gain
both health and economic benefits from the removal of the 20-foot
layer of contaminated sediments," says Lee Botts, a founder of the
Lake Michigan Federation and the Indiana Dunes Environmental
Learning Center. "Their grandchildren will benefit even more."
The Chicago district of the Army Corps of Engineers and
Region 5 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have a plan to
dredge up much of the canal mud and store it in a "confined disposal
facility," or CDF, on an oil-soaked weed patch just northwest of the
Indianapolis Boulevard bridge. Over 30 years the CDF will grow into
a 28-foot-tall truncated pyramid covering 134 acres of land. The
corps expects to spend $125 million to build the CDF and about the
same amount to dredge almost five million cubic yards from the
canal. Preparatory work has already begun, and dredging is scheduled
to start in 2008.
But not everyone's cheering. A loosely organized,
underfinanced, tenacious group of local opponents has been dogging
the corps and EPA for years, led by veteran activists Colleen
Aguirre and Betty Balanoff. They claim that the project will simply
trade one kind of pollution for another, that the corps and EPA
haven't done all they could to keep East Chicagoans safe in the
process, and that the two agencies have rarely given residents
straight answers. In their eyes, only environmental racism can
explain the agencies' decision to place the CDF half a mile from
East Chicago Central High School and West Side Junior High School,
whose students are 96 percent black and Hispanic.
They're quick to point out something no one on the other
side denies: the purpose of this project isn't to clean up the
canal. Any cleanup that happens will be a side effect. Congress has
authorized the corps only to improve navigation, making it easier
and therefore cheaper for big lake-going boats to deliver iron ore
to the two steel mills on the canal. The planned dredging won't stop
canal mud from flowing into Lake Michigan, though it's expected to
cut the flow at least in half.
The corps and EPA put environmental cleanup front and
center when touting the benefits of the project. But they back off
when asked to consider doing more than what's necessary to improve
navigation. How about dredging several feet deeper than the ore
boats need, to ensure that no more pollution washes into the lake,
as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggested in 1996? Too
expensive. The corps' project manager, Bill White, says he'd be
accused of wasting taxpayers' dollars. The project's supporters add
that you can't expect to clean up a century of pollution all at once
and that more programs, perhaps under the Great Lakes Legacy Act,
will eventually come along to help finish the job.
The CDF will create environmental problems of its own, as
it won't be truly contained until the project ends and it can be
capped. For 30 years it will stand open to the elements, and the
drying mud will be picked up by the wind. Preliminary worst-case
estimates published by the corps and EPA in their January 1999
"Comprehensive Management Plan" suggest that once the dredging and
dumping begin, dust pollution may increase by 50 percent. That dust
may be mixed with three times more PCBs than the dust from the
existing site, four times more benzene, five times more toluene,
five times more chromium, and ten times more arsenic.
Project supporters concede many of these points but insist
that it's still the least bad alternative. They say the long-term
benefits to Lake Michigan will exceed any short-term increases in
air pollution.
Over the years the Indiana Harbor Canal dispute has
confused casual observers, pitted federal agencies against each
other, helped to unseat the East Chicago Democratic machine, and
split the area's environmental activists. One thing's for sure:
dredging or no dredging, CDF or no CDF, East Chicago will be paying
the environmental price for the 20th century's gasoline and steel
habits for a long time to come.
God neglected to create a good harbor on the Indiana shore
of Lake Michigan, so when Illinois oil refineries and steel mills
began to cross the state line a century ago they had to make their
own. While they were at it, they decided to dig a canal that would
link Lake Michigan with the Grand Calumet River to the south and
with Lake George to the west.
Digging the canal wasn't too challenging--the land there is
flat and free of rocks--but somehow it never was finished. Today
it's shaped like a lopsided capital Y lying on its side. From Lake
Michigan it runs about a mile and a half through the steel mills'
lake fill, passes the original Lake Michigan shoreline, and runs
another mile and a half southwest. At that point it forks into two
branches. One runs west toward Lake George and dead-ends a half mile
short of the lake; the other runs south two miles and connects to
the Grand Calumet River.
At first the canal was a success. It allowed industries
that used the Great Lakes to move bulk commodities cheaply and
easily. In 1913 it enabled Inland Steel to take in more than a
million tons of ore and Standard Oil to ship more than 80 million
gallons of oil. In 1916 upstart oilman Harry Sinclair built a new
refinery on the Lake George branch just west of Indianapolis
Boulevard, connected it to his oil fields in Oklahoma with an
eight-inch-diameter pipeline, and got rich. A company history says
Sinclair's enterprise made $9 million in profits on $17 million in
sales in its first 14 months.
Over the years the canal conveyed not just oil and iron ore
but money from taxpayers' pockets to the industries doing business
along it. Early on much of its maintenance became the responsibility
of the Army Corps of Engineers. Then the industries--and the cities
of Gary and East Chicago--raised the cost of that maintenance by
sending some of their waste into the canal. Half garbage can, half
highway, the slow-flowing canal gradually filled with a mixture of
human and industrial waste.
Beginning in 1911 the corps dredged 100,000 cubic yards of
gunk every year from the canal. Today the channel is supposed to be
kept 22 to 29 feet deep, depending on the location. Rumor has
it--there don't seem to be any records--that the harbor and canal
were dredged deeper during World War II, which is why in some places
there's contaminated sediment below the navigation depth.
All this dredged mud had to go somewhere. From 1924 to '66
it was barged out to a 90-square-mile area in Lake Michigan 10 to 20
miles east of Chicago, where it was dumped in about 70 feet of
water.
But plenty of toxic mud was left behind. In 1949 the canal
contained so much oil that one refinery called it a "dangerous fire
hazard." In 1967 not even pollution-tolerant sludge worms could live
on the bottom. That same year an oil spill from the canal reached
Chicago's water-intake crib off 68th Street.
Deep-lake "disposal" seemed safe enough until the late 60s,
when the corps and the EPA's predecessor found that bottom-dwelling
organisms in the dumping zone were suffering "transient" effects. No
one proved that this damage would last or would harm fish or
wildlife or people, but the possibility was obvious. In 1972 the EPA
banned open-lake dumping.
It would have been a good time for Congress to make one
agency responsible for both stopping new pollution from flowing into
the canal and dealing with the stuff that was already there.
Congress didn't, though since then a combination of
deindustrialization and aggressive EPA enforcement have lessened the
incoming pollution considerably.
It also would have been a good time for Congress to give
the corps an environmental cleanup assignment in addition to its
long-standing navigation assignment. Congress didn't do that either,
and the idea has rarely been suggested since. The corps simply
continued doing its navigation job.
In 1975 the corps began studying the possibility of dumping
dredged mud at the northeast corner of Inland Steel's lake fill. In
1978 the EPA declined to approve that plan, saying pollution would
leak right back into the lake unless the corps built a "separate
impermeable containment facility."
The corps went back to the drawing board and came up with
16 possible locations for a CDF--12 on land and 4 in the lake. It
finally decided to build a 40-acre triangular island just off East
Chicago's Jeorse Park, in a sheltered area of Lake Michigan. Quickly
dubbed Toxic Island, the site was opposed by a united front of
environmentalists, and even the EPA suggested that a CDF there might
leak and pollute Lake Michigan. In March 1986, after eight years of
study, the corps dropped the proposal. Toxic Island joined the long
list of noxious land uses that northwest Indiana activists have
fought off over the years, among them a nuclear power plant, a
medical-waste incinerator, and a napalm reprocessing plant.
Until around 1980 mud kept piling up at the bottom of the
canal, making it shallower each year. Since then the canal has
reached a kind of equilibrium--it's so shallow that no more sediment
is deposited than flows into the lake.
According to the corps, the shallowness of the canal
prevents shippers from fully loading their boats, which costs them
between $11 million and $18 million a year. The partly loaded boats
still plow through the mud, stirring it up and releasing toxic
chemicals into the water and ultimately the lake. (Incidentally,
steel employment has crashed, but canal use hasn't; the canal
handled 15 million tons of cargo in 1990, and 13.6 million in 2001,
so the project can still be justified on navigation grounds alone.)
After the Toxic Island fiasco, the corps went back to the
drawing board again, this time working with the EPA. Together they
considered seven sites and 18 treatment options. They didn't get far
with the treatment options. Treating contaminated sediment sounds
like a good idea: as one attorney who's knowledgeable about the
canal quips, "Everyone would like to have a black box that you pour
sediments in one end and get clean water and sunlight out the
other." But no treatment has been discovered that can cope with the
unholy combination of heavy metals and oily organic wastes in the
canal mud. Moreover, treating the mud would create toxic residues
that would have to be put in a CDF anyway, and according to the
corps, the treatments that do exist cost about ten times as much as
stashing the unprocessed contaminated mud.
Eventually the two agencies chose a dump site that hadn't
been entered in the previous competitions--the 168-acre home of
Harry Sinclair's 1916 refinery. In 1976 the antiquated plant had
passed from Sinclair's successor firm to Energy Cooperative Inc.,
but within five years ECI was bankrupt. The buildings and
aboveground equipment were razed and hauled away, and clean soil was
trucked in and spread over the surface.
But in northwest Indiana nothing's over even when it's
over. In December 1989 the city of East Chicago took over the ECI
property for back taxes, only to find that it had acquired a hot
potato. The site hadn't been properly cleaned up and was in
violation of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Pipes full of petroleum products remained belowground, and the
ground itself resembled an oil-soaked sponge. In 1991 soil samples
from 16 feet underground exuded "a strong petroleum odor." The year
before, the Coast Guard had found oil flowing from the site into the
Lake George branch of the canal, requiring emergency corrective
action. The ECI site still has surprises left in it: in November
2003 a contractor preparing it for the CDF came across two pipes
that traverse the property more than 20 feet below the surface.
Nobody knows to whom they belong or what's in them; the current plan
is to work around them.
In 1994 the city of East Chicago unloaded the ECI property
on a new agency called the East Chicago Waterway Management
District. Established by the Indiana legislature, the district has
no assets and no meaningful taxing powers. Legally it's a creature
of the state, though East Chicago's mayor appoints four of its seven
board members. Basically, it was set up to be the owner of the
property, which gives it access to state-administered cleanup funds,
and to serve as the local partner without which the corps couldn't
conduct its project.
The district's authority is so limited it's not likely to
cause trouble by taking independent action. Last year some members
of its board criticized the corps' decision to use a mechanical
dredge. They thought a hydraulic dredge might pollute less. Project
manager Bill White said he could follow their wishes--provided the
board came up with an extra $11 million. Everybody in the room knew
perfectly well that the board had no such sum and no way of getting
it. The existing cleanup funds will barely pay the local share of
the project in its current form.
On March 20, 1996, the corps and EPA held a public hearing
on their environmental impact statement on the dredging project and
the ECI site. The agencies' inability to get their message across to
the public has become legendary over the years, and this event was
no exception. "We are only accepting comments," the EPA's Robert
Tolpa told the audience. "We will not be responding to any
questions."
Experts were available to answer questions individually in
the next room, but that was small consolation to Colleen Aguirre. "I
don't want to wait till it's all done and over with," she told
Tolpa. "I want to know, is there going to be a health-risk
assessment? Are the residents going to have a part in that? You are
saying we can't ask questions, strictly for comment. It's going to
be too late if we have to wait for the final report."
"Ma'am, this is the fifth meeting we have [had] here,"
Tolpa responded.
"I know," said Aguirre. "I've been to all of them and never
gotten a direct answer." (Aguirre, who was profiled in Michael
Brown's 1987 book The Toxic Cloud: The Poisoning of America's Air,
was still asking inconvenient questions about the agency's
health-risk assessment at a June 2004 EPA meeting, though she no
longer lived in town.)
A local Little League official told Tolpa, "I feel that you
should not build this containment this close to a high school. Even
if it's one child that gets cancer over your 30-year span on the
studies that you have done, that's still too many." A 35-year
resident of East Chicago declared himself "totally against this
project, because I have two children. My son and I golf at McArthur
Golf Course, and you can stand on the fifth tee and you are less
than 100 yards from the canal. . . . On a day like today, with
40-mile-per-hour winds coming out of the north, that dust [from the
CDF] has to go somewhere."
Regional and national environmental groups supported the
project, but they thought it could be done better. The Lake Michigan
Federation, Save the Dunes Council, Grand Calumet Task Force, and
Sierra Club Great Lakes office organized a 15-member "technical
advisory committee" that included academics from the University of
Illinois, Chicago State, DePaul, and the University of Wisconsin.
Their detailed recommendations were reasonable and
constructive--and, as it turned out, futile.
They pointed out that the federal agencies
couldn't answer a basic question: how much mud is going into the
lake? Depending on whom you ask and how they calculate, it's
somewhere between 24,000 and 200,000 cubic yards a year. The high
figure is the corps' high estimate, based on measurements taken back
in the 1980s and earlier, before pollution-control improvements; the
low end is the technical advisory committee's calculation, based on
more recent information. Even using the lower figure, the Indiana
Harbor Canal is dumping into Lake Michigan the equivalent of almost
three cubic yards of toxic mud every hour of every day. The corps
responded by saying it was looking into the matter, but the
committee never got an answer, nor has one been provided since.
They pointed out that not nearly enough samples
of sediment had been analyzed to determine the overall chemical
composition and what treatment was possible. The corps replied that
it didn't need to know; the analysis that had been done was "clearly
sufficient for the design of a navigational dredging project. The
project is not a remediation effort."
They urged that a citizens' advisory group be
formed and be closely involved at every stage of the project. No
such group was ever created, though in 2003--after most project
decisions had already been made--the EPA did fund a university-based
group that has begun offering technical information to concerned
locals. Even this well-credentialed group has had trouble getting
timely information from the corps.
They suggested that the project, like many other
solid-waste projects, include an agreement to compensate the local
community for any adverse impacts. Not applicable, said the corps.
They questioned whether the Waterway Management
District had either the expertise or the money to oversee the
project properly, especially since the agencies' environmental
impact statement didn't address "the fundamental question of who has
responsibility for unfunded liabilities and third party claims" if
anything should go terribly wrong. The question remains unaddressed.
The advisory committee succeeded in improving the project
in one way. The corps agreed to publicly review the technical
dredging and disposal literature at least every five years and "use
all reasonable efforts" to take advantage of any advances. The corps
reportedly accepted this provision only after local U.S.
representative Peter Visclosky--the ranking member of the energy and
water development subcommittee of the House Appropriations
Committee--twisted arms at the highest level.
Bowden Quinn, the former executive director of the Grand
Calumet Task Force, still thinks the ECI site is the best available
solution, but he has harsh words for how the EPA and the corps have
handled community relations. "They pretended there was an effort to
communicate with the community, but there wasn't," he says. "Their
current proposal is infinitesimally different. They hardly
communicated anything."
Local residents had no forum for regular input, so they
kept attending the 10 AM monthly meetings of the Waterway Management
District board. A scattering of mostly white locals asked questions
the board wasn't well equipped to deal with. Every three months or
so the board met in the evening instead; at those meetings
African-American and Latino residents also showed up and posed
additional questions to the board and indirectly to the corps, EPA,
and U.S. Congress. The participation of people who clearly couldn't
come during the day didn't inspire the board to change its meeting
schedule, nor did it inspire the sponsoring agencies to offer an
evening forum--or any other forum for regular citizen input.
Four decades after the dispute started it's still going
strong, because it's hard for anyone to see the situation as it
really is. The project's opponents tend to see it as one more
instance in which other people's problems are being foisted on
them--even though the sludge at the bottom of the canal is polluting
their neighborhood, and even though that sludge came from East
Chicago, not California. Project supporters tend to see it as one
more case in which numskull NIMBYs are concerned only with their own
backyards--even though the agencies promoting the project don't see
the problem with adding a little more pollution to those backyards.
Supporters say that leaving the mud in the canal is
unacceptable and point out that in three decades nobody's come up
with a better place to put the mud than the ECI site. It's located
right on the canal, making transportation relatively quick and easy
and minimizing the dredged sediments' exposure to air. It's in the
same town where most of the sediment originated and is currently
located. The CDF will contain not only the canal mud but the
Sinclair and ECI refinery wastes. And it's the only proposed site
that has a local sponsor, the Waterway Management District.
All well and good, the opponents reply--for those who can
go home to Munster or Michigan City or Chicago after the meetings
are over. The opponents take offense at a passage in an appendix to
the corps' 1999 Comprehensive Management Plan, which says in effect,
why put the CDF in a clean area when you have ruined land so handy?
"Building the CDF at the ECI site," it notes, "keeps the Indiana
Harbor sediment in an industrial area and will not consume one of
the few remaining green sites [in northwest Indiana]." Would the
authors of this passage refer to the site as "industrial," the
opponents wonder, if their own children and grandchildren were
attending school within 800 yards of it?
In another appendix the EPA says much the same thing about
air pollution. The agency concluded that at worst the operation
might cause 2.3 cancers per million people breathing the air nearby
for 30 years. That number has been criticized, and a new one is on
order, but the final number will still be tiny compared to the
cancer risk of simply breathing East Chicago's air as it is for 30
years--310 in a million, according to some studies. (The lifetime
risk in southwest and southeast Chicago is about 200 in a million,
according to the EPA.) Their point is that the CDF adds little to an
already bad situation. "CDF emissions are small," says the EPA,
"less than one percent" of the pollution found in 1989 and '93
studies of comparable south Chicago neighborhoods.
The corps and EPA conclude that a little more pollution
can't hurt when things are already this bad. But a resident, or any
reasonable person, might well conclude something very
different--that simple fairness demands a "no net increase of
pollution" rule for East Chicago--if a new CDF or industry will add
to the existing pollution, then the EPA should at least bring about
a matching decrease someplace in the area.
Project supporters long ago decided that the benefits of
cleaning up Lake Michigan outweigh what they call the "unavoidable
adverse impacts caused by the dredging." Though it's difficult to
weigh water pollution against air pollution, they're probably right.
Yet this bald statement obscures the uncomfortable truth about who
gets what. The benefits of cleanup will accrue to everyone around
Lake Michigan, while the "unavoidable adverse impacts," no matter
how small, will be concentrated in one community, where the
residents are over 90 percent nonwhite.
"To date there have been no real changes from the corps'
original plan," says Betty Balanoff. "Only great community pressure
persuaded them to research the project more thoroughly. Requests for
any improvements are met with the excuse there is not enough money.
There is no money to insure the project, to indemnify the community
for property losses or for additional health problems, even though
medical insurance here is at a minimum. . . . We understand that the
law mandates a cleanup of the ECI site and the dredging of the
canal. But if there is not enough money to do it safely, more money
must be found. . . . The community cannot be expected to pay the
difference in human life and damaged children."
On August 7, 2000, the East Chicago Waterway Management
District took a legally irreversible step by signing a "project
cooperation agreement" with the corps. The opponents continued
making their case, and the corps and EPA kept stumbling. In 2002 a
corps public-relations contractor suggested that local opponents
might pipe down if the agency promised to put a baseball or soccer
field on top of the completed CDF, since local Latinos couldn't
afford the equipment for golf or boating. "Ludicrous . . . an
insult" was the response from East Chicago resident Jose Bustos in
the Gary Post-Tribune.
Northwest Indiana's notoriously corrupt politics only added
to the tangle. Incumbent mayor and project supporter Robert Pastrick
barely defeated project opponent George Pabey in the May 6, 2003,
East Chicago Democratic mayoral primary. Pabey was able to prove
massive vote buying and fraudulent conduct in that election and won
handily in a court-ordered revote this October. As mayor, Pabey will
eventually appoint a majority of the Waterway Management District
board, but it's not clear whether he'll be able to find the legal
authority to move the CDF elsewhere or whether he can find the money
to make the existing project safer for residents.
This story doesn't have a happy ending. No one's willing to
spend the money it would cost to clean up the canal properly. The
environmentalist supporters are in the uncomfortable position of
backing a project that they've subjected to some damning criticism
and that they know is only a partial measure. They've also been
allies of Pastrick's corrupt administration; on November 15 Edwardo
Maldonado, then city controller and chairman of the Waterway
Management District board, was convicted of diverting $800,000 to
$1.5 million in public money to building sidewalks for voters who
agreed to support Pastrick.
Supporters can't even make the argument that the project
will restore a natural area that people will be able to enjoy again.
The canal was artificial from the start. Nobody has fond memories of
fishing or swimming or boating in it. No one saw fit to observe its
centennial in 2003.
The project's opponents are in the uncomfortable position
of having no credible alternative to suggest. They once distributed
a flyer urging that the sediment "be relocated to an unpopulated
area." Occasionally they'll invoke the pop-environmental notion that
we shouldn't do anything until we know for certain that it's
safe--the precautionary principle. But the precautionary principle
is of no help when the status quo is dangerous: dredging may not be
safe, but doing nothing and leaving the gunk in the canal isn't safe
either.
When doing nothing is just another way of continuing to
pollute, there's no substitute for weighing all the evidence and
choosing the least evil alternative available. And despite their
blundering, that is what the corps and EPA have tried to do. But
they haven't thought through the implications of adding pollution to
an already highly polluted area, and they've responded only
reluctantly to residents' requests to be heard and to be given
explanations and compensation. The agencies' mistakes may not stop
this project, but they may make it harder to sell the next one. It's
not enough to be right if you can't do right as well.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not
available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino;
photos/Bruce Powell. |
