WBEZ | water quality

Contaminated water trial starts in Chicago

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:56:00 -0500

The trial has started for a former suburban Chicago water official accused of lying about how the village drew drinking water from a tainted well for decades, apparently to save money.

The one-time Crestwood official, Theresa Neubauer, has pleaded not guilty.

A federal judge asked Monday during jury selection whether any would-be jurors ever worried about the quality of the water in their communities. At least one said he had.

Prosecutors say Crestwood continued drawing drinking water from the well even after environmental officials warned cancer-causing chemicals had oozed into it.

Neubauer is the first official from the village of 11,000 to go to trial over the allegations.

Earlier this month, co-defendant Frank Scaccia chose to plead guilty rather than take his case to jurors.

Midwest breweries lead environmental group's charge to fortify water laws

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:09:00 -0500

Raise a cold one this weekend and make a toast to the Clean Water Act.

That’s the advice of the Natural Resources Defense Council as they team up with 21 craft breweries in an effort to raise awareness of threats to the key ingredient in beer.

As any beginning homebrewer’s kitchen floor will attest, the brewing process requires a lot of water. Beer is 90 percent water, and including all the water it takes to clean brewing materials and rinse the packaged product, it can take 7 gallons of water to produce one gallon of beer.

“When you talk about beer, you have to talk about water. It’s not as sexy as talking about hops and malt,” said Jason Spaulding, co-owner of Brewery Vivant in Grand Rapids, Mich. “If we don’t look after [our water] long-term, it’s going to directly hurt our industry and our livelihood.”

Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, following a series of high-profile pollution incidents including the Cuyahoga River fire of 1969. Citing recent congressional attempts to tinker with the law or erode the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to enforce clean water provisions, NRDC’s senior policy analyst Karen Hobbs said the coalition of brewers isn’t united for or against any particular policy proposal.

“We're hoping to work with the brewers to have a consistent industry voice in support of clean water,” Hobbs said. “Some brewers will want to enter into specific policy issues.”

Two supreme court decisions in 2001 and 2006 questioned the EPA’s jurisdiction to enforce the Clean Water Act. The agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are waiting for clarification from the Obama administration before they enter into legal battles over water pollution where the legal definition of what waters are covered in the act is unclear. In Arizona, for example, storm water containing grease and oil from nearby construction sites pours into the San Pedro River for only part of the year. Since the tributaries carrying pollution do not flow year-round, the EPA dropped its enforcement efforts there to avoid a long and costly legal battle.

The bottom line for the nation’s craft brewers and their customers, however, is straightforward.

“If your water’s not good, your beer’s not going to be good,” Spaulding said.

Goose Island uses more than 18 million gallons of water each year, racking up a hefty water bill. Some large water users negotiate for a flat monthly fee for water, but many craft breweries, including Goose Island, pay a monthly rate based on how much water they actually use. Like any ratepayer in Chicago, Goose Island gets their water from Lake Michigan.

“Lake Michigan water has a really great chemical content to it to use as your blank canvas,” said Goose Island’s Ian Hughes.

Like many breweries, Goose Island is pursuing water conservation efforts, reusing water that rinses beer bottles after they’ve been filled and commissioning a life-cycle assessment of their product's environmental footprint.

Despite some recent rate hikes, water in the Great Lakes region is among the cheapest in the country. Even where rates are higher, many argue they don't reflect the true cost of water. If ensuring clean water costs more, Brewery Vivant’s Spaulding said he is prepared to pay.

“That’s a cost we’d be happy to pay,” he said. “Without that clean water you don’t have a viable business.”

Grand Calumet River delivers toxic load to Lake Michigan

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 10:06:00 -0600

The Grand Calumet River system winds for 13 miles through a Northwest Indiana industrial landscape that could almost be described as post-apocalyptic.

Alongside the several branches of the slow-moving waterway, a steel mill, gypsum plant and other heavy industry spew plumes of steam into the air while vines and shrubs grow inside vacant crumbling brick buildings. A fragment of the partially demolished Cline Avenue bridge still stands, twisted rebar and chunks of concrete hanging from each end. A rusty abandoned motorboat bobs half-sunken next to a soiled brown floating absorbent boom.

The Grand Calumet has long been known as one of the nation’s most polluted rivers. It is one of 43 federal Areas of Concern targeted for remediation in the Great Lakes region. For many decades before the 1972 Clean Water Act, countless industries dumped contaminated waste into the river with abandon. Gary, East Chicago and Hammond discharge untreated sewage and storm water into it.

The Grand Calumet consists of two forks that join and empty into Lake Michigan via the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal and Indiana Harbor, in East Chicago. Though the land right around the river mouth is not open to the public, local residents fish, swim, boat and wade at nearby beaches, harbors and weedy access points.

The Grand Calumet’s impact on this near shore area is hard to quantify given the way contaminants disperse quickly in Lake Michigan. But experts with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management say the river surely harms near shore lake water quality and habitat as it empties one billion gallons of water into Lake Michigan each day.

That flow includes material from overflowing sewers during heavy rains, contaminated sediment pulled from the river bottom, industrial run-off and contaminated groundwater.

Daunting as this toxic brew may sound, the Grand Calumet is getting cleaned up. Hence the near shore area of Lake Michigan should reap significant environmental and ecological benefits as well.

State and federal environmental officials are about halfway through a massive project to remove contaminated sediment and restore wetlands. And the state environmental agency is working with municipalities to reduce sewage overflow during rains.

A legacy of contamination

The Grand Calumet was “originally mostly a slowly meandering wetland complex,” said Jim Smith, an Indiana state natural resource damage coordinator. But with widespread dredging, channelizing, damming and the building of the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal which makes up the final stretch into the lake, “the flow regime of the river has changed.”

Today, in fact, municipal and industrial effluent makes up 90 percent of the river’s flow.

“There were industries from meatpacking to lumber to brickmaking and metal shops on the west branch to the big steel mills and the petroleum industry,” Smith noted. “Pipelines and everything came through this area. Also the municipalities developed their sewers going directly into the river. There was domestic contamination from human origin to organic stuff from the petroleum industry and steelmaking.

“The river was the disposal point for years.”

The river’s sediment contains harmful metals and carcinogenic compounds including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and heavy metals like mercury, cadmium, chromium and lead from the decades of industrial dumping. A 2000 study prepared for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found serious concerns and impacts from contaminated sediment in the Grand Calumet.

The river is also contaminated by leaching and run-off from nearby waste disposal sites and contaminated groundwater, according to the Areas of Concern website. It is even harmed by atmospheric deposition of contaminants from fossil fuel burning and waste incineration.

There are more than 460 underground storage tanks containing chemical and petroleum waste products in the area, the website says, and at least 150 leaking tank reports have been filed with the county.

“The contaminants we’re talking about affect organisms and can directly or indirectly affect the food chain,” said Scott Ireland, U.S. EPA special assistant for the senior adviser to the administrator on the Great Lakes. “They could wipe out the benthic community, so fish are not able to eat, or fish eat (benthic organisms) and are contaminated; then the contamination will enter the food chain. If humans eat the fish, they are taking up those contaminants as well.”

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

The Grand Calumet River’s road to recovery

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 09:52:00 -0600

The sediment on the bottom of the Grand Calumet River in Northwest Indiana provides a toxic record of the region’s history going back more than a century.

It is full of chemicals, heavy metals and other contaminants from steel-making, oil refining, waste incineration, smelting and other heavy industry that laid the economic and social foundation of the area.

But federal and state officials are now in the midst of a multi-million dollar project to clean up the sediment and the river as a whole.

Since the 1972 Clean Water Act drastically reduced industrial discharges into waterways, once the legacy sediment is removed there will be relatively little industrial pollution in the future, said Scott Ireland, special assistant for the senior adviser to the administrator on the Great Lake for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Dredging started in 2009. About 750,000 cubic yards of sediment two to three feet deep have been removed along a 2.5 mile stretch of river. The dredged area was then covered with a reactive barrier, composed of either organoclay mixed with sand or an activated carbon mat. These specialized materials help filter and contain toxic substances from the underlying sediments.

“Our capping and dredging will sequester or isolate contaminated sediments that have been there for almost 100 years, reducing the total amount of contaminants going into the Great Lakes,” said Jim Smith, a coordinator of the natural resources damages department for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. “How much it will reduce it we really don’t know – there will be some interesting monitoring done over the next few years.”

Addressing combined sewer overflows

Overflowing sewers that pour into the river and then Lake Michigan contain E. coli bacteria and other germs as well as oil, grease and detritus picked up by storm water running off industrial and municipal areas. In 2011, Hammond, Gary and East Chicago released 1.2 billion gallons, 126 million gallons and 304 million gallons, respectively, of stormwater contaminated with sewage into the Grand Calumet waterway, according to Indiana officials.
But the state is working with those cities to curb these combined sewer overflows, including by separating the sewers that carry storm water from sanitary sewers (for human waste.)

East Chicago already is implementing an approved plan. Hammond and Gary are developing their plans – two of the last four municipalities in a statewide sewer improvement program involving 108 cities and towns and 10 separate consent decrees.

East Chicago’s $20.8 million plan promises that only rains heavier than a relatively rare “10-year, one-hour” storm will cause sewer overflows into the Grand Calumet.

There are different techniques cities use to address the problem.

“You might increase the size of wastewater treatment capacity, to accept and treat more of the flow,” said Paul Higginbotham, branch chief over Indiana’s office of water quality permits. “You can also take out bottlenecks within the collection system – so you can get flow to the treatment plant versus overflow into the outfall…

“Also, bigger communities can add wet weather treatment systems, like basins for the overflow where it’s treated before it’s discharged.”

Restoring wetlands

State and federal officials have restored about 37 acres of wetlands that had been seriously degraded by contaminated floodwaters from the river over the years and choked with invasive phragmites. They removed the sediment in the wetlands and replaced it with clean sand. And they replaced phragmites with native vegetation.

In all, about 100 acres of wetland will be restored. It provides habitat for migratory birds and fish, improving the overall ecological health of the surrounding area. The wetlands also help prevent nutrient pollution and other contaminated runoff into Lake Michigan, as storm water filters through the wetlands before seeping into the lake.

The sediment clean up and wetland restoration are funded by the Great Lakes Legacy Act, a law meant to deal with contaminated sediment from years past. The Grand Calumet project so far has cost $72 million, about 65 percent of it federal money under the Legacy Act, which is part of the larger Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

Another $75 million is needed to complete the project. Securing the full funding in the near future could be difficult given the federal budget crisis which is likely to mean moderate or even severe cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

State officials will closely monitoring the project for the next 40 years, repairing the cap on the river bottom if needed and continuing to remove invasive species and plant native species as necessary.

Under a consent decree with U.S. Steel, Higginbotham said, starting next year there will also be monitoring done on five miles of the east branch of the Grand Calumet, including a site in the middle portion of the Indiana Harbor which is at the river’s mouth into Lake Michigan.

“We’ll be looking at fish populations, fish tissue contaminant concentrations, sediment contaminant concentrations, water quality, general parameters, chemical parameters, macro-benthic populations, sediment toxicity,” said Smith.

Once the sewer, sediment removal and wetland work is done, the officials said, the river should be safer and more attractive for boaters. The beaches of Lake Michigan will become healthier for people and wildlife.

The Areas of Concern website notes that the Grand Calumet once supported “highly diverse, globally unique fish and wildlife communities,” and despite all the abuse “remnants of this diversity” still remain.

Theoretically it could be revived. Then ideally a paddling trip down the Grand Calumet into Lake Michigan will provide a view of both the area’s proud industrial history and the way a battered ecosystem can be nursed back to health.

Great Lakes Echo is a project of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University.

Water distrct to curb raw sewage discharges

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 22:30:00 -0600

Wastewater managers in Chicago have agreed to spend billions to reduce the amount of raw sewage discharged into area waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency and water managers have struck a deal to head off combined sewer overflows, which happen when snowmelt or storm water overwhelm the sewers. That pushes the whole messy mixture of runoff and sewage into the rivers and canals.

The consent decree requires the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to build so-called green infrastructure, like porous concrete and rain gardens, to absorb runoff. It also gives the agency deadlines for completing the deep tunnel and reservoir project, now scheduled for completion in 2029.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and other environmental groups are suing the District over the discharges. Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the NRDC’s Midwest office, said he’s heartened by the agreement.

“This is part of a really positive trend with MWRD,” said Mogerman. “You add this to the very positive vote taken to decontaminate the sewage going into the Chicago River, and we see a more modern way of looking at sewage and water in this city.”

Mogerman said the NRDC is still mulling how this consent decree might affect the lawsuit. The agreement does resolve several Clean Water Act violations cited by the federal government.

About Front and Center – in-depth reporting from the Great Lakes

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:43:00 -0500

The Great Lakes region has always been defined by water. The “sweetwater seas,” as the lakes were known, sustained indigenous people, and served as a thoroughfare for hunters, fur traders and early voyagers.

More recently, water powered the region's growth as a critical input to the mills, processing plants and manufacturing complexes that propelled this region into becoming the industrial and agricultural powerhouse of America. Water was also the conduit for those goods to travel through the Great Lakes and out the St. Lawrence Seaway, but also down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.

Great Lakes face increasing pressure for water from world, own backyard

How likely is the fear the West could steal Great Lakes water?

Waukesha's request for Great Lakes water is complex first test of law

Water helped build this region and made it rich. But in the process the Great Lakes became a dumping ground for toxic industrial, manufacturing and human waste. The lakes were poisoned, thousands of acres of critical wetlands paved over and the natural aquatic ecosystem destroyed by pollution and invasive species. Tough environmental regulations and cleanup efforts have brought dramatic improvement but today the lakes face new challenges.

Beginning on June 20th with a live call-in program and continuing with a series of in-depth reports and web-features, Front and Center will focus on one topic—water, the critical resource linking 42 million residents of the Great Lakes basin. Reporters from throughout the region will examine the politics and policies shaping the region, and highlight the people who have made Great Lakes's water their life's work.

We will take you to the St. Lawrence Seaway where Canadian and U.S. officials are facing off over environmental shipping regulations, and travel down the Chicago River to consider the feasibility and the potential environmental benefits of re-reversing the river.

We'll visit one of the world's only floating post offices making deliveries to the big ships on the Detroit River, and spend a week on a freighter chronicling the lives of the workers onboard.

We'll hear from Native American leaders in Northern Michigan combating invasive species threatening their traditional fishing grounds and eavesdrop on wildlife biologists on the islands of Lake Superior tracking the remarkable recovery of the Bald Eagle population once decimated by industrial chemicals.

With the region's industrial economic base in decline, experts are looking at how water can play a central role in a defining a new economic future that balances the need to create jobs and protect the environment. Some call it a "freshwater economy," while others label it a "blue" economy.

Already, with water becoming an increasingly scarce resource around the globe, companies in the region are scrambling to get ahead of the curve, inventing new technologies to conserve and better manage water use.

Ultimately, the future of the Great Lakes will be guided by the actions and commitment of all those who live in the region--the people who use the lakes but all too often have taken them for granted. Our hope is that these stories will educate and spark debate while inspiring those of us who live in the region to appreciate this unique resource that has enriched our lives.