WBEZ | environment

Gallery Walk: Artist Andrew Young

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:38:00 -0500

Chicago artist Andrew Young leads a gallery walk through his exhibition, Of Light Air: Mixed Media Works by Andrew Young, to speak about his artistic concepts and techniques, background in biology, and continued interest in paleontology and human interactions with the environment. Andrew received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1989 and has since been working as an artist, author, and lecturer, including collaborations in both the arts and sciences.

Recorded live Saturday, May 11, 2013 at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

Delay and denial in Pines

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:59:00 -0500

The Town of Pines, Ind., is an unassuming place. There’s no factory or skyline to compete with the smoky towers of Gary and nearby Michigan City. Sitting at the edge of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Pines is home to just over 700 people, two gas stations, one church and one bank. It’s easy to miss unless you're looking for it, as it's tucked among groves of trees along U.S. Highway 12.

Pines does, however, have a landmark of sorts.

The unceremoniously-named Yard 520 is an out-of-use landfill that sits kitty-corner from Pines' public park. There's no household garbage under the yard's rolling expanse of green grass; instead, the landfill holds an estimated 1.5 million tons of ash from coal burned at a Michigan City power plant, which sits about three miles away. Half of Yard 520’s fill is unlined.

The ash dumping in Yard 520 started almost fifty years ago. Twelve years ago, the town learned the water was contaminated with pollutants that can leach from coal ash. Nine years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared most of Pines a cleanup site. And still today, the Pines cleanup is a web of distrust between residents, the companies responsible for the ash and the EPA.

“My husband and I bought our home here to raise our family,” said Cathi Murray, the vice president of Pines’ town council. “We thought we found our own little piece of paradise. Well, it turns out to be pretty much our own little piece of hell.”

Pines' blue lawn ornaments

The people in Pines first learned there was a problem in 2000, when a resident tasted something funny in her well water and complained to environmental authorities. After that, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the EPA conducted tests that turned up elevated levels of manganese, boron, molybdenum, arsenic and lead. Residents and their environmentalist allies spent years agitating over the issue, and the EPA made almost the entire town a cleanup site in 2004.

For Murray, the damage was already done. She had moved to Pines with her husband years earlier and put down roots, working as a school teacher and raising two kids. She'd already spent a decade drinking tap water that came straight out of the ground in Pines; while she was pregnant, she says, she swore off pop and coffee and drank only well water.

"So I have an older daughter who was born with a rare bowel disorder, and I have a younger daughter who was born hearing impaired," she said. "Do you think I will ever stop wondering, did the water I drink have anything to do with that?”

The EPA began circling around a suspect: coal combustion waste, or coal ash, the material stored in Yard 520. The presumption was that as water struck underground ash deposits, it would pick up traces of arsenic, boron, and other elements that can be dangerous if consumed at high levels. The contaminated water would continue moving underground, only to be drawn into residents' drinking wells.

NIPSCO, the utility that had dumped most of the ash, and the landfill owner, Brown, agreed to pipe in municipal water from Michigan City to two separate parts of Pines. After residents without municipal water (including Murray) sued the companies, they extended the water lines to most of the town under a new agreement with the EPA. About 50 homes in Pines still have no access to the new municipal pipes. For the past nine years they've drunk bottled water provided by the companies; today you can spot big, blue containers on some homes’ front lawns or driveways.

And Yard 520 is not the only potential source of contamination in the town. In the sixties and seventies coal ash was used as road base and structural fill throughout Pines. You can literally pick the light, shimmery black stuff off the ground in roadways, driveways and even yards. Murray says her children used to play with it before anyone realized the potential danger.

An alternative approach?

“You have to cook with bottled water, boil spaghetti, potatoes ... drink bottled water,” said Shirley McColpin. She and her husband own one of about fifty homes in Pines that still have well water in their pipes. “I just don’t think people should have to live like that.”

The responsible companies pay for water for people like McColpin, but she’s tired of waiting for the outcome of the official cleanup. She says she’s never had her well tested, and she’s afraid to wash in the water. McColpin says her husband dodged a bout with skin cancer just a couple years ago.

“Somebody polluted our water and somebody’s responsible for this,” McColpin said. “Fess up ... and give us our water.”

From the vantage of people like McColpin, the cleanup begun in 2004 has been slow and the definition of "cleanup" slippery. But the EPA and NIPSCO say they’ve done all they can to involve the community in what's called a “Superfund Alternative Agreement,” a less formal version of the official Superfund cleanup program. The “alternative” approach, they say, can save time and money by allowing polluters to enter into voluntary but legally-binding agreements.

Superfund Alternative sites are not listed on the EPA’s National Priorities List for hazardous contamination sites, although they meet the exact same criteria for the severity of the pollution. The strategy is logical: Superfund cleanups are notoriously complicated and time-consuming, and listing a site on the NPL can involve lengthy litigation. With the Superfund Alternative, the EPA drops legal battles, while industry avoids the bad P.R. smell that comes with having a Superfund site under your nose.

But observers of Pines and other cleanup sites question whether this route is actually transparent and expedient. A recent EPA assessment says the alternative approach doesn’t necessarily make cleanups cheaper or faster. And Pines residents have repeatedly accused the EPA and the companies of making decisions about the cleanup behind closed doors.

“We feel that we’ve done more community involvement at the Pines site than some of our NPL sites,” said Rick Karl, who heads the EPA Region 5 Superfund Division. He says there’s no real difference in transparency or oversight from a regular Superfund cleanup aside from the formality of NPL listing.

Between 2002 and 2011, Region 5 established more alternative sites than the rest of the country combined. But Karl says he has not evaluated whether Superfund Alternative cleanups are faster or cheaper.

That’s not surprising, or so says Lisa Evans, an environmental activist and lawyer who worked for the EPA in the 1980s. “Are cleanups being done faster, does the community have more involvement in those sites, is it costing industry or the government less money?” Evans said. “None of that is true. What the advantage is, is that industry doesn’t have the stigma of having a Superfund site.”

Indeed, NIPSCO and their consultants are quick to point out that Pines is not a regular Superfund site and they are only “potentially responsible parties” under the alternative agreement. In other words, they’ve agreed to pay the price for cleanup, but they haven’t necessarily accepted blame for Pines’ groundwater contamination. The irony is that people like Shirley McColpin haven’t avoided the stigma of living in a contamination zone.

“We’ve just been held prisoner,” she said. “You can’t sell your home, real estate agents won’t come. They don’t say, ‘You have poison water we’re not coming.’ But that’s the reason they don’t come.”

The slow grind

A likely culprit behind the pace of Superfund cleanups is the principle of the “polluter pays.”

As in most Superfund sites, the companies responsible for coal ash in Pines bankrolled the environmental investigation. They hired their own consultants, but they also issued grants to a citizen’s group, People in Need of Environmental Safety (P.I.N.E.S.), to hire an independent technical advisor to review the studies of environmental and human health risks from coal ash in Pines.

The result? The experts (again, one representing the company, another representing the citizens’ group) spar over technical details, while the residents absorb mixed messages about the contamination’s severity and sources. According to P.I.N.E.S. technical advisor, Chuck Norris of GeoHydro, fundamental questions remain unanswered — despite the fact that the EPA is nine years into its investigation.

For example, Norris says the EPA and AECOM haven’t adequately measured how much coal ash was buried and spread around Pines, where it’s located, or how much of the contamination can be accurately attributed to coal ash used as road fill. And, he says, the arsenic showing up in monitoring wells near the landfill has never been located in soil or water samples taken in other places, despite the fact that it’s presumably spreading with the groundwater plume or filtering out into the soil.

Norris is also perplexed about the lack of a definitive groundwater model. In other words, NIPSCO’s consultants offered several predictions about where the contaminated plume of water is moving, none of which were accepted by the EPA. That debate took years, and still left the cleanup with no groundwater model at all, a move Norris calls “very unusual” for a groundwater contamination site.

The EPA approved the environmental reports sanctioned by NIPSCO at each stage even when those reports lacked what Norris considers key information. Norris finds this disconcerting.

“We’re going to leave the gorilla in the room, but we’re not going to make you acknowledge that the gorilla’s there,” he said. “Even though whether or not it’s there seems to be important.”

But Norris says it’s too soon to declare the cleanup a success or failure; the proof, he says, will be in the pudding. And, he says, it can be hard for affected residents to face the fact that a “cleanup” of groundwater contamination is never really over.

“It’s always a balance between what technically can be done, what it costs to do it and how much damage will be allowed to continue in lieu of trying to do more,” he said. “A perfect cleanup doesn’t exist. Once these contaminants are out, they’re out.”

And here’s the latest message Pines residents have had to absorb: The most recent studies of the site approved by the EPA find no significant risk to human health from coal ash contamination.

This seemingly reassuring news is the word of the consultant overseeing the science in Pines on behalf of the companies. That person also happens to be a leading advocate for the coal ash industry.

At the helm: An advocate for coal ash reuse

Lisa Bradley has managed the environmental investigation in Pines since 2004 as an employee of AECOM, an international consulting giant. AECOM already has a coal ash track record: In 2009 the Inspector General for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the utility responsible for the wet ash disaster in Kingston, accused AECOM of understating the company’s responsibility.

And last year, Lisa Bradley joined the executive committee of the powerful American Coal Ash Association, an association of utilities and marketers in the business of promoting what they call the “beneficial use” of coal ash.

The national industry in coal ash recycling is worth more than $2 billion a year. Companies say various types of dry ash from coal combustion can be safely used in roads, in concrete, or even in toothpaste. The EPA’s currently weighing two proposed regulations on the use of coal ash; industry broadly favors one that’s less restrictive. The agency’s sat silent on both since 2011.

Also, the EPA itself supports coal ash reuse, and in 2011 the inspector general slapped the agency’s wrist over the issue. The agency, the IG wrote, had collaborated with industry to support the practice of coal ash reuse, despite the lack of data about the potential risks.

Bradley attends industry events, where she promotes the idea that coal ash is similar in composition to soil. Environmentalist groups have smeared her work as “junk science.” But she doesn’t believe her advocacy makes her unqualified for the Pines jobs.

“I don’t see it as a conflict,” said Bradley. “I’m very well trained in what I do. I’ve been doing it for a long time. Certainly everything we’ve done for Pines has followed EPA guidance and regulations.”

All of this is incontrovertible. Bradley’s been a toxicologist at AECOM for 22 years. And in any EPA cleanup, the agency ultimately approves all the reports and decides the outcome based on its own regulatory powers.

Yet the EPA’s own research has documented two dozen proven cases of environmental or health problems caused by coal ash, and dozens more potential cases. Numerous scientific studies demonstrate that the elements present in coal ash can harm human health, animals and the environment. An investigative report by the Center for Public Integrity finds industry has had a hand in holding back state regulations and fighting against federal ones.

So how could a figure like Bradley end up in such a key position in Pines?

“They’re providing facts and information just as any other toxicologist would provide,” said Nick Meyer, a spokesman for NIPSCO. He says the company selected AECOM as consultants through a standard bidding process. The data the consultants provide, he says, is not subjective. “A 12-inch ruler is gonna measure something the same as it measures something down the road.”

But the comparison is not apt. Environmental reports are hundreds of pages long and include thousands of pieces of data gathered from wells and soil samples. EPA feedback on those reports is even more substantive; I’ve been told a Freedom of Information Act request for comments and communications about the Pines reports will take six months to fulfill.

When I asked Rick Karl of EPA Region 5 about concerns that this cleanup could be influenced by the coal ash industry, his response was simple.

“We use our own scientists to review and prepare comments on any document that is developed by a responsible party,” Karl said.

In other words, the buck stops with the EPA. Though, of course, not everyone sees it that way, particularly those who think the EPA’s dropped the ball on coal ash.

“The problem lies in relying on the polluter to do the investigation,” said Evans, adding that having the EPA make corrections after the fact is a waste of time at best. “Because the polluter has a vested interest in keeping those costs low. It’s a situation of the fox guarding the chicken coop.”

Evans argues potential gaps in oversight are built into “the polluter pays” model of almost all EPA cleanups. Keep in mind that there are more than 1,000 of these sites around the country, and Pines is neither the most contaminated, nor the most controversial.

But despite the confusion it can cause for residents and the potential for conflicts of interest, the “polluter pays” model is all the EPA has to work with. The EPA’s Superfund program hasn’t received new funding since 1995, and the Obama administration’s efforts to reinstate the Superfund tax have gone nowhere. In the meantime, the EPA is placing fewer new sites on the National Priorities List, and Superfund Alternative Approach sites are on the rise.

As it stands now (in Pines, and around the country), if the polluter doesn’t pay, no one does.

The clock will keep ticking

“The coal industry wants a free hand to dispose of this stuff how they see fit,” said George Adey, the Pines Town Council president. “Our community is a perfect example of why we need a stronger EPA and stronger regulation for coal ash.”

That kind of sentiment’s drawing more attention lately, especially after the Kingston disaster. That incident reminded environmentalists and lawmakers that towns such as Pines had been treated like coal ash dumps, though it hasn’t led to much action. The EPA has been sitting on two proposed regulations on the disposal of coal ash since 2010, and the states offer a hodge-podge of guidelines. As it stands, the states regulate the disposal of coal ash in more than a thousand ponds and landfills around the country, many of them unlined.

Coal remains a major source of energy in the Chicago region as well as the entire nation. And environmentalists say “clean coal” is a fallacy if you consider the continued production of unregulated coal ash.

New regulatory developments are likely to pass Pines by, since NIPSCO no longer dumps ash there. The clock, though, will still be running on the cleanup. The EPA says it expects to announce what cleanup requirements it will impose on NIPSCO and Brown in early 2015.

Meanwhile, the Yard 520 landfill still sits at the edge of the town. There’s a marshy ditch right next to Yard 520 that captures most of the contaminated runoff from the area and carries it through the town of Pines and through Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

The final destination? Lake Michigan.

Lewis Wallace is a WBEZ Pritzker Journalism Fellow. Follow him @lewispants.

Does Illinois have a nuclear future?

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 23:00:00 -0500

President Barack Obama was in town Friday visiting Argonne National Laboratory in the Western suburbs. The president talked about his “all of the above” energy policy, which includes alternative fuels and better batteries, but one area didn't get quite as much air time from the president: nuclear power.

Illinois continues to be the largest producer of nuclear power in the country.

And scientists at Argonne, and nearby Fermilab, want to keep it that way – by making nuclear part of our sustainable energy future.

But the future of nuclear here and across the country is shaky. After a long hiatus, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is licensing new reactors again, but most of those are in the Southeast, and none are in Illinois.

Reduce, reuse, recycle...

The first rule of Argonne National Laboratories: Don’t touch anything. When nuclear engineer Roger Blomquist took me on a tour, he was sure to show me the Geiger counter the employees use to check their hands and feet on the way in and out of the lab where Argonne builds specialized parts for research reactors.

I learned the second rule of Argonne pretty fast, too: Don’t say nuclear waste.

“The idea that it is waste is somebody’s interpretation,” Blomquist said. At Argonne, the radioactive stuff most of us know as nuclear waste is called spent nuclear fuel.

Part of the reason for the linguistic shift, says Blomquist, is that we could be recycling the materials in nuclear waste.

“With enough recycling you can use 100 percent of the energy that’s in the uranium ore you dig out of the ground,” he said. Today’s technology uses up just one percent of the power we could be getting out of uranium through nuclear fission. The rest comes back out of the reactors, mixed with a slush of more volatile, radioactive elements.

But recycling nuclear fuel is well within reach. Blomquist is working on the development of fast reactors, a type of nuclear reactor that can run on reprocessed fuel and that he says would be smaller, more contained and safer than the reactors we currently use.

Just down the road at Fermilab, Argonne’s sister laboratory, researcher and associate lab director Stuart Henderson agreed that the technology in use these days is way behind the times.

“A lot of what we do with spent nuclear fuel is sort of what Homer Simpson would do,” Henderson said. “It’s not very sophisticated.”

Reprocessing or pyroprocessing nuclear waste would allow us to take the pellets of radioactive fuel out of reactors, separate out the elements with the longest half-lives, and reuse them as fuel for reactors. The only thing left over would be the most radioactive parts of the waste, which decay in just a few hundred years.

Right now spent fuel has to be stored in pools or casks for hundreds of thousands of years.

Henderson’s working on another type of nuclear reactor that would deal with both waste and safety issues, a reactor powered by a particle accelerator.

Right now, what happens in a nuclear reactor is a controlled chain reaction: in short, particles crash into one another and cause other particles to crash into one another, generating an enormous amount of heat.

But once it starts, nuclear fission in a reactor can be hard to slow down.

In the new model, called a sub-critical reactor, there would be no chain reaction. A particle accelerator would shoot particles into the reactor to keep the reaction going.

So if you want to stop it, you just hit a switch and turn off the accelerator.

“That means that the reactor is never capable of having a Chernobyl-type explosion,” Henderson said. He’s in touch with Belgian scientists who are building one of these reactors, called a sub-critical reactor; his job is to help build the high-powered accelerator that’s capable of doing the job.

If you build it

So, what’s the hangup? Where are these reactors of the future?

Both Blomquist and Henderson say having the technology is simply not enough to usher in a nuclear renaissance. We’d need to start building these reactors of the future now if we wanted to be getting power from them in less than 15 years, and in the U.S., that’s just not happening.

They both say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a part of that equation – it’s expensive and complex to license a reactor design, so much so that companies don’t see an incentive to get involved with the grandiose designs of the future, no matter how much safer they might be. Here in Illinois, Exelon is looking to make its current reactors more efficient, but there are no plans for new reactors in the state.

“Nobody’s gonna build any new ones, anytime soon,” said Mark Cooper, a researcher at the University of Vermont who studies the safety and economics of nuclear power.

Cooper says other options available like solar, wind, natural gas and coal remain far more economically viable than nuclear, and he suggests we should be investing more in other high tech energy innovations.

Plus, he says even the most advanced nuclear reactors still come with risks – and someone has to pay for insurance on those, too.

“As you operate them, you learn that you haven’t done enough,” he said. “Mother nature throws you a curve, human beings don’t behave properly, equipment breaks down.”

Just two years after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan, those possibilities loom large, especially for people with nuclear power in their own backyards.

Living with nuclear power

Braidwood, Ill. is only 50 miles from the high tech labs, but in a lot of ways, it’s a different world. The fear of nuclear power is real here.

Exelon operates a nuclear plant at the edge of the small town, and in the 1990s the water was contaminated with radioactive tritium from the Braidwood plant. According to the Chicago Tribune, Exelon didn’t admit the mistake until years later.

The people in Braidwood have developed a sort of gallows humor about living near a reactor.

“You’re gonna be the first one to go if you live by one,” said resident Mike Franklin put it. In other words, you won’t live to suffer through the devastating effects of radiation – and that’s a good thing. Franklin, like a lot of people I talked to, grew up in Braidwood, and said he generally doesn’t think much about the plant.

In a grocery store parking lot at Braidwood’s main intersection, just up the road from the reactor, I caught an older man named Charles Crick unloading his grocery cart. He worked at the Braidwood plant.

“I started in a nuke in 1971, and I worked in ‘em until I retired,” he said. “Do I glow in the dark? No.”

The Stumble Inn is a bar just a mile down the road the other way, in the 600-person town of Godley. The morning crowd at the Stumble Inn was small but enthusiastic - and none of them like living near the plant.

“I’m not for nuclear power,” said Arthur Wallace, who goes by Slick here. Slick’s son-in-law worked at the Braidwood reactor, and died of leukemia at age 44; some research suggests links between leukemia and radiation. His daughter worked in security at the plant.

“They sent her home every once in awhile with her badge gettin’ too much rads. Too much radiation,” he said. “She quit after 11 years.”

The bartender, Ronda Bally, was a school bus driver for a long time, and recalled getting trainings from Exelon on how to pick up children and the elderly during a nuclear emergency.

“My life is half over,” she said. “My kids and my grandkids still have a lot of years left ahead of them, and if something as basic as a water supply could cause them serious health issues or even possible death, I have a problem with that.”

A lot of people here say they’d support safer nuclear power in a heartbeat. But Bally, like Slick, isn’t sure she wants a nuclear future at all.

“I’m kinda more interested in the whole wind farm thing that they’re doing now”, she said. “Nuclear anything is very scary.”

The nuclear future

“Nuclear power is the worst investment in the current environment,” said Mark Cooper. “You have gone through a series of these pursuits of a technological holy grail. And they have failed.”

His point: scientists have known about safer nuclear for decades – and companies just aren’t willing to spend the money to make it happen.

But Roger Blomquist at Argonne thinks it’s only a matter of time before climate change eclipses the barriers to nuclear innovation.

“Then getting rid of burning fossil fuels will become a national emergency,” he said. “And when that happens, that’s when this technology will be blindingly obvious to most people.”

At that point, he says, maybe living in the nuclear future won’t seem so bad.

Follow Lewis Wallace on Twitter.

Englewood residents fight for environmental safeguards during rail yard expansion

Thu, 28 Feb 2013 15:39:00 -0600

Residents in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood are demanding that railway company Norfolk Southern include environmental protections into its expansion plans for its South Side rail yard.

The company has already bought and demolished some Englewood homes over the past several years to fulfill its expansion plans. Now Norfolk Southern is on track to purchase 104 acres of city land. The yard is set to expand southward, from Garfield Boulevard to 61st Street.

John Paul Jones, the head of the nonprofit Sustainable Englewood, said residents aren’t trying to block the rail yard expansion.

“But for Englewood it could be a dramatic impact on our quality of life but also our well-being because of a host of environmental harms such a project would bring,” Jones said.

Residents worry about health impacts of truck traffic, which would increase because the yard is location where freight is transferred from rail to trucks and vice versa. Residents are particularly concerned about increased diesel-related air pollution, as the Englewood neighborhood already has some of the highest asthma rates in the city.

Jones’ group wants a community benefits agreement from Norfolk Southern, connected to the sale of the city-owned property. Sustainable Englewood is asking for: monitoring and mitigating diesel pollution; creation of green space and placement of buffer zones around homes. The hope is to lessen noise and air pollution.

Brian Urbaszewski of Respiratory Health Association of Metropolitan Chicago said filters should be go on diesel engine trucks, to eliminate 90 percent of the soot that comes out of tailpipes.

At Tuesday’s city council housing and real estate committee meeting, a hearing for the sale of city land to Norfolk Southern was delayed. A Norfolk Southern spokesman said the company is meeting with environmental activists next month.

Follow Natalie on Twitter @natalieymoore

With all this snow, are we still in a drought?

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:14:00 -0600

Chicago is gearing up for yet another winter storm that's already dumped more than foot of snow from Texas to Oklahoma. While you may think of the snow as a big hassle, farmers across the state are cheering.

For the first time in seven months, Sugar Grove farmer Steve Ruh is getting so much rain and snow that his field’s drainage system is helping put moisture back into the waterways.

"They’re replenishing the creeks, and they’ve actually replenished the Illinois and the Mississippi River enough where we’ve been able to actually ship grain out via the river, which we haven’t been able to do the last few months, because the water had been so low," he explained.

Ruh farms in total about 3,200 acres, just west of Aurora in Sugar Grove and at another farm near Champaign.

"We’re almost ahead of schedule as far as moisture," he said. "But, we had a lot to make up for."

The National Weather Service says the Chicago area is about 2.65 inches above normal so far this year. Rockford is 2.95 inches.

State climatologist Jim Angel said even though the USDA Drought Monitor still shows part of the northern and western areas of the state in drought conditions, that likely hasn't taken into account recent rain and snow.

"January was a very wet month," he said, adding that gave the topsoil a good soaking. "It’s that area two or three feet below that needs to get moisture and we’re pretty close to that."

Angel, ironically, was at a conference today at Purdue University speaking to farmers about the weather. This is the time of year he travels around visiting farms, and he said he many farmers are optimistic about this year.

Steve Ruh is, too.

"We are replenishing and today’s heavy wet snow is definitely a Godsend," he said.

Worldview: Mental health in the developing world, Stehlik on 'Django Unchained' and Weekend Passport

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 12:49:00 -0600

Worldview 12.28.12

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 09:24:00 -0600

Drought threatens to close Mississippi to barges

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 09:13:00 -0600

ST. LOUIS — After months of drought, companies that ship grain and other goods down the Mississippi River are being haunted by a potential nightmare: If water levels fall too low, the nation's main inland waterway could become impassable to barges just as the harvest heads to market.

Any closure of the river would upend the transport system that has carried American grain since before steamboats and Mark Twain. So shipping companies are scrambling to find alternative ways to move tons of corn, wheat and other crops to the Gulf Coast for shipment overseas.

"You can't just wait until it shuts down and suddenly say, 'There's a problem,'" said Rick Calhoun, head of marine operations for Chicago-based Cargill Inc. "We're always looking at Plan B."

The mighty Mississippi is approaching the point where it may become too shallow for barges that carry food, fuel and other commodities. If the river is closed for a lengthy period, experts say, economic losses could climb into the billions of dollars.

It isn't just the shipping and grain industries that will feel the pinch. Store prices and utility bills could rise. And deliveries of everything from road-clearing rock salt for winter and fertilizer for the spring planting season could be late and in short supply.

"The longer it lasts, the worse it gets," said Don Sweeney, associate director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "It's inevitable that it will mean higher prices down the road."

The focus of greatest concern is a 180-mile stretch of the river between the confluences of the Missouri River near St. Louis and the Ohio River at Cairo, Ill. That's where lack of rain has squeezed the channel from its normal width of 1,000 feet or more to a just a few hundred feet.

The river depth is 15 to 20 feet less than normal, now about 13 feet deep in many places. If it dips to around 9 feet, rock pinnacles at two locations make it difficult, if not impossible, for barges to pass. Hydrologists for the National Weather Service predict the Mississippi will reach the 9-foot mark by Dec. 9.

The situation worsened last week when the Army Corps of Engineers began reducing the outflow from an upper Missouri River dam in South Dakota, where a group of experts said Thursday that the worst U.S. drought in decades had intensified sharply over the last week.

The flow is gradually being cut by more than two-thirds by Dec. 11 as part of an effort to ease the effects of the drought in the northern Missouri River basin.

Lawmakers from Mississippi River states are frustrated with the corps' action and even requested a presidential emergency declaration to overturn it. So far, the White House has not responded.

On Thursday, Army Assistant Secretary Jo-Ellen Darcy told Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois and some of his colleagues from Iowa and Minnesota that the corps would consider dialing back the amount of water being held back from the Mississippi.

Darcy also pledged to expedite removal of rock formations south of St. Louis, though that work would take at least two months after a contractor is hired.

To Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, the stakes couldn't be higher.

"There is going to be a dramatic ripple effect to our economy if the barge traffic grinds to halt, which clearly it will if something is not done to avert this crisis," she said.

Her Missouri colleague in the Senate, Republican Roy Blunt, acknowledged "friction" between upper Missouri River interests that control the flow and those downstream on the lower Missouri and Mississippi rivers. He said the corps "needs to manage that balance."

Over the years, parts of the river have occasionally been closed because of low water, barge accidents, dredging, ice and flooding. But this shutdown, if it happens, would affect a pivotal stretch that is used for two-way traffic — shipments going south to the Gulf as well as transports from the Illinois and Ohio rivers headed north to Chicago and Minneapolis.

A two-month shutdown — the length of time that some observers fear given current conditions — would have an estimated impact of $7 billion, according to the river industry trade group American Waterways Operators.

Consider agricultural products. It costs 30 to 35 cents more per bushel to send grain to the Gulf by rail instead of barge — a massive figure when calculating the millions of bushels shipped downriver.

"When you think of all we buy at the grocery store that has grain and corn, consumers could really see it hit them in the pocketbooks," said Ann McCulloch of the Waterways Operators group.

The Coast Guard controls navigation on the river and decides when to require restrictions or shut it down.

"It's really played by ear," Coast Guard Lt. Colin Fogarty said. "The Mississippi River is a dynamic environment."

River shippers are bracing for the worst, weighing train and truck alternatives to move a staggering volume of cargo, if necessary.

Seven million tons of farm products are shipped via barge in a typical December-January period, along with 3.8 million tons of coal, 1.7 tons of chemical products, 1.3 tons of petroleum products and 700,000 tons of crude oil, McCulloch said.

Trains already haul a vast volume of material, but switching from river to rail isn't that easy, especially on short notice. Cargill, for example, uses 1,300 of its own barges on inland waterways. Finding that much capacity elsewhere is no simple task.

"We'll look for other sources of transportation to the extent we can. But if you take away this important artery, you can't just snap your fingers and replace it with trains," Calhoun said. "There aren't just trains sitting around. They're already pretty busy with their business on their books."

Tractor-trailers can pick up some of the slack. But some cargo, such as coal, just isn't cost-effective to haul by truck over long distances, said Bob Costello, an economist with the American Trucking Associations.

Businesses operating directly on the river are bound to suffer, too.

George Foster founded JB Marine Service Inc. in St. Louis 36 years ago to make a living fixing and cleaning barges. An extended river closure may force layoffs, he said. And he figures many other companies will be forced to cut jobs, too.

"It's extremely dire," Foster said. "There's no way to sugarcoat it."

U of I trustees approve $15.5 million solar farm

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 09:03:00 -0600

Trustees at the University of Illinois have approved a $15.5 million project to build a 20.5-acre solar farm to help power the Urbana-Champaign campus.

The Champaign News-Gazette reports that the solar-power facility will be built on land now used by the College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.

The university says the solar farm is slated to begin producing power by next fall. It's eventually expected to supply about 2 percent of the electricity used on campus.

For the first 10 years, the university will buy power from Phoenix Solar Inc., which will build and operate the facility. After that, the university will own the solar farm.

How to build a better ditch. No, really.

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 06:00:00 -0500

Andy Ward remembers the day he drove through the Darby Creek watershed – the day that convinced him to build a better ditch.

It was the mid-‘90s, and the 560 square miles of Ohio land that feeds in the Big and Little Darby Creeks was one of the most diverse aquatic systems in the Midwest. Ward, a professor at Ohio State University’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, wanted to know how he could best protect the creek and its tributaries from farm runoff and other pollution that threatened life in the waterways. In excess, chemicals like phosphorous can lead to a massive overgrowth of algae, choking off other plant and animal life in and around the Great Lakes and as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.

As Ward and a colleague drove past some of the local farms, they debated the merits of buffer strips – areas of soil and vegetation meant to separate farm fields from the surrounding landscape and absorb runoff. “Buffer strips were the new thing on the block at the time,” Ward explained, and farmers were being offered financial incentives to build them.

But what did that matter, Ward wondered, if most farmers also used a series of underground drains to draw excess water away from their crops? If the drains ran under the fields they would also run right underneath the buffer strips.

“How much value [were they] really going to provide,” Ward asked, “if a good portion of the flow went right underneath them?”

The farms’ underground drains would often empty into ditches – some as big as 15 or 16 feet wide – that ran around the fields and fed into the watershed. As Ward and his colleague rounded a corner, they saw a bulldozer clearing out one such ditch, ripping out giant clumps of grass and other vegetation and mounds of sediment that had built up over time, fed by nutrients and run-off water.

“I turned to the person I was with and asked, ‘Is that a common practice in the Midwest, to totally remove everything that was in the ditch?’ ‘Oh yeah that happens a lot. In fact, there are maintenance programs in which the county will come and do that.’"

Ward was shocked. “That’s crazy!” he recalled telling his colleague. “We’re providing incentives to grow grass at the top of the ditch, yet a lot of the flow is going underneath that grass. Then we’re paying people to rip out the grass where the water is actually ending up! It just made no sense to me,” Ward said.

Farmers needed ditches to catch excess water and move it away from crops. But was there a way to design a more environmentally-friendly ditch?

It wasn’t just a crazy dream. Ward and his colleagues came up with what they called a two-stage ditch. Whereas a conventional ditch is a narrow, muddy, waterslide of a tube, channeling water and all of its contents straight through to larger streams and rivers, the two-stage ditch looked like an overgrown series of large steps. Water would flow through the narrow bottom of the ditch, but a flat “bench” of soil above the water, planted with grass and other vegetation, would absorb water and act as a flood plain during times of heavy rain. Rather than fighting nature, Ward figured they could let nature help protect itself.

But what would the farmers and landowners think? According to the environmental advocacy group the Nature Conservancy, at $10-$12 per linear foot, two-stage ditches are vastly more expensive to build than conventional ditches, which cost only $1 to $1.50 per square foot. But two-stage ditches are expected to last a lot longer (around 30 years). The Conservancy argues that “one option is immediate” while “the other is permanent.”

In 2007 the Joyce Foundation (which also supports editorial initiatives at WBEZ) gave $5 million in grants to the Nature Conservancy and three other groups to, in part, help build two-stage ditches in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio around the Wabash River watershed. And Kevin Willibey, a farmer who owns land near Ohio’s Fish Creek, built two-stage ditches on his property after seeing a pitch from Ward and his colleagues.

Willibey’s testimonial is included in a short film produced by the Nature Conservancy. Hear him explain why he feels good about the switch in the audio below:

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Andy Ward spoke at an event presented by the Peggy Notebart Nature Museum earlier this month. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.