Dow and the Tittabawassee River

In one of her first actions as director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson has ordered the Great Lakes office of EPA to stop negotiations with the Dow Chemical company — begun in the last days of the Bush administration — over controversial dioxin cleanup in the Saginaw Bay watershed.

The move is being celebrated by Michigan environmental groups that have appealed to the new administration to intervene in a process they say could shuffle the cleanup of a serious public health hazard into a non-regulatory process favored by the company.

“I think its pretty exciting that they are going to stop and take a look at this,” said Kathy Henry, a former resident of the Tittabawassee River floodplain whose property was contaminated with dioxin from Dow’s Midland plant. “We have been fighting this thing for so long.”

In January, Henry and representatives from a dozen environmental and community groups wrote to Jackson and appealed to her to intervene in EPA’s efforts to designate the areas contaminated by Dow as a “Superfund Alternative Site.” Such alternative status would lead to a vague process likely to shortchange citizen involvement and oversight, the activists said.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility also appealed to Jackson to intervene in the negotiations.

In a written response to the Michigan groups this week, Jackson stated:

I share your concerns about transparency, public participation, and the extensive contamination at the Dow site. … It is also important to address your concerns about EPA’s current approach at the site. To that end, I have dispatched a high-level team from my office and EPA Region 5 [Great Lakes bureau] to meet with you and report back to me about your concerns and options for the site. … Region 5 will not proceed with further negotiations with Dow until the team has reported back to me and reviewed the situation.

Jackson also stated that newly appointed advisor, Robert Sussman, would provide oversight on the matter.

Sussman was deputy EPA administrator under President Bill Clinton and a member of the Obama transition team. As a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, Sussman blogged for
Think Progress on environmental topics, including the forced resignation in May 2008 of EPA Region 5’s last administrator, Mary Gade. Gade said she was forced to resign over her efforts to get Dow to cleanup dioxin in the Saginaw Bay watershed.

“If her only sin was zeal in protecting the public, firing her was wrong and will send a troubling message to EPA employees all across the country who are trying to do their jobs,” Sussman wrote at the time.

Michelle Hurd Riddick of the environmental group Lone Tree Council said that she is encouraged and delighted by Jackson’s response and by conversations she had this week with Sussman.

“He is saying that they want a better handle on what is going on,” Hurd Riddick said. “They want to better know what and why they are moving to the Superfund Alternative Site process. He wants to know what our issues are with this process.”

She said she told Sussman that any serious investigation of EPA’s activities with Dow must involve Mary Gade, who she said has detailed knowledge of the case. She also said that officials need to focus on increasing heath education for people who live around dioxin contamination and don’t understand its toxicity.

“There has not been a public health voice on this matter,” she said. “Not the health department, not the [Michigan Department of Community Health], and EPA has been very quiet about this.”

Dow: “Not a setback”

Dow Chemical’s Midland plant has contaminated 50 miles of the Saginaw Bay watershed with dioxin — one of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals known. In 2003, after eight years of negotiations, the state of Michigan entered into a clean-up agreement with the company. The state struggled to hold the company to the deadlines set in the agreement, and when samples from the Saginaw River revealed contamination at extremely high levels in 2007, EPA’s regional office, under Mary Gade, ordered an immediate clean up.

Dow appealed to EPA headquarters, stating that it disliked dealing with both the state and federal regulators and suggesting that it would prefer to deal only with EPA.

Gade was stripped of her authority over Dow and she soon resigned. Shortly afterward, the EPA’s Great Lakes office began working on a new approach for the dioxin clean up, the Superfund Alternative process.

Gade, now in private practice, told Michigan Messenger last month that the process begun in December by EPA was similar to the one she rejected in early 2008 as insufficient to protect human health.

Gade is not the only one to warn of problems with the Superfund Alternative process. An EPA Office of Inspector General report in 2007 found that Superfund Alternative Sites were not adequately regulated by the agency.

“I wouldn’t consider this a setback,” said Mary Draves, spokeswoman for Dow, when asked about the interruption of negotiations for Superfund Alternative site designation. “We are ready to work with EPA when they are ready.”