I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans last week to use federal stimulus funding to accelerate a PCB contamination clean-up project in Massachusetts that involves shipping polluted sediments to Michigan for storage.
New Bedford Harbor, one of New England’s largest and most contaminated Superfund sites, is polluted with polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals that accumulate in living organisms and cause a host of health problems. PCBs were banned in the 1970s.
PCB contamination is also a problem in the Great Lakes region, where there are advisories against eating locally caught fish.
Dave Dickerson, a project manager for the EPA’s New England office, told Michigan Messenger in an interview that the New Bedford Harbor clean-up project involves dredging contaminated sediments, “dewatering” them and shipping the dried contaminated sediments to western Wayne County.
The contaminated soil will be transported to the Michigan Disposal Waste Treatment Plant in Belleville, near the Willow Run airport.
Dickerson said that with the new accelerated clean-up schedule, he expects 40,000 to 45,000 tons of PCB contaminated sediment to be transported by train to Michigan this year. The New Bedford project is expected to take decades to complete.
Peter Quackenbush, senior environmental engineer with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s waste and hazardous materials division, oversees the Belleville facility. Quackenbush said in an interview that it is the only Michigan facility authorized to receive PCB clean-up materials. The facility is also licensed to accept hazardous waste residues from manufacturing operations such as the auto industry.
“They do accept PCB waste from various cleanups,“ Quackenbush said. “They landfill it.”
The Wayne County landfill is situated in a natural layer of clay and equipped with a liner of clay and synthetic materials, Quackenbush said. “The facility has leak detection and leachate collection and they monitor the ground water and the air.”
The New Bedford Harbor cleanup will add significantly to this years load of PCBs at the landfill.
According to Quackenbush, the facility accepted around 145,000 cubic yards of PCB waste in 2008 and has total capacity of 1 million cubic yards.
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