As Kalamazoo River cleanup is celebrated, next phase of PCB remediation set to be announced

Updated, June 9, 3:38 p.m.

PLAINWELL — It might seem like just a small-scale cleanup in a gargantuan overall project to rid the Kalamazoo River of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, but state and federal environmental officials are hailing the next step in the cleanup of the river as the kind of sustained progress that has been sought for decades.

The yet-to-be announced $10-million project will take place at and behind a diversion dam about 2 miles upstream from Plainwell, which is about 10 miles north of Kalamazoo, said Jim Saric, remedial project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Work crews will remove PCB-laden soils from riverbanks and floodplains in the area behind the dam as well as a minimal amount of in-stream sediment contaminated with the chemicals, which the EPA has labeled a health risk to humans and animals.

An official announcement could come as soon as Tuesday. (Update, June 9, 3:38 p.m.: The plan has been formally announced.)

Georgia-Pacific Corp., one of the two companies responsible for financing cleanup projects on an 80-mile stretch of the river that was declared a Superfund site in 1990, is paying for the project, which is to begin sometime later this summer and take two years to complete, Saric said.

“This shows the commitment of the parties involved — state and federal agencies as well as [Georgia-Pacific] — to keep things going forward,” Saric said. “We are pressing on our end to keep things moving.”

Millennium Holdings LLC, the other company, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. As part of the filing, Millennium was shielded from continuing to finance any cleanup projects on properties it doesn’t own, such as its cleanups along the river. The company has said it expects to emerge from bankruptcy by the end of the year.

Whether Millennium will still be committed to financing cleanup projects is still not known.

“If Millennium pulls out will [Georgia-Pacific] still be as committed?” asked Jeff Spoelstra, of the Kalamazoo River Watershed Council, a river advocacy group. “What we need is an open-ended commitment from Millennium.”

Saric was joined Monday by other members of EPA, officials from the Michigan Departments of Environmental Quality and Natural Resources, representatives from Georgia-Pacific and river advocates and stakeholders at an event to mark the successful completion of the first significant cleanup project on the river since the Superfund declaration.

The $25 million cleanup of nearly 130,000 cubic yards of soils and sediments containing 5,000 pounds of PCBs from a 1.5-mile stretch of the river near Plainwell began in June 2007 and wrapped-up recently. In addition to the removal of contaminated materials, an unused dam just downstream of the city of Plainwell was also removed, allowing the river to return to its natural banks in the area.

With the river bubbling behind her, state Sen. Patty Birkholz, a Republican from Allegan County’s Saugatuck Township, addressed the nearly 40 officials and concerned citizens who attended the event.

“I heard the current and I said ‘Thank you Lord,’” she said. “This is a good story for the rest of the cleanup. But to quote Robert Frost, we have a ways to go.

“We need a commitment to get to the mouth of Lake Michigan and say that we cleaned-up this river.”

River advocates are hoping for that kind of commitment, too, but would like to see environmental regulatory agencies enter into more ambitious agreements with the companies responsible for paying for the cleanups. A greater amount of transparency in how agreements are made is also desired, they say.

“This was a great (cleanup) action, but when was it made?” Spoelstra said. “The process is functioning but on a very small scale.”

An open house to update the public on cleanup projects going forward is tentatively scheduled to take place sometime in mid-July, EPA officials said.