The 220 acre pit where the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumps dioxin contaminated sediments from the Saginaw River has been given a pleasant new name.

The disposal site, which sits along the Saginaw River in Zilwaukee and Frankenlust townships, is known as the Dredged Material Disposal Facility, but Saginaw County Controller and Chief Administrative Officer Marc A. McGill has decided that it shall now be called the “Saginaw River Preservation Project”.

A county document provided to the The Saginaw News News indicates that McGill is chiefly concerned with preservation of the businesses along the Saginaw River.

“At least 14 businesses provide jobs associated with this River Preservation Project. Without the River Preservation Project, all these businesses could be subject to closure and all the over-300 Americans would lose their jobs.”

Moreover, according to the county definition, river freighters bring in materials that municipalities need, such as crushed stone and rock salt, at “advantageous prices,” and the project “improves the cleanliness of the river as well as improves its flow.”

“I think it’s kind of putting lipstick on a pig because it’s nothing more than a pit … in middle of the wetlands,” Lone Tree Council environmental spokeswoman Michelle Hurd Riddick told the News. “That’s hardly consistent with preservation.”

The Michigan Dept. of Environmental Quality opposed the Army Corps plan to dispose of dredged materials at the pit and asked that the Corps seek a groundwater permit for the disposal facility and construct a slurry wall to line the pit and protect against seepage.

State regulators backed off that request, however, after then-Lt. Gov. John Cherry intervened in a closed door meeting with the agency and Army Corps staff.

Environmental groups, health officials and people who live near the disposal site have expressed concern that dioxin from the dredged materials could contaminate groundwater, wildlife and locals.

The Michigan Senate has passed a bill that would block state agencies from making environmental rules that are stricter than federal requirements, prompting concerns from environmental advocacy groups.

According to an analysis by the Senate Fiscal Agency:

Senate Bill 272 would do the following:

– Prohibit an agency from promulgating a rule more stringent than the applicable Federal standard unless specifically authorized by statute.
– Require an agency to adopt Federal rules and standards if it adopted rules to implement a federally delegated program.
– Specify that a guideline, operational memorandum, bulletin, interpretative statement, or form with instructions would be advisory only and could not be given the force and effect of law.
– Prohibit a rule from exceeding the rule-making delegation in its authorizing statute.
– Require an agency to consider exempting small business from a rule under certain
circumstances and expand the methods by which an agency must reduce the economic impact of a rule on small business.
– Revise a provision pertaining to a challenge to the validity or applicability of a rule.
– Allow a court to award up to 10 times the cost of any permit fees plus actual and reasonable costs for witness and attorney fees if the court determined a rule-processing violation had occurred.

The new law could benefit Dow Chemical, which is responsible for dioxin contamination in the city of Midland, the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay.

In 2009 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took lead responsibility for enforcing clean up of the watershed section of the contaminated zone, leaving the state responsible for working with Dow on pollution in the city of Midland where dioxin pollution has settled over much of the city.

Under federal rules dioxin at levels of 1000 parts per trillion requires cleanup. State law requires clean up at 90 ppt. With pollution in Midland at around 300 ppt, the Senate law could allow Dow to avoid difficult and expensive cleanup of the city.

In an online discussion of the law, Lone Tree Council leader Michelle Hurd Riddick said that political leaders in Midland and Dow Chemical have long argued that the state should apply EPA’s 1,000 ppt standard for dioxin.

EPA has acknowledged that its 1,000 ppt cleanup level is outdated and the agency has promised to update dioxin cleanup requirements to comport with current scientific understandings of the chemical’s toxicity, she said. This process, however, has been stalled under pressure from the chemical industry.

Wetland permitting is another area in which state environmental rules are more stringent than federal rules.

In a 2003 presentation on the differences between state and federal wetland rules former Dept. of Environmental Quality Director Stephen Chester said that that approximately 930,000 acres or 17 percent of all state wetlands are “isolated” wetlands — those not adjacent to the Great Lakes or inland lakes or streams — that are not clearly protected under the federal Clean Water Act.

In 2008 the Michigan Farm Bureau adopted a resolution that criticized DEQ protocols and asked to be regulated under federal law which allows more agriculture in and around wetlands without permits.

Cranberry farmers have been particularly troubled by state wetland rules, the group said.

The Senate action will hamstring efforts to protect the Great Lakes, the Michigan Environmental Council said.

In 1976 Gov. William Milliken reduced the algae beds that were covering Lake Erie by issuing an administrative rule limiting phosphorus, the group said. Under the Senate law, the governor would be blocked from taking such action.

“Federal standards to protect water quality are designed to be a minimum standard below which states are not allowed to drop. They are not written by people who feel a stewardship responsibility over one of the world’s most important freshwater resource,” MEC policy director James Clift said Thursday.

“It seems inconceivable that politicians in the Great Lakes State believe Washington bureaucrats will protect the lakes better than those who live here,” Clift said. But that’s what they’ve said with today’s vote.”

State environmental groups are calling on the EPA to respond to a Dow-Chemical funded mailer that downplays the risk of living amidst dioxin contamination.

In recent weeks the Dow-funded University of Michigan Dioxin Exposure Study has publicized a new report in which researchers claim that adults who live in areas contaminated with dioxin from operations at Dow’s Midland plant do not have elevated levels of the chemical in their blood. The report, which has been distributed to people throughout Saginaw and Midland, also claims the people who eat fish from the highly contaminated waters downstream from Dow don’t have higher dioxin levels.

On Monday I reported that public health experts are worried that the report is likely to confuse people.

The message seems at odds with the repeated state health advisories warning against contact with the soil of the Tittabawassee floodplain and against eating fish from the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay.

In a Feb. 1 letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Director Lisa Jackson representatives from the Lone Tree Council, League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and others wrote:

We believe the mailing by the University of Michigan was inappropriate and premature, inasmuch as it is clearly intended to influence public opinion before the new study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal and made available for public scrutiny. It also sends conflicting signals to the population, and interferes with and frustrates public health efforts to educate the public about legitimate health threats.

The groups urged EPA to conduct a review of the report and inform residents about its limitations.

EPA has not yet stated whether it plans to respond to the latest UMDES report.

In 2009 the agency conducted a formal review of the University of Michigan Dioxin Study and announced that it would be of limited value from a public health perspective because it failed to address dioxin exposure among children and did not adequately sample people who live on highly contaminated land or eat local fish.

Midland-based Dow Chemical will work with The Nature Conservancy on ways to make its manufacturing sites more environmentally sustainable as part of a five-year, $10 million collaboration, the company announced Monday.

From the Associated Press:

“Most people believe it’s a choice — it’s either grow the economy or protect the environment . . . the classic zero-sum game in which someone has to lose,” Dow Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris said in a joint appearance before the Detroit Economic Club with Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy. Dow intends to “demonstrate that protecting nature can be a profitable global priority and can be a smart business strategy,” Liveris said.

…

Dow and the conservancy are still working out details of how the initiative will work. But one example might be for Dow to make greater use of “green infrastructure,” such as using trees, wetlands and other natural features for flood control and water treatment, Tercek said.

Dow’s Midland facility has contaminated 52 miles of the Saginaw River watershed with dioxin and other chemicals, and environmental activists in the areas were immediately skeptical about the new partnership.

“Dow has a hard time being green on issues that really count, like cleaning up the mess in your own backyard,” Lone Tree Council member Michelle Hurd Riddick told AP.

The area downstream from Dow’s plant is contaminated enough to qualify as a federal Superfund site but Gov. Jennifer Granholm, under pressure from the company, asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency not to place the site on the National Priorities List.

EPA is now working with Dow on a cleanup plan for the contaminated river and floodplain but the work is expected to take a decade and it has not involved relocating or compensating people who are living on highly contaminated land. The state of Michigan remains responsible for pursuing remediation of the dioxin fallout that has contaminated the city of Midland.

Dow Chairman Liveris’ statement about the economic benefits of protecting the environment sounds very similar to the environmental philosophy espoused by new governor Rick Snyder, who is still listed as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Michigan Chapter of the Nature Conservancy.

It is not yet clear how the Snyder administration will approach Dow’s ongoing environmental concerns in the Saginaw watershed.

The director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment, Peter Preuss, has reportedly warned that EPA is “really unlikely” to meet the December 2010 deadline set by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson for completing the agency’s assessment of dioxin.

Last year as EPA assumed responsibility for overseeing the cleanup of dioxin contamination that stretches 52 miles downstream from Dow Chemical’s Midland facility, Jackson promised that the agency would redouble its efforts to protect the public from dioxin by finishing its long-delayed official assessment of the chemical.

Dioxin is a byproduct of combustion and of the chemical manufacturing process that accumulates in the fat of people who are exposed to it. A draft version of EPA’s dioxin assessment indicates that that most Americans are already being exposed to health-damaging levels of the toxin through their diets.

If the report is finalized it could be used by EPA to set more restrictive regulations for the chemical, but the chemical industry has successfully fought the completion of the report by continually arguing for further study. According to EPA protocols the agency’s Science Advisory Board must finish a review of the dioxin assessment before it can be released and this review involves evaluation of voluminous concerns brought by industry groups.

Michelle Hurd Riddick of the Lone Tree Council said that dioxin cleanup efforts in Saginaw, Bay City and Midland have been hampered by lack of clear and current dioxin information from EPA.

In an online environmental issues forum she wrote:

Last year EPA took over the lead from the DEQ after more than a decade. Many were skeptical and remain so for many reasons—the one bit of consolation was the new administration’s commitment to science and the release of the Dioxin Reassessment. At a minimum there was hope that science and not politics would finally guide public health protection and an eventual cleanup of Dow’s huge dioxin contamination.

That appears less certain. Dow Chemical, [General Electric], [American Chemistry Council] along with dozens of other industry lobbyists is working over time to stop the release of the dioxin reassessment. Challenging the science, insisting on absolutes and throwing every extraneous issue on the table, industry could easily prevail.

In a New Year’s Eve announcement EPA called for public comments on a plan to change the preliminary remediation goals for dioxin in residential soil from the current federal level of 1,000 parts per trillion (ppt) to 72 ppt.

The agency also recommended that dioxin remediation goals for commercial/industrial soil will be changed from 5,000-20,000 ppt to 950 ppt.

The proposed strengthened cleanup goals could go into effect in June and are considered interim levels.

EPA has also promised to complete a long-delayed dioxin health assessment by the end of 2010. This assessment is to be the agency’s scientific foundation for future decision-making about dioxins in the environment and may result in another adjustment of allowable dioxin levels.

Dioxin has spread from Dow Chemical’s Midland plant, through the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and into Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay, and has contaminated hundreds of residential properties in the river floodplain.

Michelle Hurd Riddick of the Lone Tree Council is a longtime advocate for cleanup of Dow’s dioxin contamination.

In a phone interview she said that the strengthened cleanup guidelines are a very welcome development.

“EPA is going to use current science,” she said. “They are going to base decisions on science and what is best for public health and divest themselves from the politics of the issue.”

According to EPA:

Dioxins may cause a large number of different health effects, like cancer and reproductive effects. Dioxins are of concern because they are the result of combustion, and are absorbed from the air into the food chain where they can stay for many years.

Dioxin levels as high as 1.6 million ppt have been measured in the Saginaw River.

The agreement comes after months of confidential negotiations involving Dow, EPA and the state of Michigan, and represents the first proposed settlement between the Obama administration and the chemical giant responsible for contamination of Michigan’s largest watershed. But it’s hardly the first attempt by the state or federal governments to deal with the problem.

“For those involved all these years, this is the fourth public comment period on yet another version of how Dow will move forward,“ said Michelle Hurd Riddick of the Lone Tree Council.

Environmentalists and residents of the contaminated zone are looking for evidence that the EPA — which assumed responsibility for overseeing cleanup of the area in May — will be able to speed progress on a pollution problem that has dragged on with Michigan unable to get the company to fully investigate the scope of the contamination it has caused.

EPA has promised tough, swift and transparent actions to address the dioxin contamination which EPA Director Lisa Jackson has acknowledged as a threat to public health.

In June the agency began confidential negotiations with Dow over how to proceed.

In the proposed Administrative Order on Consent released by the agency for public review on Oct. 16, the EPA lays out a strategy for completing characterization of the contamination and states that if Dow fails to comply with the terms of the agreement it will force the company to act, and levy fines.

The agency has promised to consider feedback about the proposal before finalizing it and has opened a public comment period that will last until Dec. 17.

EPA has scheduled a public forum on the proposed agreement for Nov. 5 at Saginaw Valley State University’s Curtiss Hall at 7pm.

The agency has also funded a review of the proposal by a third party environmental consultant selected by the Lone Tree Council — Dr. Peter L. DeFur, president of Environmental Stewardship Concepts, an environmental consulting firm that specializes in working with citizen groups focused on dioxin and PCB contamination.

The proposed agreement involves hundreds of pages of information.

DeFur has established a website where he will post his review of the proposed deal between the government agencies and Dow.

In a summary of the agreement, EPA said: “Cleanup options, including sediment disposal locations, cleanup technologies such as dredging, capping, etc., and relocation, [and] Cleanup levels were not part of this settlement. …These items will be considered later in an open and transparent public process.”

EPA has stated that it expected the cleanup process to extend through 2018.

Dioxin, an intensely toxic byproduct of the chemical manufacturing process, is among the most dangerous of the many chemicals that have polluted the watershed downstream from Dow’s Midland facility.

The dioxin contamination zone stretches 52 miles from Dow’s Midland complex, through the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and into Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. It includes hundreds of residential properties, farm fields, municipal parks and the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge. The state has issued warnings against eating of fish or game from the dioxin zone and residents of the Tittabawassee floodplain have been warned by the state to avoid contact with the soil around their homes and to wear protective masks while doing yard work.

The presence of dioxin in the watershed has been known since the 1970s, and the contamination is migrating into the Great Lakes system, but cleanup so far has been mostly limited to the removal of a few hot spots, stabilization of pollution river banks, and vacuuming and landscaping around homes in the contaminated floodplain.

Dow has also spent millions on philanthropy, political contributions, lobbying, and studies by scientists at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

Consumers Energy Karn Weadock coal plant (Photo courtesy of Hampton Township)

A coalition of environmental groups is asking state and federal regulators to take a careful look at the potential wetlands impact of a coal-fired power plant planned by Consumers Energy along Saginaw Bay.

Consumers Energy has proposed building a new 930 megawatt power plant at its Karn Weadock generating complex in Bay County.

Company spokeswoman Mary Gust told Michigan Messenger that Consumers Energy worked with three different consultants to determine that there are less that seven acres of wetlands on this 500 acre site, and filed a permit application with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Land and Water Management Division on Sept. 29 seeking approval of development plans.

On Oct. 14, DEQ notified Consumers Energy that it considered the application incomplete.

“There are insufficient data in the application to demonstrate that the site is effectively drained and that wetland hydrology is absent,” DEQ stated.

In an interview DEQ spokesman Bob McCann said that the agency believes that there is some level of wetlands at the site, which is tilled farmland, and DEQ wants more information about how much pumping had been done to keep the area dry.

Environmental groups argue that documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that in pre-application arguments the company has been negotiating with regulators over what portion of the planned development site should be considered regulated wetlands. Because the proposed building site borders Lake Huron and the Saginaw River, they say, the DEQ and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — which has jurisdiction over navigable waters and adjacent wetlands — likely have jurisdiction over far more than the few acres identified by the power company.

Some are wary of environmental assessments by the company.

“They’ve known about their ash landfills leaking into Saginaw Bay since 1982 and are only now dealing with them,“ Lone Tree Council Chairman Terry Miller said in a statement. “Now, when they realize the property they’ve chosen to build on might be regulated wetlands, they are using legal smoke and mirrors to argue against its protection.”

A group of environmental organizations — the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Law and Policy Center, Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, Lone Tree Council, Midland CARES, and Sierra Club — sent a letter to the DEQ and the Army Corps asking that regulators “thoroughly and independently” review the potential impact of the project on wetlands which provide habitat and flood control and filter pollutants.

State regulation of wetlands has come under increasing political pressure this year.

In her February State of the State address, Gov. Jennifer Granholm proposed handing the DEQ’s wetland permitting program over to the federal government, and also announced an executive order requiring that coal plants receive enhanced environmental review.

The timing of these moves struck some as meaningful.

“It suggests to me that there is the potential that some trading is going on here,” former DEQ director Russ Harding told Michigan Messenger earlier this year.

Harding, who as director of the Property Rights Network at the Mackinac Center supported the ultimately unsuccessful move to end Michigan’s wetland permitting program said that he believes Consumers Energy would have an easier time obtaining necessary permits if the matter was handled exclusively by the Army Corps. He said he feels that an anti-coal bias could prejudice DEQ consideration of the wetland permit.

Consumers Energy is also waiting on a DEQ air permit for the proposed coal plant, and it’s not clear that this permit will be granted. The governor has ordered DEQ to consider whether proposed coal plants are the most prudent and feasible way to meet the state’s energy needs which are declining. A Michigan Public Service Commission analysis prepared for the DEQ last month stated that Consumers Energy had not demonstrated that the proposed plant is needed.

As we’ve reported previously, the EPA took over negotiations with Dow from the state of Michigan over dioxin cleanup. Those negotiations are now completed and an announcement of the resulting plans is expected to be released soon.

EPA Photo of Saginaw River dredging.

The people of the dioxin-contaminated Saginaw Bay watershed need objective, scientific information about dioxin now, she said in a telephone interview: “This report has so much information that would be so valuable to the state of Michigan. Here you have a state that has a mammoth problem and needs to figure out what to do.”

The EPA’s draft assessment of dioxin states that there is no safe level for dioxin exposure and that people are already being put at increased risk for cancer by background levels of the chemical.

Chemical companies, such as Dow, have lobbied against the release of this report which could mean new rules for how foods are labeled and how much cleanup is required at dioxin contaminated sites around the country.

The 50-mile stretch of contamination that extends from Dow Chemical‘s Midland plant into Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay is likely the largest site of dioxin contamination in the country and comprehensive cleanup would be expensive and complicated. As government agencies debate how to classify dioxin, locals who are living amid the pollution are experiencing elevated cancer rates and some are asking to be relocated to safer areas.

On May 26, the EPA announced that it plans to release the long-delayed report on the human health effects of dioxin by the end of 2010, after a review by the agency’s Science Advisory Board. The announcement came as the agency also declared that it would play an expanded role in pursuing cleanup of Dow’s dioxin contamination.

Some groups expressed cautious optimism about these developments but others — including Gibbs,who is now executive director of the Virginia-based Center for Health Environment and Justice — note that the EPA plan for the health assessment includes caveats that could result in additional and lengthy delays.

The final sentence in the EPA announcement states: “The release date of the final dioxin human health and exposure assessment is dependent on the scope and complexity of the revisions that will need to be made to the 2003 draft assessment based on the contents of the final response to comments report.”

Gibbs said that the additional review was ordered by former President George W. Bush during the last weeks of his administration, and that the chemical industry has successfully lobbied for repeated reviews in order to delay the reports release.

Bush would’ve continued to delay this report for decades, she said, and it’s too soon to tell if the Obama administration is serious about changing course.

“Bottom line is [the additional review] is not needed at all,” she said, “The questions that SAB is being asked to respond to are not science questions.”

Among the issues the board will review, Gibbs said, is whether dioxin is a carcinogen.

“That is silly because it has already been defined as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer,” she said.

The U.S. Health and Human Services’ National Toxicology Program also classifies dioxin as a carcinogen.

Another question that will be revisited by the panel, she said, is whether there is a safe level of dioxin exposure.

“Industry wants some level of threshold,” Gibbs said, but the EPA’s draft report states that there is no safe level for exposure to dioxin and indicates that for most people the major source of exposure to dioxin is through foods, especially fish, meat and dairy products.

“Dioxin accumulates in your fat cells,” she said, “and it stays there for 7 ½ years.”

Though there have been some advances in in limiting industrial emissions of dioxin from paper mills and other source Gibbs said, people such as those in the Saginaw region who are exposed both through the environment and through their diet need the government to begin to act to minimize the health risks they face.

The EPA’s dioxin health assessment could mean stricter standards for dioxin cleanup.

The absence of authoritative information on dioxin has been a factor in recent environmental battles.

In 2006, Environment Michigan and the Lone Tree Council sued to block the construction of an unlined disposal facility for dioxin-contaminated dredged materials from the Saginaw River. Among their concerns was that dust from the sediments could endanger nearby residents and that flooding could cause the toxin to spread over land. In federal District Court, the groups tried to present information about the toxicity of dioxin by presenting the EPA’s draft assessment. The judge ruled against them and dismissed the EPA’s draft report as evidence, pointing out that it had not been cleared for official release.