Sunday, August 14, 2005

Worries grow over toxins raining down

Wind carries pollutants over thousands of miles

By Brad Heath / The Detroit News

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SARNIA, Ontario -- Over the years, the chemical plants that squat in gray rows along the river here have spilled thousands of pounds of industrial poisons into the water, roiling their neighbors on both sides of the border. But even more troubling, some environmentalists say, are the toxins that escape invisibly into the air.

Industry in the Great Lakes Basin released 100,000 tons of toxic chemicals into the air and water in 2002, an analysis of the most recent pollution data available from the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation shows. The true figure is almost certainly far higher because the commission's records include only a fraction of U.S. and Canadian industries.

Toxic industrial pollution in the Great Lakes has dropped sharply in the 30 years since governments on both sides of the Lakes tightened their pollution rules. Most estimates suggest levels are still declining. But environmentalists say they remain unacceptably high.

"You have to ask, what is that water for? Is it a hazardous waste dump or is it for people who live in this area?" said Derek Coronado, the research and policy director for the Citizens Environment Alliance, based in Windsor, Ontario.

Most of the toxins are released into the air from the jutting smokestacks of factories and power plants. Indeed, the U.S. and Canadian governments have made so much progress closing off the pipes that once dumped pollution straight into the water that environmentalists say the biggest industrial threat to the lakes is now what rains down from the air.

Most vexing has been mercury, a potent toxin that can cripple the nervous system and continues to poison fish in the Great Lakes. The U.S. put strict limits on how much mercury can be dumped into the water as part of the 1972 Clean Water Act, but thousands of pounds still go up the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants in the region.

Even more drifts over the lakes from plants in China and other countries because mercury released into the air can be carried thousands of miles by the wind before it falls back to land. Studies suggest this kind of airborne transport is now the leading source of mercury in the Great Lakes.

"What we really need to do is reduce the mercury globally if we want to have an effect on this," said Skyles Boyd, the environmental director for DTE Energy.

DTE estimates its coal plants in Michigan -- including a massive plant next to Lake Erie -- release 1,400 pounds of mercury each year. Boyd said the company is doing what it can to reduce those emissions, and little of that mercury touches the lakes.

Others aren't so sure. Plans to erect a new coal-burning plant in Wisconsin, near Lake Michigan, have drawn rebukes from environmental groups and from the attorney general in neighboring Illinois, who argues releases from the plant would taint the lake.

At the same time, pollution pouring directly into the lakes hasn't been entirely cut off. Plants in the basin reported releasing almost 5,800 tons a year, including repeated spills by plants in a section of Sarnia known as "chemical valley" for the dozens of chemical plants clustered in a forest of long smokestacks and huge storage tanks next to the St. Clair River.

"We have people here who will no longer drink from the tap," said Bela Trebics, the head of a citizens group in Wallaceburg, Ontario, a city that draws its drinking water downstream from Sarnia.

In 2003, a plastics company in Sarnia released 650 pounds of cancer-causing vinyl chloride into the St. Clair River. In 2004, a faulty cooling system at an Imperial Oil plant dumped 42,000 gallons of a toxic oil solvent into the river. This year, an enforcement sweep by Ontario's environment ministry found all but one of the area's plants were out of compliance with environmental rules.

A spokeswoman for Imperial Oil, Janet Maaten, said the company is replacing its cooling systems with another type that is less likely to fail. She said other changes at the plant will also reduce the levels of pollution in its regular discharges, which already are within limits set by the Canadian government.

The repeated spills have outraged downstream communities on both sides of the border and prompted calls in the United States for better monitoring of pollution in the river.