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Old 11-16-2017, 08:31 AM
Ike Bana Ike Bana is offline
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Where's Erin Brockovich when you need her?

U.S. Steel dumps more toxic chromium near Lake Michigan

Quote:
The spill wasn't serious enough to merit reporting "and did not pose any danger to water supply or human health," a company spokeswoman said. (WTF????)

In April, fishermen spotted a bigger spill in Burns Waterway, a man-made slip that runs along the west edge of the steel mill and drains into Lake Michigan. They called local television stations, drawing emergency responders from the U.S. EPA's Chicago office who confirmed the plume contained hexavalent chromium, a highly toxic version of the metal made infamous by the movie "Erin Brockovich."
We own a home 15 miles east of the US Steel plant in Portage Indiana. And yesterday we find out (from the Chicago Tribune article) that not only was there a discharge of hexavalent chromium into Lake Michigan in October, but with the discharge in April, a total of a little less than 1000 pounds of Chromium-6 went into the the Burns Waterway, a man-made slip that runs along the west edge of the steel mill and drains directly into Lake Michigan. So we called the Department of Water in Michigan City to ask about the possibility of the material reaching our water supply...nobody there knew anything about it. Then we called IDEM (Indiana Department of Environmental Management), resonsible in Indiana for this sort of thing and guess what...they didn't know anything about it either. Since fucking October, because the local water companies in NW Indiana, the National Park Service which manages the Indiand Dunes National Lakeshore all along the South Shore of Lake Michigan in NW Indiana, and none of the state or federal regulatory agencies responsible for monitoring pollution of the southern tip of Lake Michigan were notified. Because, as a US Steel spokeswoman glibly advised us all...it didn't, in her fucking opinion, pose any danger to the water supply or human health.

Here's one of the more disturbing aspects of this. We have two neighbors in our town who are deeply involved in environmental issues. One is an environmental engineer with over 35 years of experience in the assessment and control of such things, the other a long time employee of the Indiana Department of Environmental Management with an educational specialty in water quality. And what do our two environmental speci@list neighbors say to us in our email correspondence yesterday morning when we suggest that we send something out on the town email tree letting residence know what's going on with this? "Well let's not alarm people with this, it's a small release and shouldn't have any impact in the water quality in the area." So I wrote back..."Tell ya what, I think the people have a right to know what is happening with our water supply and that they are perfectly capable of deciding how alarmed they want to be." I haven't heard back from these two as of this morning.

Anyway...our calls to the Water Department and IDEM got them both on track...IDEM was out with their gear checking the quality of our water supply by lunch time with a specific screening for Chromium-6, and we were relieved to get the report that there was zero reading on it in our supply.

So I get to thinking about Trump's dismantling of the EPA and the activities of his personal fucking rent-boy Scott Pruitt. And then I get to thinking about libertarian assholes like the Koch brothers who believe that the government should be completely out of the protection of the people from the spilling of poisons into our drinking water supply by American business...that a truly free market and the legal system will provide all the protection that we need. And Copenhagen looks even more attractive to me than it did the day before yesterday.

Un-fucking believable. A rusty pipe on the grounds of US Steel that nobody remembers even exists anymore...full of Chromium-6 hanging right over a tributary into one of the most precious bodies of water on earth and dumping poison into it that nobody would know about if it weren't for a couple of fishermen.

Last edited by Ike Bana; 11-16-2017 at 08:36 AM.
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Old 11-16-2017, 08:46 AM
MrPots MrPots is offline
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The way to handle this is to purposely poison the water supplies of the 1%. Only then will they care.

Lets' face it, the 1% have declared war on the people of this country, both economically and environmentally. They've made it clear that the rich and powerful are the only ones who really matter in this country and that everyone else is expendable. They poison us, then cut off our health care. Screw the 1%. Time to fight back.
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Old 11-16-2017, 02:20 PM
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CarlV CarlV is offline
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I would bet the Koch Bros will starting dumping "petcoke" in poor areas of Chicago and Detroit like they were doing before too.
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