Posted on March 7, 2022
This week, crews began clearing trees from Verburg Park in Kalamazoo, which has been closed in preparation for a major contamination cleanup in the Kalamazoo River.
In April, crews will begin digging sediment contaminated with PCBs out of the river near downtown — a cleanup project that, when finished, will bring the waterway that much closer to a day when fish there are safe to catch and keep.
The project, which is being overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was supposed to begin last year. But organizers had to reconfigure the cleanup after an estimated 369,000 cubic yards of additional sediment flooded the contaminated river stretch from an upstream dam that unexpectedly drained its 1,000-acre reservoir.
The unwelcome influx has significantly altered parts of the river. It has smothered habitat and impended public access by creating, in some areas, mudflats the size of football fields from which people have needed rescue.
It has also forced added costs onto the long-awaited cleanup project though efforts to, among other things, re-map the riverbed to account for the changes.
“It’s a hindrance that nobody had prepared for,” said Rick Kimble, spokesman for Georgia-Pacific, one of two major paper companies paying to remove PCB contamination that’s plagued the river since the late 1950s.
Kimble said the influx of sediment “easily added” $10 million to the total estimated cost of the cleanup, which he characterized as a fluid number while work progresses.
The silty gunk started flowing out of Morrow Lake in late 2019 after a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation (OPG) that owns Morrow Dam in Comstock Township drained its impoundment in a surprise move prompted by an “emergency” need to repair spillway gates on a dam acquired in 2017.
This week, the situation finally resulted in a lawsuit. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued two OPG subsidiaries on Tuesday, March 1; asking a judge to order the “environmental disaster” be cleaned up and force OPG subsidiaries Eagle Creek Renewable Energy of Delaware and STS Hydropower of Michigan to pay natural resource damages.
The move was welcomed by local anglers and river advocates, who have watched, flabbergasted, as the sediment influx has ruined their fishing grounds while the companies responsible have done little to fix the mess they caused in the river.
Advocates are eager to see PCBs dug out of the river, which featured decent smallmouth bass catch-and-release fishing before reservoir sediment coated the river bottom and woody areas where fish spawn and eat.
“It would be nice to have a river that you could technically eat fish out of again,” said Ryan Baker, president of the Kalamazoo River Alliance nonprofit.
Baker said the Alliance, which formed around the sediment issue, wants to expand its focus into fish habitat restoration. However, the state of the river has made fundraising tough.
Overall PCB cleanup will take several years and involve dredging at multiple hotspots between Kalamazoo and Parchment. Meanwhile, the Morrow Lake sediment influx continues to work its way downstream into communities like Plainwell, Otsego and Allegan.
“Whatever you do now in this area is just going to get covered in sediment,” Baker said. “It’s a losing battle at this point.”
In Kalamazoo, getting dredging equipment to remove PCBs from the river in the city itself has been a long process that dates back to 1990, when the Allied Paper/Portage Creek/Kalamazoo River Superfund site was initially added to the EPA National Priorities list.
The pollutants came from paper mills that recycled carbonless copy paper made with PCBs and discharged waste to the river. The contaminants settled out over the years in areas of slower moving water. The expansive remedial site stretches all the way to Lake Michigan, about 80 miles downstream.
Most of the cleanup work to date has been in several river-adjacent landfills and downstream communities like Plainwell and Otsego. Risk assessments, investigations, feasibility studies and various planning decisions have broken the project into numerous sections. Design work for cleaning the urbanized stretch between Morrow Dam and Plainwell began in 2017 and the project was broken into smaller pieces in 2020.
The most recent sediment removal took place in late 2020, when PCBs were dug from a side channel at the old Crown Vantage landfill on the edge of Parchment.
The cleanup starting this spring is focused on a stretch between Gull Street and Paterson Street that includes a cove area with a boat launch at Verburg Park, which, despite health warnings, is popular with some neighborhood fishermen.
The removal work is expected to escalate this summer and will involve mechanical dredging with heavy equipment on barges digging sediment from the park cove and both riverbanks.
It should be finished by next spring, according to EPA project managers. However, dredging will continue both up and downstream next year and into 2024 as the project migrates to lingering PCB hotspots in sections stretching downstream past the city wastewater plant into Parchment, and upstream around Mayors Riverfront Park.
The PCB cleanup around Mayors Riverfront Park isn’t expected to begin until 2025, said Jim Saric, EPA project manager.
“That hotspot is deeper,” Saric said. “It’s a large hotspot and some of that material is the center of the channel, but it’s buried at depth. We’re not sure to best to approach that one.”
Saric said PCB concentrations in the remedial area sediments average around 50 parts-per-million (ppm). They are generally in the top three to four feet of sediment, although some contamination does go deeper than six feet. The goal is to remove enough PCBs to reach average concentrations around 0.33-ppm in the river mud.
Saric estimated that the Morrow sediment influx has added another two to four feet on top of what Georgia-Pacific and International Paper had planned to remove.
All sediment dug from the river during PCB removals will be processed as hazardous waste and sent to a landfill after being dried in riverside staging areas.
“Not only does that mean Georgia-Pacific and International Paper have to excavate and dispose of that material, which increases the volume and costs, but now we have a new surface layer. You have to recalibrate how deep to dredge, where the various zones are. It complicated that,” Saric said.
“It added more volume of material to deal with.”
Because Verburg Park and the adjacent Kalamazoo River Valley Trail will be closed while dredging is underway, the companies agreed to dredge Morrow sediment out a boat launch at Mayors Riverfront Park so there’s still an access point.
Kimble said Georgia-Pacific asked the Morrow Dam owners if they would assist the project and remove that material to enable river access. The answer was no.
“We will dredge that out and get that ramp usable,” he said.
Though a public relations firm, Eagle Creek issued a statement that spared no pity for the PCB cleanup or the difficulties the sediment influx has created for river access — which, beyond recreational use, is important for law enforcement in emergency situations.
