Posted on November 20, 2018
A century’s worth of bad environmental practices by local industries is slated for dredging out of the “Old Channel” around Zug Island, in a more than $50-million federal project to improve long-standing pollution problems on the Rouge River.
Arising from the murk with potentially health-harming, ecology-wrecking pollution will be eight or so cars, mysteriously sunk in the 15- to 26-foot depths of the channel.
“Who knows? Maybe we’ll find Hoffa finally,” quipped Steve Check, project manager for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, referring to Jimmy Hoffa, the long-missing and presumed murdered former Teamsters president.
The Old Channel wraps around Zug Island, with its counterclockwise flows entering the main channel of the Lower Rouge River — a reversal of its natural flows created when Henry Ford in the early 1900s expanded a shipping canal to the Detroit River to feed his vast Rouge Plant.
Dozens of industries operated in the area from the 1800s — iron and steel mills, coking, tar and paper manufacturing, along with heavy shipping and train traffic to supply the factories’ resource needs. Those operations continued for generations at a time when there was little concern about — let alone regulation of — industry environmental practices.
“At one point, there were about 82 million gallons of industrial waste per day going through that channel” and out in the Rouge and Detroit rivers, untreated, said Rose Ellison, project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“That was in the day that these river channels were deemed an acceptable way to get these wastes off the land and away from people.”
The main contaminants of concern polluting the channel and its sediments are poly aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH, which are potentially cancer-causing. The primary sources were years of operation by the Detroit Tar and Detroit Coke plants. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial chemical, are also present.
“There are other contaminants there, but (PAH) are the main one,” Ellison said. “If we go after the PAH, we’re going to get many of the other contaminants as well.”
Channel bank stabilization work is underway now, with the dredging expected to be completed by summer 2020.
So, where’d those cars come from? Were they abandoned there? Ditched stolen cars? Or worse? Nobody involved with the cleanup project is sure. They were discovered on the channel bottom via side-scan sonar as the project area was evaluated, Ellison said.
“When we take them out, we’re going to have to call the police,” Ellison said. “They’ll get the VIN numbers and figure out why they ended up there.”
Once cleared by the police, the cars and other large debris will be moved to appropriate landfills or scrapyards, Check said.
“There’s all kinds of stuff down there — telephone poles, giant sections of concrete from old foundations,” he said.
“An old boat, an old freighter anchor,” Ellison added.Honeywell Inc., which now owns the Detroit Coke property, is voluntarily contributing more than $20 million to the Old Channel dredging work through the Great Lakes Legacy Act, a 2002 federal law allowing the EPA to partner with private entities to address Areas of Concern, designated locations around the Great Lakes with significant, impactful environmental degradation. Thirty-one Areas of Concern have been designated around the five Great Lakes, with four areas since delisted because of restoration work.
The collaboration has been in the works since 2010, planning and preparing for the work that’s now begun.
“Honeywell is one of many responsible parties that had former manufacturing operations along the Old Channel of the Rouge River,” company spokeswoman Victoria Streitfeld said in an email to the Free Press.
The partnership program with the EPA “allows for a streamlined and efficient approach to federal cleanups,” she said, and on the Old Channel will help “protect the watershed, restore wetlands and habitat, and remove obstacles to economic growth.”
It’s a trail-setting example for further remediation, said Marie McCormick, executive director of the nonprofit Friends of the Rouge River.
“I think this will set precedent for other public-private partnerships that will help improve water quality in the Rouge River, going upstream now from the Old Channel, especially with some of the industrial, potential corporate partners that are along that stretch,” she said.
A contractor for Honeywell is currently installing sheet piling along the north bank of the Rouge River, in anticipation of dredging more than 70,000 cubic yards of channel sediment beginning next spring — more than 3,000 feet of seawall, sunk to about 95 feet into the ground.
The piling will prevent the channel’s banks from collapsing as the work is done, Check said.
“You can’t just pull that stuff out without the bank destabilizing and going into the river,” Check said.
More than three-quarters of a mile of the Old Channel bottom will be dredged — carefully, as the process could stir up a century’s worth of toxins and reintroduce them to the Rouge and Detroit rivers.
Silt curtains will be placed around the area where the dredging is occurring, with sediment monitors upstream, downstream and midstream, Ellison said. Alarms will go off if the sediment levels rise to concerning levels, “and we’ll have to stop and evaluate what we’re doing,” she said.
Areas of the channel bottom where it’s determined sediments shouldn’t be dredged will instead be capped with gravel-like materials designed to better contain the contaminants and improve habitat for fish and smaller aquatic organisms.
“We’ll try to use materials that will be amenable to fish-spawning — cleaner sediment,” Ellison said. “It won’t be the sort of gooey sediment that’s probably there now.”
Many of the potentially health-harming pollutants in the sediments can bio-accumulate, going from small creatures living in the channel bottom mud into the small fish that eat those creatures, to the medium-sized fish that eat the small fish, and so on, the contaminants being exponentially magnified up the food chain.
“We want a cleaner environment, so the base of the food chain is clean so everything from there is clean as well,” Ellison said.
The agencies hope to have the project completed in 2020.
Why spend so much money cleaning up a highly industrialized area that the public may not want to frequent, anyway?
“The more we do these cleanups of (Areas of Concern), we’re seeing more and more positives, in addition to improving public health and the environment,” said Chris Korleski, director of the EPA’s Great Lakes National Program Office.
“You’re taking areas where fish are questionable and trying to bring them back to where they are cleaner, the habitats are more natural. We’re beginning to really see a potential impact from a community restoration perspective and an economic restoration perspective.”
Much was made of when the first beaver seen on the Detroit River in 75 years was spied in 2008. Another beaver was spotted in the Old Channel the next year, Ellison said. Now, beavers are almost a regular occurrence around the area. That’s why cleanup efforts, even near Zug Island, are important, she said.
“It’s an industrial area, but you give nature a foothold in there, and Mother Nature will take care of the rest,” she said.
Source: Detroit Free Press
