Former EPA official denounces Dow’s new deal

Cleanup plans for Michigan dioxin contamination are early test of change at EPA
 By Eartha Jane Melzer, The Michigan Messenger 1/23/09 8:00 AM

Dow and the Tittabawassee River Mary Gade, the former Environmental Protection Agency official who said she was forced from her job last year over her efforts to get the Dow Chemical Co. to clean up dioxin contamination in Michigan, is back in the fight.

A proposed deal that the EPA is now brokering with the company appears even more lax than the one she rejected last year as “insufficient to protect human health,” she told Michigan Messenger.

Observers say that the Obama administration’s attitude toward cleanup of the Great Lakes region’s largest area of dioxin contamination will be an indicator of how serious the Obama EPA is about rolling back industry influence over environmental policies.

Since 1982 state and federal agencies have been debating with each other and with Dow officials over how to deal with a plume of dioxin — an extremely toxic byproduct of the chemical-manufacturing process — that has spread 50 miles down river from Dow’s Midland headquarters, through the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and into the Saginaw Bay.

Though the health and environmental risks associated with dioxin have long been known, little actual cleanup has taken place.

In 2003, after eight years of negotiations between the state of Michigan and Dow, a cleanup framework was finalized using the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, a federal law under which the EPA can designate the state to be the lead agency in pursuing a cleanup. The EPA retains emergency powers under the act and can step in and compel action under some circumstances.

Gade invoked the act’s powers in August 2007, when the most concentrated dioxin pollution ever measured by the EPA was detected in the Saginaw River. Gade demanded, successfully, that Dow conduct a limited emergency cleanup.

A few months later, at Dow’s request, the EPA entered into a new round of closed-door cleanup negotiations with the company, but in January, after two deadline extensions Gade’s office broke off negotiations with Dow, calling the firm’s proposal insufficient to protect human health.

In May Gade stepped down. She said top officials in the Bush administration’s EPA forced her out because of her work on the cleanup.

“I’m surprised if anybody is surprised by this,” then-U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., now President Barack Obama‘s chief of staff, told the Chicago Tribune when asked about Gade’s ousting. “This administration, from Day One, has always chosen polluters over the environment.”

Around the time that Gade left, EPA and state officials began discussion on a new approach to the dioxin cleanup, according to Wendy Carney of the EPA’s Superfund Division.

In a proposal released in early December, EPA said that it was seeking a new agreement for dioxin cleanup arrangement with Dow — a “Superfund Alternative Site” process.

Officials said the new process would involve treating the contaminated area like a Superfund site but not adding it to the National Priorities list as a Superfund site.

EPA officials said that this approach would speed clean-up by sidestepping the bureaucracy involved in designating an area a “Superfund site.”

Critics argue that the Superfund Alternative Site process is advisory rather than regulatory.

They say that the move would protect Dow stockholders from economic fallout associated with owning a Superfund site, but would derail the existing cleanup process and limit public involvement and oversight of the process.

Gade called the effort to initiate a new cleanup plan on a site with an existing RCRA process “highly unusual” and said that EPA policies since the ’80s have recommended pursuing cleanup through an RCRA process whenever possible.

She took the step of traveling to Saginaw to personally question the EPA’s plan at a public meeting where it was presented last week and urged concerned citizens to keep a spotlight on negotiations over dioxin cleanup.

“People need to be insisting that their government officials from Gov. (Jennifer) Granholm to President Obama to the head of DEQ (state Department of Environmental Quality) and EPA do their jobs so they get the protection they deserve,” she said in a telephone interview with Michigan Messenger.

Michelle Hurd Riddick of the Lone Tree Council called the EPA’s move to push a Superfund Alternative Site process for Dow a goodbye present from the Bush administration.

“This opportunity to go behind closed doors was the Bush administration’s parting gift to Dow,” she said.

Last week EPA said it hoped to have the new cleanup deal approved by Dow by Feb. 15.

Lynn Buhl, who replaced Gade as top administrator for Region 5, has submitted her resignation.

Who will replace her and whether there will be another change in tone in the dioxin cleanup negotiations will be closely watched.

EPA officials, off two days for federal holidays, promised comments for this story on Wednesday but did not return phone calls.

http://michiganmessenger.com/12081/former-epa-official-denounces-dow%E2%80%99s-new-deal

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