Echo

EPA taps 21 Great Lakes schools for air tests

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By Thomas Morrisey
Capital News Service

Federal and state officials are scrutinizing 21 Great Lakes-area schools as part of a nationwide check on whether bad air threatens the health of elementary students. There are 62 schools nationwide that will be monitored for 60 days as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiative. An EPA scientist said the program will help determine if the pupils are at risk and guide future testing for potential dangers. “It’s really hard for us to know. We couldn’t make a list of the worst 60 schools if we wanted to because we just don’t have that information,” said Jaime Wagner, an environmental scientist with the EPA’s regional office in Chicago.

Echo

Great Lakes fish eaters less contaminated than a decade ago

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Anglers who ate Great Lakes fish have 33 percent fewer PCBs and 43 percent less DDT in their bodies than they did a decade ago, largely because they changed their diet and switched to less contaminated fish, according to a study by Wisconsin researchers. The scientists compared blood drawn from people in 1994-1995 with blood from the same people drawn roughly nine years later. Most of the 293 men and women tested were sports fishers and boat captains who consumed large amounts of Great Lakes fish. One reason for the decline “is that your body excretes these chemicals over time as they slowly get metabolized,” said Lynda Knobeloch, study leader and senior toxicologist at the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. “The other is that exposure levels are much, much lower than what they were 30 years ago.”

Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs—industrial compounds used largely to insulate electrical transformers—and the pesticide DDT were banned in the United States in the 1970s.

Echo

Toxaphene – A stubborn pollutant persists

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Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
April 23, 2009

The largest, deepest and coldest Great Lake holds another distinction, – it has the highest levels of toxaphene found in the region and possibly anywhere in the world. Since federal bans on persistent pollutants in the 1970s and 80s, most chemical concentrations have declined in the Great Lakes. Some Great Lakes toxicologists say the same is true of toxaphene. But toxaphene in Lake Superior has increased by 25 percent since its ban in 1990, according to Mel Visser, a former environmental health safety officer and author of Cold, Clear and Deadly, a book that details the legacy of Great Lakes contaminants. The insecticide has been shown to damage the immune system, nervous system, lungs and cause cancer.

Echo

Great Lakes or great sink? Pollutants produced abroad and still circulating at home threaten water quality

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By Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo 4/22/09
Indian cement plants, Russian incinerators and Chinese farms send large amounts of persistent pollutants to the Great Lakes. The continued expulsion of these toxins pose serious environmental and health problems for all countries, including those who have long since banned these chemicals, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Climate change may further complicate the issue. As countries like China develop, they are not only becoming the largest emitters of carbon dioxide but of persistent organic pollutants or POPs, according to the International POPs Elimination Network. These chemicals drift into the atmosphere or fall to the surface to evaporate.

Echo

An ill wind blows no good

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Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo 4/21/09
As contaminated sediment is cleaned up in the Great Lakes, persistent pollutants continue to blow in, threatening again to poison soil and harm human health. That has some experts questioning if it’s worthwhile to spend money to remove toxic sediments if they will once more become contaminated in a matter of years. “We have been very hung up on cleaning the watershed because we believed it was the source of contamination in the lake, but in recent decades contamination has come through the air,” said Mel Visser, former vice president of environmental health safety at Upjohn Pharmaceutical in Michigan and author of Cold, Clear, and Deadly: Unraveling a Toxic Legacy. “Even if you cleaned all the lakes tomorrow you wouldn’t do anything to the water because the concentration of these chemicals is controlled by the amount in the air,” said Visser, whose book describes current sources of chemicals that continue to pollute the Great Lakes’ air, food supply and water. The Great Lakes Legacy Act signed in 2002, provides funding to clean up Great Lakes sediments.

Energy

Fermi 2 plant closed after vibrations were detected

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(MI) The News-Herald – DTE Energy shut down its Fermi 2 reactor plant in Monroe County on March 28 after an unexpected vibration in plant equipment was detected. John Austerberry, spokesman for DTE, said the nuclear power plant was scheduled to be shut down at 3 a.m. that day for a refuel outage plan. The vibration in the bearings for the turbine was noted at 1:48 a.m., so operators decided to shut the plant down to protect the equipment, Austerberry said. “It was not a safety concern,” he said, adding that the operators responded appropriately. More

Echo

Michigan bill preserves hunting access; seeks to distinguish land protections for warblers from those of turkeys

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By Joe Vaillancourt
Capital News Service

While hunting around 25 years ago, Dennis Fijalkowski used a turkey call on a late April morning in Oscoda County. A turkey called back–but he couldn’t shoot because it hid behind a sign that said Kirtland’s warbler, the rarest bird in Michigan, was known to inhabit the area so all hunting was prohibited. Frustrated, Fijalkowski was forced to skip the turkey, although warblers aren’t there that time of year. Things may soon change for hunters involved in similar scenarios. A resurrected bill would require the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to keep state land open for hunting seasons unless there are legitimate concerns for the environment or hunter.

Echo

Wisconsin county overcomes air pollution imports to avoid regulation

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By Julia Cechvala
Great Lakes Echo

For the past six years the Dane County Clean Air Coalition has promoted voluntary efforts to reduce air pollution. In February they paid off when the coalition announced that the county meets the federal standards for fine particle pollution. This means that Dane, along with Brown and Columbia counties, escaped regulations that the Environmental Protection Agency can impose on “non-attainment areas.”

Plenty of air quality challenges have confronted Dane County, including some outside the county’s control. Emissions as far away as Texas or Ohio affect Wisconsin’s air, according to Larry Bruss, head of regional pollution issues for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. Industrial farms, factories and power plants emit pollutants that combine to form ground level ozone and fine particle pollution.

Water

Potential water raids unite Great Lakes states; adequacy of protection questioned

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Matthew Cimitile

Once seen as a region of endless water, the Great Lakes watershed is under stress thanks to inadequate water management, unrestrained growth and other pressures. Climate change stands only to make conditions worse, experts say, as increasingly thirsty neighbors look for additional water and changing weather harms quality and supply. Out of such gloom, however, has emerged what analysts describe as a most significant feat: Earlier this year, after almost a decade of talks, local and state leaders throughout the Great Lakes set aside differences and agreed to coordinate the protection of this vast but finite resource. The Great Lakes Compact, signed into law in October, controls transportation of Great Lakes water to parched areas outside the region. Thrust for this regional resolution came via fears of a 1998 plan by a Canadian firm to transport tankers of Lake Superior water to arid parts of Asia.

Echo

Three Great Lake states among a dozen receiving $6 billion in stimulus cleanup funds

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By Matthew Cimitile, cimitile@msu.edu
Great Lakes Echo
Ohio, New York and Illinois are among a dozen states just awarded funds from the federal Department of Energy for environmental clean up. The three Great Lakes states along with nine others are getting $6 billion in new funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The investment is expected to create thousands of jobs, federal officials announced Tuesday. Funding will speed the cleanup of soil and groundwater, help transport and dispose of waste and clean and demolish former weapons facilities. “These investments will put Americans to work while cleaning up contamination from the cold war era,” Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a news release.