High on a bluff above Lake Michigan, Waukegan Mayor Haig Paravonian plans a Walkway of the Stars, a row of statues honoring the ”stars” of Waukegan`s past: Ray Bradbury, Jack Benny, Otto Graham and Jerry Auerbach.
Ironically, Craig Colten, associate curator of geography for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and an industrial pollution expert, also uses stars to point to Waukegan`s history, but his stars are markings on a map of the city`s industries from 1885-1929. Each of Colten`s stars points to a hazardous material handling site, and there are 14 of them along the city`s four miles of Lake Michigan shoreline.
Colten`s stars point to the sins of Waukegan`s past, including the old tannery, steel mill, coke plant and paint factory whose workers used arsenic and other dangerous chemicals in their manufacturing processes, then dumped the residue onto the ground or into streams feeding into Lake Michigan.
Waukegan`s present industries, however, are also not pollution-free. The Toxicheck Co. of Bloomfield Hills, Mich. is an environmental information company that uses such high-tech tools as database searches and computer-generated mapping to locate environmental liabilities.
Toxicheck`s report of Waukegan in 1992 is also dotted with symbols pointing to hazardous conditions. LUST (leaking underground storage tank) is the unseen enemy of environmental agencies. Each LUST of chemicals, wastes or petroleum products can take months, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, to remove and clean up. According to Toxicheck, five lakefront companies still in operation in Waukegan now have LUST conditions, which will require extensive soil and groundwater testing.
Environmental problems, both past and present, are so visible that Stephen Lapish, the chairman of the Waukegan Harbor Citizens Advisory Group
(CAG), has arranged bus tours for anyone interested, to point out the hazardous-waste highlights. CAG was set up at the behest of the Illinois EPA and is made up of various government agencies, businesses and environmental groups who are working on a remedial action plan.
The first stop on the CAG tour is the 300-acre Manville Corp. property, just south of Illinois Beach State Park. ”See those hills over there.”
Lapish points to long rises in the earth that stretch from the factory buildings almost to the shoreline. ”That`s five feet of clay and dirt, covering up asbestos left over from the manufacture of roofing materials, pipes and insulating products when the plant was called Johns Manville. And that`s 130 acres of prime lakefront land we`ll never walk on again.”
According to federal EPA records, Johns Manville personnel began tossing asbestos and other manufacturing residue onto the same disposal area in 1922. Water runoff from the land, which was once a marsh, led directly into Lake Michigan. In the early 1980s, when the EPA began citing the country`s worst environmental offenders for the national priorities list of Superfund cleanup sites, Johns Manville was included.
At first, Johns Manville lawyers contested the listing, but the company later entered into a consent degree with the government and cleaned up the property by sealing the waste in clay.
Lapish next points to a wooded area at what was the intersection of Sand and Water Streets. ”Over there, behind that fence, was where the Greiss Pfleiger Tannery operated before it burned to the ground. There are still piles of chemically treated hides just beyond the fence.”
The next stop on Lapish`s tour, near the intersection of Pershing and Dahringer Roads, is what he calls ”the famous Waukegan Tar Pit.” The pit, which is on the site of an old coke plant, was the dumping ground for the tars and other dangerous substances, such as benzene, volatile organic compounds and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons, according to the EPA, which were left over when coal was turned into coke for nearby steel mills.
The EPA has required the present pit owners, the North Shore Gas Co., the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway and the North Shore Sanitary District, to fence the area, and a $500,000 cleanup is under way.
A far more costly environmental cleanup also is going on a few blocks to the south where the Outboard Marine Corp., 200 Seahorse Drive, is spending $20 million to rid its property and the adjacent portion of Waukegan Harbor of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Lapish looks out over the water at bright yellow plastic curtains that extend far beneath the lake`s surface to keep the silt from contaminated soils from floating off into the rest of the harbor.
”You know,” he says. ”OMC has been tagged as the villain in the pollution of Waukegan Harbor, but as far as I`m concerned, they`re the only really responsible company here. They`re spending a ton of their own money on this cleanup, and they`ve been very willing to keep us informed along the way.”
PCBs were not considered hazardous when OMC began using a hydraulic fluid containing them in 1961. The hydraulic fluid, manufactured by the Monsanto Chemical Co., was, in fact, used by thousands of companies until the late 1960s, when scientists discovered that PCBs can be toxic to humans and federal agencies banned their use. The marine engine company switched to another type of hydraulic fluid and thought its problems were over.
But in 1976, federal EPA inspectors found PCB concentrations in Waukegan Harbor and traced them to an OMC drainage pipe. When the first Superfund list of national priority cleanups was published in 1982, OMC joined its neighbor, Johns Manville, as one of the 260 most contaminated sites in the six-state Midwest region. OMC protested and began eight expensive years of litigation before signing a consent decree with the federal EPA in 1988, agreeing to pay for an agency-designed cleanup.
OMC sued Monsanto, but after a lengthy period dismissed its suit without prejudice, meaning OMC could go back into court against Monsanto at a later date.
According to John Perrecone, community relations coordinator for Region 5 of the federal EPA, the entire cleanup should be completed by the summer of 1993. That time period of 11 years from discovery to remediation of a contaminated industrial property is about average, according to David Ullrich, director of the Waste Management Division of the EPA`s Region 5 office.
Lapish says CAG and state and federal EPA officials estimate that it could take them two or three more years to draw up a remedial action plan for the four-mile area and several additional years to figure out how to design and fund the cleanups.
Waukegan city officials, however, do not want to wait that long and are trying to attract developers who will transform the contaminated land into sites for upscale condos, hotels and private marinas. ”They don`t want to even begin the discovery process,” complains a former city worker who does not want to be named, ”because they`re afraid it will draw out their lakefront development program.”
The last stop on Lapish`s tour is the south end of Waukegan`s lakefront, where a neat new marina and a tiny public beach are located near factories and abandoned industrial sites. On the southernmost 53 acres, Waukegan Public Works Department trucks are hauling rubble away from the property most recently chosen for development by Mayor Paravonian and his director of economic development, Wes Dunski.
Lapish notes that the land itself certainly looks better now that the city has knocked down several old factories and deteriorating houses, ”but we still don`t know what`s beneath the soil and how much of what`s there might eventually make its way into Lake Michigan.”
The city and the landowners, the Bank of Waukegan and the Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, presumably do know what`s there, because they have paid for soil borings, tests that analyze samples of dirt for contaminants. They have not released the results of those tests.
Andrew Armstrong, director of real estate for the EJ&E, Joliet, said that his company had made a thorough environmental investigation of the property, but he feels that information is ”between the city and the railroad. Illinois` Responsible Property Transfer Act mandates that the seller of a piece of commercial property reveal environmental hazards to the buyer.”
The railroad, the bank and the city all have said they would reveal all environmental consequences to any potential developer.
Janet Causey, the federal EPA`s state project officer for the Waukegan area, acknowledges that she is frustrated that those parties are keeping contamination information to themselves. ”If this were information the federal government had, we would be required by law to pass it on. It`s too bad the same laws don`t apply to private property owners.”
Nevertheless, Causey says she, too, would like to some day see hotels and housing along Waukegan`s lakefront. ”But there is a long cleanup procedure we must go through before development is even an option.”
The EPA cannot force cleanup of the land without concrete evidence that there is an environmental problem on the site.
But the city`s development plans likely would be foiled anyway, because lending insitutions will not loan money for purchase of land for development if the land hasn`t been given a clean bill of health by an environmental assessment firm. That`s because if the developer would default on the loan, federal law lays part of the responsibility for cleanup of polluted sites with the lending institution.
Lapish also dreams of a day when the lakefront is reclaimed for public use. He stands near the EJ&E freight tracks and looks across piles of rubble that the city workers have set on fire. Just beyond the smoke, Lake Michigan sparkles under a springtime sun. ”Look how close the lake is,” he says, then asks, ”But would you buy this land?”
