Legislation signed by President Bush Wednesday authorized $50 million a year for the next five years to clean up contaminated sediment across the Great Lakes region, pollution left over from industrialization.
Called the Great Lakes Legacy Act, the money will be parceled out to municipalities, states and American Indian tribes to remediate and monitor longtime toxic hot spots in the Great Lakes basin.
The total of $250 million isn’t nearly enough to restore the 42 U.S. and Canadian sites designated as “areas of concern.” But environmental groups called it a “down payment” and a much needed first step. In the last three years, more than 1.3 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment have been purged on the U.S. side, but the challenge is so great that no site is fully complete, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s a multi-billion-dollar problem, but we have to start somewhere,” said Andy Buschbaum, Director of the Great Lakes Office for the National Wildlife Federation. “In an era of budget constraints, $250 million is welcome.”
Since the turn of the last century, major steel, auto and paper industries in Great Lakes cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee dumped untreated waste into the Great Lakes. Though the dumping has largely stopped and stringent laws are now in place, the problems remain.
Making things worse is the slow outflow rate of the Great Lakes: Lake Superior retains water for 173 years while Lake Michigan keeps its water for 62 years. Pollutants discharged into the Great Lakes settled into sediment in the bottom and can be dangerous when disturbed years later.
“We don’t automatically assume that because sediment has some nasty stuff it needs to be dredged or disturbed … There are different treatments for each site,” said George Kuper, president and CEO of the Great Lakes Industries who worked on the legislation with groups like the Sierra Club and the Lake Michigan Federation. “We want to work on the places that are causing the most problems, not the ones that just have a lot of [toxic sediment] in one place. This legislation lets us do that.”
