Superfund No More? And What Happened at St. Louis, Michigan.

In 1995, the tax on the production of chemical and petroleum stopped. This tax was the main source of funding for the Michigan Superfund trust. The Michigan Superfund is a fund that cleans up toxic waste in Michigan and is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA for short. Why is the tax important? This means that the EPA will only work on the worst of the worst of contaminated areas in our environment caused by chemical waste. This is no way to treat a problem like this, but what other choice do they have? They don’t have enough funding to be able to address this large scale problem that is still very much relevant today.

Michigan has a total of 6,600 toxic sites, of which a hundred and eleven are located in Wayne County. Of the 6,600 toxic waste sites, only sixty-five of them are a part of the Michigan Superfund. To specify, a Michigan Superfund sites are “sites that were polluted decades ago and now are eligible for federal funding for cleanup” as said in an MLive article called See a map of where Michigan’s toxic Superfund sites are located. With barely enough funding for the EPA to clean up the sites we have, this means that clean up is slowed to a crawl.

Again, why is it important that it’s taking a longer amount of time to clean up chemical waste? Yes, we all know chemical waste is bad, but a lot of times we underestimate just how severe it is. We tend to forget that there are still waste sites. The longer the waste sites sit, the greater the potential for exposure.

So let me tell you what happens to a human being when exposed to this toxic substance. First of all the sites may be poisonous, explosive, and/or radioactive. It can also cause cancer, birth defects, and damage a person’s chromosomes. Chromosomes are the cells in the body that make up the genes. Despite all the medical problems these toxic sites bring, many of the sites only have the most rudimentary of notification of the danger that lies below the surface.

“Often, there’s just a fence and sparse signage to indicate that something went awry years ago. In other places, like along stretches of the Pine River and Kalamazoo River, there’s little but common sense to keep people away.” said Garret Ellison in his mlive article Without sable funding, Michigan Superfund cleanup creeps along.

This is simply unacceptable. We are supposed to be safe from our own land, not be poisoned by it. The fact that there isn’t nearly enough money for the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up the waste is a waste of our own resources. This should be one of our top priorities. Companies are continuely adding toxic chemicals into our air and land. In 2011 alone, the United States has released about two million tones of these chemicals in our air.

This isn’t the only problem, there are still companies today that are willing to dump their toxic waste illegally. One well known company that has done this is Wal-Mart. In 2013, Wal-Mart plead guilty for dumping hazardous waste. As a result of this they had to pay eighty-one million dollors to the EPA. All this money didn’t only go to Michigan’s Superfund sites, after all the EPA covers all of the United States.

In 2010, St. Louis, Michigan was voted number eighteen on Daily Beast for Most Polluted States. This is specifically for Velsicol Chemical Corporation’s old plant site and what it did to the environment. Now this corporation has a messy history dealing with toxic waste. In 1973, some of the workers mistakenly substituted bags of nutrimaster with flameretardent containing PBB. PBB stands for Polybrominated biphenyl and is a form of fire retardant. These bags of PBB were then given to the Farm Bureau Services who mixed what they thought was the nutrient into cattle feed, this cattle feed was then distributed among Michigan farmers. This ultimately spreed through the food change causing people to consume tainted beef and milk. It took over a year to realize this had happened.

All this was because the Velsicol Chemical Corporation had run out of their Fire-master bags and thought it was a good idea to use Nutri-master bags instead. This had a massive effect on the community as over 388,000 chickens and 34 dairy herds were put under quarantine, six-hundred and twenty-one tons of feed and thirteen thousand tons of cheese and butter were taken away, as well as 1,520,415 (over 1.5 million) animals were killed because of the corporation’s mistake.

That’s just the contaminated livestock and goods, there’s still the people who were hurt by this as well. Some of the animals’ meet had been sold and made into hamburgers as well as their contaminated milk was sold to humans. The PBB caused an increase in breast cancer, men had a higher chance of thyroid problem, and young girls had early menstruation and a high chance of miscarriage as they grew older. This is just some of the repercussions it had on our state. It is still being studied today as the long term effects are still being discovered, but so far it has affected three generations of Michiganders.

This affected our entire state and even today it’s a health problem. At the time this was happening, the Velsicol Chemical Corporation was called Michigan Chemical Corporation and because this incident happened they found that their old name was too damaged to allow them to continue business and therefore renamed themselves Velsicol Chemical Corporation. Even though they had changed their name, the company still had to pay a settlement of 38.5 million. This was no where near enough to clean up the site. The company was also free from liability of anywhere outside their site because it was thought the contaminates could be contained.

In 1982, the corporation poorly tried to fix what they could by tearing down some buildings, burying some others, and using the site instead for toxic burial. To keep the toxic from escaping their site and possible getting into Pine River, the company had built a thick underground wall and a placed a cap over the site. Some time after being built, the company checked on their containment. The cap was leaking, as in toxic waste was getting out. They met with the newly formed Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force and proposed a plan.

The plan would have started during the summer of 1998, but it didn’t go through as payment stopped being funded. You see the company’s parent company at the time, Fruit of the Loom, had filed for bankruptcy in 1999. At the end of the bankruptcy, the parent company sold to another company, but this did not include Velsicol’s toxic site. The site was then left completely alone. Because of this the only person who could clean up the site were the people of St. Louis.

You would think this was the end of the problem, but it wasn’t. In 2005, more chemicals, including PBB and DDT (dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane), were found by the EPA leaking into the water supply. DDT was once used as insecticide. This leak was very bad as it was also found to have spread into the groundwater and soil of the neighborhood next door. The city filed a law suit against Velsicol. Luckily, they won over twenty million for the toxic well water.

It wasn’t the end of the issues but it was a start. The EPA plan of action was to build a new water system, thereby abandoning the well water, and to clean up the pollution. They would need to act soon as by now the pollution was affecting the birds. This affect on the birds broke the record of highest level of DDT found in birds. In humans, DDT can causes nausea, dizziness, confusion, headaches, incoordination, lethargy, vomiting, fatigue, and tremors. For birds, it causes eggshell thinning and embryo deaths.

In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency finally bagan the long awaited plan. They started by digging to remove the DDT and PBB pollution from the city. For the waste site itself, the EPA wants to give the land a thermal treatment, which burns the waste, and burying it with a layer of soil. Today, the waste site is still unusable but the town of St. Louis is hopeful to one day be able to use that land again.

As you can see the Michigan Superfund is still very much needed and that without the money we wouldn’t be able to deal with sites such as St. Louis’ toxic waste site. But seeing as there isn’t much funding going into the Superfund, we wouldn’t be able to deal with all the other toxic sites we have here in Michigan. The Velsicol’s toxic site shows that a problem can quickly arise and affect not just the area around the site but also the entire state. So spread the word as we want a pure Michigan, not a toxic Michigan.