Thomas Simon remembers the day he found a carp in the Grand Calumet River in 1985, barely alive, bloody, and with no fins. “It looked like someone had beaten it up,” said Simon, a biologist who studied the river for 26 years.
Yet state officials were thrilled, because it was the first fish in years found in the northwest Indiana river widely considered the nation’s most toxic waterway.
A quarter century later, fish are more plentiful and look healthy. But state and federal agencies say they are still unsafe to eat, their flesh laced with toxins from sediment poisoned by decades of dumping from nearby steel mills, chemical plants, meatpacking operations and other heavy industry.
The Grand Calumet carries this toxic brew into Lake Michigan about eight miles from Chicago, each year dumping about 200,000 cubic yards of sediment full of PCBs, heavy metals and “some of the nastiest, most toxic contaminants ever,” said Cameron Davis, the White House Great Lakes “czar.”
This summer the federal government will begin a new phase in a decade-long attempt to bring the Grand Calumet River back to health. The Environmental Protection Agency is beginning a project to clean up a section of the river, but when that work is complete about three miles plus the canal that empties into Lake Michigan will still remain seriously contaminated.
This summer’s work is expected to cost $50 million, 65 percent of it coming under the federal Great Lakes Legacy Act, designated to clean up past contamination. The remaining 35 percent will be paid for with money collected as fines from steel mills and other polluters required to contribute to a trust fund under the Natural Resources Damages Assessment law.
Federal officials say they are encouraged by how much progress has been made even before this summer’s work. And Simon, a biologist for the federal government for 20 years and now a scientist at Indiana State University, thinks a major study he launched Thursday likely will show marked improvements in fish health.
Officials from the E.P.A. at a community meeting Thursday described plans to begin dredging contaminated sediment from a mile-long stretch of the river in Hammond, Ind. and the nearby Roxana Marsh.
But many residents think the government should be doing more faster. For example, the canal by which the Grand Calumet empties into Lake Michigan still is so contaminated that only sludge worms can live in it.
The Chicago River has been in the national spotlight recently because the conservation group American Rivers last month named it one of the nation’s most endangered rivers. But while the Chicago River’s chief problem is untreated sewage, the Grand Calumet deals with both sewage and much more serious ecological issues. For example, there are five Superfund sites surrounding the Grand Calumet, including almost 500 underground chemical or oil storage tanks, many of them leaking. A toxic brew of chemicals and metals make the Grand Calumet unsafe to touch and its fish unsafe to eat.
The Grand Calumet runs through largely low-income, African American areas of East Chicago, Gary and Hammond, where residents say the river and the ship canal that empties into Lake Michigan have not gotten the attention they deserve.
Next year the Army Corps of Engineers will start dredging sediment from the canal, which it has not done since 1972, because stirring up the poisonous muck can create serious health and environmental risks. The Corps will remove only enough sediment for ships to pass through and will monitor air quality during the process, but will not insert clean material and plastic liners, as the EPA is doing at the other dredging sites.
“We would have liked for it to be a full cleanup,” said Bessie Dent, program director of the Calumet Project citizens group. “But we’ve given up on it, because money was only allocated for the ships.”
On Memorial Day, a dead carp and crumpled soda cans floated through the canal past steel mills, scrap metal yards and massive white oil tanks. Other parts of the river also looked and smelled polluted. Where petroleum pipes enter the river next to Highway 12, brown oil with a suffocating smell coated rocks, and yards of sodden absorbent boom bobbed in the water and lay coiled on the banks like bloated brown worms.
Dealing with legacy contamination from decades past is the biggest challenge facing the river. In the vicinity of U.S. Steel’s Gary Works mill, the company has removed contaminated sediment 21 feet deep from five miles of the river, replacing it with plastic liner, carbon filters and clean fill.
Simon thinks the results of cleanup efforts will be reflected in the fish survey he is beginning, the most comprehensive one in decades.
In the 1990s when he worked as a federal biologist, Simon found that more than half of the fish in the Grand Calumet had deformities, eroded fins, lesions and tumors. Statewide in Indiana, only one in 10,000 fish have these symptoms.
This time Simon expects to find fish with relatively few visible deformities, but he still expects damage to internal reproductive and other organs. He will pay special attention to bluntnose minnows, which live only about three years and are a good indicator of current pollution levels.
One potentially worrisome byproduct of the improved appearance: People will be more tempted to catch and eat the fish that live in or even visit the river. As the river becomes healthier, salmon and other sport fish from Lake Michigan are more likely to spend time in the river, eating contaminated bottom-dwelling organisms.
“Just because fish look good from the outside doesn’t mean they are healthy,” Simon said.
The Grand Calumet is one of 43 “Areas of Concern” in the Great Lakes region designated under a treaty between the United States and Canada. Officials admit the Grand Calumet may never meet the program’s goal that it should become a “community resource and should provide healthy recreation activities, in an aesthetically pleasing environment.”
But Davis said the improvements to the Grand Calumet could give hope for polluted sites around the Great Lakes region.
“You can tell nature wants to make a comeback on this river,” he said, noting the return of egrets and other wildlife. “If we can make progress here, we can make progress anywhere.”
