Looking for a walk in the park, not toxic waste
Community groups sue to stop toxic waste dumping on Southeast Side lakefront land designated for park
After striking out with city and state officials, community groups are urging a federal court to block expansion of a lakefront dump in Chicago’s heavily polluted Southeast Side.
A lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court accuses the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of reneging on a 1982 deal to cover the 45-acre dump once it was filled with toxic sediment dredged from the Calumet River and the Cal Sag Channel.
Under the deal brokered by state lawmakers, the once-submerged site should have been transformed years ago into an extension of nearby Calumet Park at 98th Street and Lake Michigan. Instead, the Army Corps is planning to keep piling noxious muck at the site for another 20 years, leaving it 25 feet higher than it is today.
Sediment dug out of the river is contaminated with harmful metals including arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury, and dangerous polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly known as PCBs, that build up in fish and people.
Groups suing to block the disposal of more dredged gunk are alarmed by government studies during the 1980s and 1990s that found worrisome concentrations of PCBs in fish and crayfish collected from the dump, which was designed to allow the lake to flow freely back and forth through it.
The groups are not persuaded by Army Corps promises that an even larger dump can be safely managed.
“We are tired of being the dumping ground for toxic materials in the city,” said Amalia NietoGomez, executive director of Alliance of the Southeast, a coalition of neighborhood churches, businesses and community groups in the largely Latino and Black corner of Chicago.
Army Corps officials have said they need to routinely dredge so commercial ships can pass through waterways connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River basin. The federal agency opted to continue using its existing dump — bureaucrats call it a confined disposal facility — after neighborhood groups opposed the creation of another disposal site further inland along the Calumet River.
City and state officials signed off on the Army Corps plan to keep using the lakefront dump. But the new lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit Environmental Law and Policy Center, contends the project fails to comply with federal environmental laws and skips stringent monitoring to ensure PCBs and heavy metals aren’t leaching into the lake and river.
Past monitoring, later scaled back at the request of the Army Corps, revealed pollution concentrations exceeding federal and state regulations adopted after the dump was constructed with dikes intended to protect Lake Michigan from the dredged sediment, government documents show.
Howard Learner, the center’s executive director, accused the Army Corps of glossing over the environmental consequences and neglecting to explore other disposal options.
Moreover, Learner said, plans to expand the dump run counter to the Biden administration’s pledges to focus all federal agencies on fighting climate change and working toward environmental justice in low-income, predominantly Black, Latino and Indigenous communities that are disproportionately exposed to industrial pollution.
More intense storms and more frequent fluctuations in lake levels — both driven by climate change — increase the risk the Army Corps dump could rupture and trigger an environmental catastrophe that endangers the region’s source of drinking water, Learner and other opponents contend.
The Southeast Side already is heavily burdened by pollution — a toxic legacy left by steel companies that abandoned Chicago decades ago and more recent arrivals.
Four miles south of the Army Corps dump is the city’s latest Superfund site, a federal designation reserved for the nation’s most contaminated properties.
People living on the Southeast Side breathe some of the city’s dirtiest air, monitoring data shows. More than 75 polluters in the area have been investigated for Clean Air Act violations since 2014, including companies that contaminated yards and playgrounds with brain-damaging manganese and lung-damaging petroleum coke.
Last year neighborhood groups and the Biden EPA pressured Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s administration to reject a permit for Reserve Management Group, an Ohio-based company that built a scrap shredder in the neighborhood near George Washington High School after closing a similar facility in wealthy, largely white Lincoln Park.
Regarding continued dumping by the Army Corps, there are additional questions about access to Lake Michigan and the safety of people who recreate at nearby beaches.
The group Friends of the Parks is pressing the federal government to uphold the deal to convert the dump into an extension of a lakefront park and help fulfill Daniel Burnham’s 1909 vision of an entirely public shoreline.
“Chicago’s lakefront is one of our city’s most precious gems,” said Juanita Irizarry, the group’s executive director. “It is a travesty to continue to designate prime lakefront park land ... for a toxic dump.”