RIVER STILL POLLUTED
Chemicals lurk in sediment
Sediment along the Detroit River’s American shoreline — so contaminated with toxic chemicals it erodes sampling containers and gives fish tumours — may not be cleaned up for many more years.
That’s what representatives from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said during a Detroit River Canadian Cleanup’s public advisory council meeting Tuesday.
“The entire Detroit River shoreline needs remediation,” the department’s Sam Noffke told the small group of environmentalists and concerned citizens gathered at the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. Noffke, an aquatic biologist, studies sediment contamination.
“No area in the Detroit River is clean.”
Over several years, researchers with the department have collected and tested 873 samples from dregs along the river’s U.S. shoreline from Celeron Island to near Belle Isle. Where sediments were present near the shore, significant amounts of mercury, lead, asbestos, cyanide, chromium, pesticides and more were found.
According to Noffke, contamination was highest near historical industrial and municipal outfalls. Samples from near an old copper facility and fuel loading dock at the river’s bend by downtown Detroit had the highest concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — chemicals released from burning fuels, trash, tobacco and wood.
An area near the Macarthur Bridge to Belle Isle, where the Uniroyal Tire plant once operated, had the highest concentration of contaminants. A sediment sample left unanalyzed over one weekend eroded its polycarbonate container, Noffke said.
“These are legacy issues that happened from the Industrial Revolution,” said Melanie Foose, also with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. “These problems have been occurring for 200 years.”
In the mid-20th century, people saw the river running rainbow colours with oil slicked surfaces that coated and killed animals, Foose said. Environmental disasters like that are no longer the norm, but their effects can still be seen with a closer look on both sides of the border.
“We can look inside sediments, and we can look at the bugs, and we can look in tissues,” she said. “We know that things aren’t better, even though they look at little bit better. In the future, hopefully, maybe, when we look inside of critters, we’ll see the benefits from all of this work.”
To clean the approximately 5.1 million cubic metres of contaminated sediment along the U.S. shoreline, the department needs financial partners. Now that the river’s length has been sampled and the lab results mapped, the federal U.S. Environmental Protection Agency can begin looking for those partners, Noffke said.
“It could be several years, decades,” he said.