Great Lakes Dredging Due as Gunk Mounts

It has been more than 30 years since the government dredged the Ashtabula River in northeast Ohio.

Officials have been trying for years to get a navigable path cleared through the river for recreational boats. Trouble is, the Ashtabula is full of heavy metals and cancer-causing chemicals.

Properly dredging the river will be expensive, and once it’s dredged there’s another problem: what to do with all the contaminated muck.

Throughout the Great Lakes, there is too much contamination and a dwindling inventory of places to store it.

“It’s a very serious matter for the region,” said Steve Thorp, program manager for the Great Lakes Commission in Chicago.

The government has built 26 places around the lakes to hold dredged-out mud too polluted to dump back in the water. Six of them are full; four more will fill up in 1995.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, estimates that by 2006, there will be no more room in 24 of the 26 facilities. The five Ohio facilities, for example, expect to be full by 2000.

Five million cubic yards of silt are dredged out of Great Lakes shipping channels each year. About half of that is too dirty to return to the water, said Allegra Cangelosi, director of the Great Lakes Washington Program.

It costs the federal government more than $33 million a year.

Almost all dredged material used to be routinely dumped back into the lakes. Then Congress decided that contaminated soil should be dumped elsewhere.

Since 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers has been opening disposal sites to store soils contaminated by chemicals and heavy metals.

Congress had assumed the flow of pollution would eventually stop, so it planned for 10 years of sediment storage and set aside the problem of what to do with the muck.

But new pollutants kept going into the lakes, and dredging never got rid of all the old accumulation. Now that original 10-year plan has become permanent.

What happens to contaminated muck in the future depends in part on what Congress does when it renews the Clean Water Act.

Sens. John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum and Rep. Eric Fingerhut, all Ohio Democrats, have introduced a package of Great Lakes proposals that give a high priority to dealing with toxic gunk on the lake bottoms.

They want full-scale testing of new sediment cleanup technology, plans for dealing with confined disposal facilities after they close, more Environmental Protection Agency authority over dredging, a new trust fund to use Clean Water Act penalty money to pay for cleanup projects, and help for Great Lakes communities to reduce the pollutants in wet-weather runoff.

Thorp said the commission hopes Congress also will come up with a uniform policy for paying to expand the disposal facilities. “Some places have to foot the bill entirely on their own,” while the federal government foots the bill elsewhere, he said.

In the past, the commission has lobbied unsuccessfully to move the entire responsibility to the federal government; however, now it is hoping for a single, uniform formula regionwide--perhaps a 75%-25% split, he said.

Meanwhile, chemicals continue to pollute the lakes, and industry, environmentalists and politicians are tussling over an effort to rewrite the rules that say how much can be released there legally.