Unusual Alliance Works to Speed River Cleanup

WASHINGTON — In an unusual partnership, environmentalists, polluters, local municipalities and the EPA are working together to clear out the toxic gunk that’s clogging the Ashtabula River near Lake Erie.

Their common goal is to start dredging the river without the years of lawsuits and studies typical of cleanups done under the Superfund law.

Layers of heavy metals and cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyl compounds, or PCBs, have contaminated the river-bottom silt. Dredging would not only clean up the pollution, but would accommodate more boat traffic on a channel that flows into Lake Erie at Ashtabula, in Ohio’s northeast corner.

“It isn’t only an environmental issue. It is a very serious economics issue in this county,” said John Mahan, coordinator of the Ashtabula River Partnership, a joint endeavor of environmentalists, polluters, regulators and municipalities.

The various interests were driven together by the experience of Fields Brook, a nearby upstream tributary that years ago was put on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list of the nation’s most pressing pollution problems. As with other Superfund sites, expenses have mounted and the actual cleanup work has been delayed. There was a consensus that there had to be a better way.

And, so far, the partnership is working.

All sides are sharing the costs of preparing for dredging. The approach is unusual at a time when industry, which ultimately is supposed to pick up the tab for Superfund cleanups, increasingly is questioning the need for cleanup dredging, and winning support for that skepticism in Congress.

Just this fall, Congress added language to the EPA’s spending bill urging the agency to issue no more dredging orders.

It wasn’t mandatory, but “the trend is worrisome,” said Emily Green, a Great Lakes expert with the Sierra Club’s Midwest office. “If they try to push it again next year, it would really have a tremendous impact on the lakes.”

Major corporations on the hook to pay for cleanups, whether by dredging or some other means, are banding together to investigate non-dredging options.

The Sediment Management Work Group--made up of Alcoa, the Boeing Co., DuPont, Exxon Corp., General Electric Co. and other big companies--was formed to pool scientific work, including studies of situations in which dredging might not be the best option.

That group’s coordinator, Detroit lawyer Steven Nadeau, said industry isn’t against all environmental dredging, but wants other options considered, including letting silt entomb contaminated mud.