The Bay City Times Tuesday, December 14, 2004

The latest chapter in the quarter-century quest to build a dump for Saginaw River dredging spoils has a familiar ring to it.

It's the sound of people opposed to a dump trying to chip away at the project.

The search to find a site for muck dredged from the river appears to be over.

Saginaw County intends to buy 600 acres straddling Zilwaukee and Frankenlust townships on the Bay-Saginaw county line.

Officials in Saginaw want the upper river dredged so river shipping to Saginaw County will continue.

All that's left to clinch the dump deal are the little details.

The most recent is a water discharge permit that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality proposes to issue to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

DEQ officials in Lansing say it's one of the most stringent permits ever proposed for surface water discharged in Michigan.

Yet dump opponents are not reassured.

They demand more studies on an issue that has been studied to death.

They claim that pumping water from the dump after dredged sediments have settled would put pollutants into the river.

They claim that PCBs and dioxins at the dump would pollute the air through evaporation.

It all sounds very serious.

But it's nitpicking.

If PCBs are evaporating from contaminated water, wouldn't that be happening anyway, whether the pollution is left in the river or dug up and put in a dump?

If there are toxins in the river bottom, wouldn't it be better to take them out and confine them in a dump? That's exactly what was done to clean pools of PCB contamination from the Saginaw River bottom in Bay City several years ago.

We can't fathom why taking toxins out of the river is a bad idea now.

At a Dec. 6 hearing on the proposed water discharge permit, the Lone Tree Council attempted to drop a bomb with its announcement that some Corps of Engineers samples of river sediment showed dioxin contamination as high as 11,812 parts per trillion.

Holy cow.

Our only reaction to that news is let's dredge it out of the river - right now.

Put it away safely, in a dump built for it.

We owe environmentalists a debt of gratitude for raising alarms about pollution over the years when nobody else would.

But in this case, their concern is misplaced.

If ever there was a safe place to dump poisoned soil from the river bottom, it ought to be the confined disposal facility that Saginaw is planning.

As a bonus of the dredging that's intended to help the economy of the region, the environment in and around the river should become cleaner.

To claim otherwise is just picking at nits.

© 2004 Bay City Times

For additional articles like this one, go to the Tittabawasse River Watch web site www.trwnews.net for complete coverage of the Tittabawassee River Dow Chemical dioxin contamination saga. . The Newspaper / Media page of our site contains an extensive archive of media articles dating back to January 2002. The source organization's web site link is listed to the right of the article, visit often for other news in our area. The Newspaper / Media page may be accessed by scrolling down to the bottom of the CONTENTS section and clicking on the Newspaper/Media link.