Dioxin hoopla should lead to downriver tests, river cleanup

Holy cow!

It's not too often we hear words to that effect coming from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and hardly ever concerning dioxin contamination of the Saginaw River, its tributaries and Saginaw Bay.

An EPA scientist out of Chicago declared in no measured tones last month that dioxin contamination found in the bed of the Saginaw River offshore of Saginaw's Wickes Park is nearly 20 times higher than ever found in any U.S. waters.

Boy, howdy! The Michigan Department of Community Health agreed. The department issued a fish-consumption advisory for the entire Saginaw River against anyone eating bottom-feeders such as catfish, carp and white bass, and warned children and women of child-bearing age to limit their consumption of some other types of fish.

Hey, thanks for caring, everyone.

But now let's have some perspective.

Sure, the really high level of dioxin contamination is startling, but the decades-long concern over dioxin contamination of our waters barely qualifies as breaking news anymore.

So, amid this high-level hoopla, we've got to wryly welcome everyone to our mess.

Glad we made your record books.

Now, what are you going to do about it?

Dow Chemical Co. has said dioxin in the river fits the profile of what the company pumped into the Tittabawassee River as a manufacturing byproduct for decades until the 1970s.

Dow divers last week broke through the Saginaw River ice and began vacuum-dredging the dioxin hot spot near Wickes Park.

Company tests, by the way, indicate that the contamination, at 7,000 to 18,000 parts per trillion, is quite a bit less than the record-breaking sample of 1.6 million parts per trillion found there. The spike might have been a concentrated ''nugget'' in a patch of dioxin-contaminated sediment, Dow says.

Downriver in Bay City, we've been waiting way too patiently for dioxin surveys and tests up on the Tittabawassee River to flow downstream and into the bay.

That's now on the table.

But state and local officials and environmental activists have long suspected dioxin contamination in the Saginaw River and bay.

That's why we've had fish-consumption advisories in local waters for years, for both dioxin and polychlorinated biphenyls.

If state and national pollution control officials really want to get our attention, they'll do a lot more than talk about the chemicals in our waters.

Now that the infamous dioxin sample has them all in a lather, someone ought to do what should have been done long before.

Test all waters and all sediments of the Saginaw River and into the bay. If appropriate, declare the waters a federal and state Superfund site, eligible for immediate funding.

Then clean it up, once and for all.

After the initial astonishment, that's the only appropriate, official response to the dioxin that Dow is now digging up offshore of Wickes Park.