Tittabawassee River cleanup near Dow Chemical's Midland
plant to start in 2012
Published: Monday, December 12, 2011, 9:30 PM Updated: Tuesday, December
13, 2011, 8:43 AM By Lindsay Knake | The Saginaw News
Cleanup work on a three-mile stretch of the Tittabawassee River along the
Dow Chemical Co. plant in Midland is scheduled to being in the spring.
It is one of the first steps in a several-year initiative of the Environmental
Protection Agency and Dow Chemical Co. to clean the river of contaminants, which
include dioxins and furans.
Diane Russell, remedial project manager at the EPA’s Saginaw Field Office, said
the
Segment 1 project will take two construction seasons to complete. While
dioxins are not a focus in the section, the cleanup will target several
different contaminants, including arsenic, that in the stretch of river.
Russell provided an overview of the 2012 plan at Monday's
Saginaw-Tittabawassee Rivers Contamination Community Advisory Group meeting
at Saginaw Valley State University.
Click here to see a map of the cleanup by segment.
Dow Chemical has acknowledged leaking dioxins and furans, chemical byproducts of
the chlorine manufacturing process and combustion, among other chemicals into
the Tittabawassee River from the late 1890s to the 1970s.
The cleanup, including interim work to prevent residents from coming into
contact with contaminated soil, began in January.
Construction work for the next river section, Segment 2, likely will not start
until 2014, when Segment 1 is complete, Russell said. Segment 3 should start in
2015. EPA officials will plan for both sites in the year prior. The agency
sectioned off the river into the approximately 3- to 4-mile segments to manage
the cleanup, she said.
Segment 3 runs through Freeland.
Russell said the EPA will complete the evaluation of sediment traps and address
any highly-contaminated areas throughout the cleanup process as necessary in
2012.
In 2011, the EPA planned for Segment 1 cleanup, and Dow workers cleaned a
heavily-contaminated island in the Tittabawassee River in Saginaw Township and
many high-use properties along the river to prevent residents from coming into
contact with contamination.
Click
here for more information from the EPA website.
http://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/index.ssf/2011/12/tittabawassee_river_cleanup_ne.html
For additional articles like this one, go to the Tittabawassee 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.