Our View: EPA should finish work
09/17/2007, Midland Daily News Editorial

Oh, the drama.

Last Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pulled out of a process addressing dioxin contamination issues in the Tittabawassee and Saginaw River watershed. Not open enough, the agency said. Too little progress made because legal matters not directly related to restoring the watershed are subject to the mediation. Taking our ball and going home.

Whatever, said everyone else involved — The Dow Chemical Co., State of Michigan, Federal Natural Resource Trustees and Saginaw Chippewa Tribe — and kept working.

The next day, City of Midland officials traveled to Chicago to meet with EPA Region 5 officials to sort out how to keep the agency apprised of dioxin soil sampling without violating a pledge to protect the privacy of property owners who volunteered under the assumption of anonymity. The EPA said the sampling analysis information is necessary for a complete and current picture of dioxin in the city, but for now it will settle for specific relevant information about sampling protocol and spatial distribution of data points, without identifying specific property locations or property owners.

This is a more productive example of what sent the EPA away from the other mediation process — a desire for a "more open and transparent process." In spite of its assertion that, for example, time-consuming debates over what constitutes public information made the talks with Dow and others ineffective, walking away can hardly be considered more efficient.

The EPA claimed to be willing to participate in a narrowed approach once the overall damage to the watershed is better defined, focusing specifically on natural resource damage claims. Dow currently is cleaning up three dioxin hot spots in the Tittabawassee, and the EPA believes more work might be needed downriver.

Here's where the pot calls the kettle black, though. You know what could help the dioxin debate, which has been hampered for years by debates over whose "how bad is this stuff" numbers to use, quarrels over action levels and site-specific criteria and the like? The long-promised dioxin reassessment.

In 1994, the EPA embarked upon a research program to further evaluate the exposure of Americans to the dioxin class of compounds. In October 2004, the draft dioxin reassessment was delivered to the National Academy of Sciences for review. It still hasn't been released.

It seems to us that if the EPA wants a transparent process, a great aid would be an updated scientific standard. Everyone has learned to work around it, to their credit.

But if the EPA truly wants to helpful in this mess, it seems that pushing to complete its own reassessment would be more effective than throwing up its hands and turning away.

©Midland Daily News 2007
 

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.