Sunday, December 14, 2003

JONATHAN HUNT
THE SAGINAW NEWS

Everyone remembers the goose.

Publications ranging from prestigious to prurient lavished coverage on a Hemlock-area honker with its wings on backward.

Maybe the lure of poetic possibilities was irresistible. Greek thinker Socrates, after all, drank poison hemlock in 399 B.C. when carrying out his death sentence.

The town of Hemlock -- named after a long-gone canopy of evergreen trees -- quickly became the dateline in macabre reports of fouled fowl, cows with purple teeth, green-gutted rabbits and wilted houseplants.

Less tabloid-worthy yet worrisome human symptoms also plagued residents southeast of the village, who by 1977 feared Dow Chemical Co.'s deep brine disposal had contaminated their drinking water.

This 25-year-old story, which bubbled up in 1978, stands out as a chemical mystery -- a forerunner to today's Tittabawassee River dioxin debate -- by sparking a far-flung pollution probe that left residents with no easy answers.

Then, as now, citizens pushed for higher-level inquiries and decried inaction or delays.

"You had to keep the focus, and I couldn't spend my whole life doing this," says Carol Jean Kruger, now 68, who spent years seeking information.

Some residents in Fremont and Richland townships thought the state had produced little more than "a piece of paper to be stuck away in some file," U.S. Sen. Carl Levin said on a Saginaw visit in August 1979.

A month prior, Kruger and neighbor Kathryn Jungnitsch's testimony before Levin and a U.S. Senate subcommittee helped spur a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.

Those early efforts to track a hidden problem gave Saginaw County its first tour in the labyrinth of environmental investigations -- and yielded as much frustration as satisfaction.

"It just seemed like it went on and on," recalls David D. McKeage, Richland Township manager.

Today, dioxin in the Tittabawassee floodplain and irrigation depletion of groundwater in western Saginaw County mirror the Hemlock case as residents, businesses and arms of government grapple with problems invisible to the naked eye.

Poisoned Hemlock?

A now-closed network of virtual syringes for reinjecting brine, the mineral-rich water that fed Dow's mammoth Midland operations, pokes deep beneath the Fremont-Richland landscape.

Dow's system of solution mining piped the salty liquid from production wells in Bay, Midland and Saginaw counties to the city of Midland. The company extracted minerals there to make organic chemical products and returned spent brine to disposal wells in Hemlock and other places. It closed down the aging three-county network following a 1985 consent order.

Brine reinjection began in 1959; Dow officials have said depths in Fremont-Richland reached 3,000 to 4,500 feet. Some residents there feared the company pumped in more than just salty water.

Chemical processing did contaminate some brine; in 1969, Dow received a $500,000 federal grant to decontaminate and recondition waste brines sent underground.

However, Dow rebuffed the EPA's 1980 attempt to examine its Midland waste brine lagoon. The company said sand-filtering between the lagoon and disposal wells removed any toxins, and instead allowed sampling of wells, pipes and adjacent land.

Test results showed 134 parts per million of arsenic in pond sediment next to a reinjection well near Fordney and Roosevelt. That far exceeded typical natural levels, but it's not clear what caused it. A 1979 EPA memo said a Dow-developed arsenic compound was used in its brine wells at one time.

The Hemlock study and subsequent testing found traces of several man-made chemicals in the brine system. But in 1984, the DNR geological survey division's Allen F. Crabtree said he saw "nothing of great concern at this stage indicating that we have a great problem."

And Dow spokeswoman Anne Ainsworth said "the EPA did not connect the residents' concerns with Dow's brine system."

Household water samples also revealed tiny amounts of industrial compounds. But those, along with very high levels of chloride and dissolved solids in some wells, weren't tied to brine reinjection, though residents say their water was never that brackish before.

Fremont Township resident Rudy Scherzer, 64, says he noticed greater water pressure at his farm when a nearby disposal well fired up.

"You could tell when they were pumping," he says. "Them motors would really make a noise then."

But he never had a problem with his water and didn't get involved in the late 1970s intrigue.

"We drank the same water our cows drank. I've been drinking it all my life."

An EPA summary exonerating the brine system admitted the neighborhood's geology was complicated by "past practices in coal and oil exploration, well drilling and brine production."

Karl Bremer, who led the EPA study, defends it.

"I was in charge of looking at the Hemlock area," Bremer says. "We were like the devil's disciple over there. I thought we did a fairly thorough investigation."

Minimal findings only fueled the fire for those who felt unwanted attention over a township matter damaged the village's reputation while spending public money.

"Hemlock never really should have been drawn into it," says Carl Roggow, 74, then-Richland supervisor. "It was a waste of taxpayer money. It got carried too far. I can't even think what the motivation would have been.

"It was a wild goose chase," he asserts, the unintended irony drawing a smile to his lips.

Officials estimate the investigation's total cost at more than $1 million.

"It just sort of died a natural death, although it was a costly venture," says Dr. Neill Varner, who then practiced privately in Hemlock and now works for the Saginaw County Public Health Department.

But residents maintain their claims were validated.

"All we wanted was to clean up our personal environment," says Jungnitsch, now 61, and whose farm on Ederer produced the famed goose.

"We weren't trying to destroy people's privacy," Kruger says. "We were trying to do good for the community."

Kruger says any negative community response stayed beneath the surface, and her motivation involved protecting her neighborhood, not reaping any benefit.

"I was never treated unkindly," she says. "It's up to the individual to take care of yourself. People took responsibility for their own welfare.

"A lawsuit was out of the question. That was part of the age of innocence."

Dioxin debate

Today's dioxin quest involves those who live, work or play along the Tittabawassee River floodplain, Dow, state and federal agencies, the legal system and even hunters stalking wildlife with night vision gear.

People close to the river say they, too, just want to preserve what they have -- good health, use of the land and stable property values.

Tainted sediment deposited by repeated flooding delivered most of the dioxin to the river shore area, officials say.

Unlike the Hemlock scenario, they know what substance they're dealing with -- dioxins, a chemical family with 210 forms, called congeners.

Just 17 of those forms present serious health risks, says Paul D. Jones, an MSU toxicologist who spoke at a state Department of Agriculture dioxin meeting Thursday night in Freeland.

Dioxins occur as a byproduct of combustion and industrial processing, but people at the meeting were told the Tittabawassee contamination comes chiefly from Dow.

Citizens dissatisfied with the state's response to dioxin in soil turned two years ago to the federal Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry, an office that deals with health threats from hazardous substances.

Hemlock-area residents took matters to the federal level too, but this time state agencies have re-entered the picture.

Dioxin's tendency to bind to organic matter, concentrate in fat cells and magnify in food chains concerned officials at Thursday's meeting, and they don't want to see agricultural land uses exacerbate the problem.

A Vermont subcontractor's study said a threat to fish reproduction may exist, and this month night hunters have collected wild game so Dow can test for dioxin in edible portions.

Meanwhile, not far from Hemlock and the Tittabawassee River, irrigation depletion has entangled farmers and their trade groups, state regulators, private well owners and the Church of Latter Day Saints.

Water pressure in dozens of western Saginaw County private wells has dwindled to near nil during recent growing seasons. Owners say two large-scale farms near Merrill, one run by the Mormon church and the other owned by Clio-based Walther and Sons Farms Inc., are draining aquifers to irrigate their crops.

Michigan Farm Bureau leaders say they're waiting for the other shoe to drop after a Mecosta County Circuit judge ruled water-bottler Ice Mountain, owned by Nestle Waters North America, Inc., must restrict its withdrawals.

Farm trade groups fear the case could act as a legal precedent to clamp their lifeblood.

21st century response

New technologies and increased awareness promise better responsiveness to land and water issues, but cost and bureaucracy act as limiting factors.

"We could've gotten in there faster (now)," says Dr. James Truchan, a state Department of Natural Resources investigator during the 1970s, about rural Hemlock.

"This whole concept evolved," he says. "The analytical tools are much more sophisticated. We've got a portable tool that you can bring right in there and sniff the air."

"It may have been airborne," he says. "Michigan Chemical Co. was releasing material in the night."

The Gratiot County company, later known as Velsicol, closed its St. Louis plant in 1978.

Today, doctors can measure the "body burden" of specific pollutants in people via a process called biomonitoring and can find a pollutant's source through a chemical "fingerprinting" method called factor analysis.

But a machine sensitive enough to test for dioxin costs about $500,000 and each dioxin sample costs an average of $950.

"Someone's going to have to end up paying for that, and it's not a trivial matter," MSU's Jones says. "(Dow is) paying for many of these studies.

"The more money you spend, the more precise models you get."

An alphabet soup of agencies discussing complex details threatens to glaze over eyes looking for basic answers.

"The average layman, it's over their head," says 67-year-old Midland resident Ron Wells. "They're talking to themselves."

Wells attended Thursday's dioxin meeting, where a slew of scientists slung atomic-level information.

Joe Trombley, 41, of Auburn, owns land near the floodplain. He's concerned about possible health effects and how he can use his property.

"If I haul a tree off there, is the dirt gonna shake off it?" he asks.

Trombley says the meeting helped show him where to access information, and he grasped the language.

"But I'm an engineer," he says.

The state Department of Community Health announced Dec. 3 it will undertake a study in 2004 to measure dioxin levels in residents along the Tittabawassee River, a process Dow says it supports. Elevated dioxin levels in soil don't necessarily translate to high blood dioxin levels in people and animals, the company says.

Uncertain endings

Hemlock's municipal water is fine, Richland Township's McKeage, says. Its tested regularly for contaminants under rules stricter than 25 years ago.

"We're drinking glacier water, McKeage says.

But Jungnitsch, Kruger and other people in rural Fremont-Richland say they don't drink straight well water these days, however. They prefer to haul in their drinking supplies or use filtering systems.

Little barn-like structures that now enclose many of the former brine wells house monitoring equipment for nearby surface water, the DEQ's Rhonda Klan says.

Bremer credits the Hemlock case with increasing scrutiny. Residents' concerns caused a ripple that caught the government's attention, he says.

The Fremont-Richland fears that mushroomed in 1978, the same year dioxin turned up in Tittabawassee River fish, gave regulators a longer view.

"It made us more aware that dioxin had been produced at the Dow facility," Bremer says of the rural Hemlock situation.

People now, however, are saying wildlife in the dioxin-tainted area appear healthy and plentiful.

"There was a whole series of these kinds of contamination problems that came up in the '70s," Truchan says. "Hemlock was part of that time period, but we couldn't come up with anything definitive."

The incidents, and then rural Hemlock's troubled critters, sensitized officials and endure as symbols of an early period in pollution awareness.

Jungnitsch agrees it was a different era.

"They found some things, but they explained them away. We think it was because it was the first big eruption. They really got their feet wet." t

Jonathan Hunt is a staff writer for The Saginaw News. You may reach him at 776-9682.

© 2003 Saginaw News