GROUNDWATER BENEATH A swath of the city of Ann Arbor is currently contaminated by the suspected carcinogen 1,4 dioxane. The City of Ann Arbor website has a FAQ page dedicated to answering questions about the contamination. Likewise, the Michigan DEQ website has its own “Gelman Sciences, Inc. Site of Contamination Information Page.”
In early September 2013, Ann Arbor City Council passed a resolution that called on the Michigan DEQ to tighten its standards for the clean up of the 1,4 dioxane plume that has already contaminated one city well on the west side of Ann Arbor. For Council member Sabra Briere, through whose Ward the Huron River winds, it was the first time that she made the plume a campaign issue. Her opponent addressed it first.
For years, local environmentalists and respected citizen activists have complained the clean-up of the three mile long, mile wide plume of suspected cancer causing 1,4 dioxane has been a slow, inefficient and ultimately ineffective process.
Now, hydrology experts suggest the 1,4 dioxane plume is headed toward Barton Pond which provides 85 percent of the city’s drinking water. Ann Arbor’s Pall/Gelman 1,4 dioxane disaster is one of the largest groundwater clean-up actions in the United States; Pall has pumped out over 5 billion gallons of water and removed over 75,000 pounds of 1,4 dioxane.
The disaster in West Virginia has sparked hundreds of news stories. The Pall/Gelman plume disaster gets little play from local media and, more shockingly, even less play from local environmental groups. These groups are all-too-ready to condemn environmental scofflaws in other cities and states, but the complications, machinations, and political gamesmanship related to the Gelman/Pall plume elicit few comments from local environmentalists.
The local chapter of the Michigan Sierra Cub focuses on state and national environmental issues, such as fracking. The Huron River Watershed Council and the Ann Arbor Ecology Center have very infrequently touched on the issue of the Pall/Gelman disaster. In a January 2, 2014 Detroit Free Press article about the plume, citizen activist Roger Rayle spoke. Neither the head of the Huron River Watershed Council or the Ann Arbor Ecology Center weighed in. Neither did the article highlight anything either group has done over the past decade years to draw attention to the plume and the troubled clean-up efforts.
In 2012, the national Sierra Club was revealed to have taken $25 million in donations from the natural gas industry. Media stories questioned the Sierra Club’s support of natural gas as an environmentally acceptable energy source. Over the past dozen years, together, the Huron River Watershed Council and the Ann Arbor Ecology Center (through it subsidiary Recycle Ann Arbor) have taken millions of dollars from Ann Arbor politicians in the form of no bid contracts (Recycle Ann Arbor) and outright earmarks (Huron River Watershed Council).
Over that same period of time, the leaders of these environmental groups have not brought state or national media scrutiny on the Pall/Gelman disaster. Instead, the executive directors of both the Huron River Watershed Council and the Ann Arbor Ecology Center have repeatedly donated to and endorsed as sterling environmentalists local politicians who have, for years, essentially ignored an environmental disaster while campaigning.
