[CPEO-BIF] "Michigan has 7, 300 toxic sites. Money for cleanups is almost gone."

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Michigan has 7,300 toxic sites. Money for cleanups is almost gone.

by Jim Malewitz
Michigan Environment Watch
January 17, 2018

BELLAIRE — Meet Tom and Sarah Hudson. The couple, both in their 60s, call themselves “the arrow people.” It’s a lighthearted description of their toxic reality: A slow but steadily moving industrial solvent plume is threatening the drinking water beneath their slice of paradise in northwest Michigan. 

The Hudsons, retirees who split their time between here and Rochester, can’t see the contamination beneath the forested hills. But its trajectory looks unmistakable, according to a map drawn by state environmental regulators and illustrated with an arrow aimed at the Hudsons’ patch along Windy Hill Road in Bellaire, a town of about 1,000 about 30 miles west of Gaylord. 

“It was a little crazy seeing that arrow point right to us,” said Sarah Hudson, sitting across from Tom at their dining room table on a snowy December morning. 

The contamination will likely force them to abandon their water well and switch to a municipal source. They’re not alone. Their house sits near the edge of what state officials call North America’s largest known plume of trichloroethylene, or TCE, a man-made compound increasingly found at former industrial sites. It’s known to cause cancer and is linked to ailments of the liver, kidney, immune system and central nervous system. Originating on the grounds of a long-shuttered auto parts plant in Mancelona, the plume —  1.5 miles at its widest — stretches 6 miles northwest to Bellaire and has tainted up to 13 trillion gallons of Antrim County groundwater.



…

For the entire article, see
http://www.bridgemi.com/michigan-environment-watch/map-find-pfas-chemical-threats-michigan-drinking-water-near-your-town

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director
Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
P.O. Box 998, Mountain View, CA 94042
Voice/Fax: 650/961-8918 
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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