By Joel Thurtell
If you’re concerned about pollution in the Rouge and Detroit Rivers, there’s an important meeting tonight.
The Department of Natural Resources and Environment will be discussing changes in permits for pollution levels the government will allow at Detroit’s wastewater treatment plant.
The plant is the biggest single-unit wastewater plant in North America, and it dumps billions of gallons of untreated sewage into the rivers every year.
The meeting is today, Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 7 p.m. in Southwestern High School, 6921 West Fort Street, Detroit.
There likely will be “objections to proposed modifications to federal pollution discharge permits for the Detroit Wastewater Treatment Plant,” according to a press release from the Michigan Environmental Council.
“The proposed permit changes under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) fail to ensure significant progress toward eliminating sewage discharges to the Great Lakes,” according to MEC. “The Detroit sewer system annually releases billions of gallons of virtually untreated, diluted sewage to the Great Lakes system.”
I reported on this in the Detroit Free Press before I retired in 2007. The book I wrote with photos by Free Press photographer Patricia Beck, UP THE ROUGE! PADDLING DETROIT’S HIDDEN RIVER (Wayne State University Press, 2009) discussed this problem, as did an article I wrote in the December 10, 2008 Metro Times, “Measuring the Rouge.”
When I was writing for the Free Press, the Wayne County Department of Environment (now defunct) claimed raw sewage discharges to the Rouge River had been reduced to 2 billion gallons a year. That was a lie. Thanks to Detroit Riverkeeper Robert Burns, I acquired data he’d gotten from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department showing that the discharges amounted to at least eight times what Wayne County claimed.
I’m curious to learn what “changes” we’re going to see in those discharge permits.
In 1985, environmental officials promised the Rouge River would be “swimmable and fishable” by 2005. However, a study of E. coli in the Rouge in 2005 showed the river was safe for human contact 2-5 percent of the time.
By 2006, government had spent nearly $2 billion supposedly cleaning the Rouge.
Despite all kinds of fanfare and celebrations, with the claim by one Rouge official that the battle was won and the river is “swimmable,” the Rouge is still nothing more than an open sewer.
I can’t wait to hear what officials have to say at tonight’s meeting.
