Unmeasuring the Rouge

The New York Times did a bang-up job today, November 23, 2009, reporting on hazardous pollution created by municipal sewer systems. Glad they found the story. This kind of national attention to a serious problem that is getting worse is long overdue. For a regional perspective and look at the dirtiest river in Michigan, I’d like to suggest further reading for the Times reporter: The book I co-authored with Patricia Beck, Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River, published last March by Wayne State University Press.

Our book, ostensibly about a 27-mile canoe trip on the Rouge back in 2005, aims at detailing the abuses we humans have inflicted on this industrialized waterway since people started using it as an appendage of their toilets and as a dump for industrial waste.

On Dec. 10, 2008, Metro Times published my article, “Unmeasuring the Rouge,”  about the official retreat from actually measuring the harm we’ve done to the Rouge. The same officials who orchestrated this “unmeasuring” have proclaimed the war against pollution has been won. Nothing has changed in the nearly year that has passed since my Metro Times story ran, except things keep getting worse.

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By Joel Thurtell

On an overcast morning in November, 2008, I followed Mapquest step-by-step to a bridge on Military Street spanning the Lower Rouge River in Dearborn. I did a very un-Mapquest thing — hopped my car over a curb, stowing it on a sidewalk. I popped the trunk, pulled on hip waders and tromped across the bridge where, just beyond the guardrail, I found the guy who emailed me that helpful parking tip. He wore an orange t-shirt and cap. He had on chest waders, too, and was hauling deep-cycle storage batteries out of a big metal box supported by two 4-by-4-inch posts.

A few steps away, a steep embankment dropped down to the Rouge. Robert Howell, a 30-year-old hydrological technician with the U.S. Geological Survey, was removing water quality monitoring equipment from a USGS stream-flow gauging station. I thought I was going to observe him mothballing the gear for the winter. I would be shocked minutes later to learn he was dismantling the water quality measuring instruments, perhaps forever.

On November 1 of 2008, I watched Howell working with equipment at monitoring sites that were measuring more than water velocity and volume, the usual USGS targets. They were also recording levels of underwater dissolved oxygen and water temperature. Those are important yardsticks of the river’s ability to sustain marine life. I’d recently heard Cave talking about improvements in dissolved oxygen which, she implied, were the result of spending $1.6 billion on a project to cleanse the Rouge – a program known as the Rouge River National Wet Weather Demonstration Project that was managed by her. Now I was seeing firsthand, I believed, how her data were collected.

I was fascinated to see how the instrument that measures water quality is submerged in the river by way of a long length of black PVC pipe that also runs partway under the riverbank before emerging above ground where technicians can service it. On a typical maintenance day, which takes place every few weeks, the techs pull monitoring heads and clean them before submerging them once again in the river.

Howell, a fisheries biology graduate of Lake Superior State University in Sault Ste. Marie, was explaining his techniques as he scrambled up and down the soaking, clay-sided bank, steadying himself with a rope looped around one of the gauging station legs.  Then at one point, he was stewing about whether to thread a line through that PVC pipe, just in case someone might want to re-install the instruments that measure dissolved oxygen and temperature in the Rouge.

Re-install them? I thought. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you saying USGS is shutting down water quality monitoring at this site?”

“From all four Rouge sites,” he said. “Unless somebody else wants to pay for it, it’s finished.” He mentioned two entities involved in the decision – ECT and ARC. The Alliance of Rouge Communities, or ARC, is a consortium of several dozen local governments now challenging the state over terms of state-issued storm water permits. ARC had been underwriting the USGS cost of the data collection, Howell told me. ARC is run day to day by staff from ECT, or Environmental Consulting Technologies, Inc. ARC’s executive director is James Ridgway, a vice-president of ECT, who confirmed that ARC, funded 50-50 by federal and local money, did indeed cut the testing.

I was stunned first because USGS had only been collecting water quality data since 1999. Before that, zilch. Eight years of data. Now, zilch again. After November 1, 2008, you can say what you want about Rouge River water quality — as far as dissolved oxygen, nobody in future can prove or disprove your claims.

Dissolved oxygen is what fish and other aquatic animals breathe. When it falls to low levels, underwater life can’t survive. Like fish, organic pollutants like human and animal waste use up  oxygen. Also, the warmer the water, the lower the oxygen. That’s why the USGS was measuring temperature as well as DO levels.

Secondly, I was shocked to learn that ARC and ECT had pulled the plug. In fact, the funds came from Wayne County, I later learned, but county and ARC  and work closely together. Wayne County’s environment director, Kurt Heise, is co-chairman of ARC.  ECT’s Ridgway was on the ground floor of the $1.6 billion Rouge demonstration plan. He helped design it. ECT has been a contractor on the project for years.

Are not measurements needed to gauge the success of the project?

I called and emailed Ridgway, asking what happened. His answer was blunt: “It’s all about money. The EPA used to monitor and the MDEQ used to monitor and the budgets have been cut and they’ve stopped. I’m working with folks on the Obama transition team, and I’m arguing that EPA has to remember that collecting data is important. We’ve been robbing little pots of money to do monitoring in southeastern Michigan, which is not being done any place else, not being done at all, and we’re running out of places to rob.”

Lack of money, Ridgway said, “Is complicating matters. How do we know if our water is getting clean? Nobody is measuring anything.”

That wasn’t the message I got from Ridgway on October 24, a couple weeks before I met Howell. I heard Ridgway declare success at a public meeting on the status of the Rouge at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He said, “If somebody would have told me 20 years ago that the Rouge River would be fishable and swimmable most of the time, I would not have believed it, and yet we have done it.”

Forgive me for being a bit suspicious that the same man who declared it safe to bathe and fish in the Rouge is responsible for cutting the USGS water quality testing. A few days earlier, I had learned from MDEQ’s Christine Alexander that MDEQ stopped testing throughout the Rouge for E. coli in 2005, and there has been no testing for E. coli – an indicator of human and animal waste  — in the area where Pat Beck and I canoed – the Main Branch of the Rouge. No Main Branch E. coli data for three years, yet we’re told it’s okay for swimming “most of the time.”

Even in 2004 and 2005, test results were anything but good, both in the Main Branch and Middle Rouge. A study by the engineering firm Camp, Dresser & McKee found that the Rouge River in 2004 was safe for swimming, also known as “full body contact,” 2-5 percent of the time.

Ridgway told me the Rouge E. coli monitoring once was done with federal funding, but that money is drying up. At ARC, he said, “We continue to do monitoring, but to do that, we have set certain priorities. We’ve shifted from monitoring to illicit discharges.” Ridgway noted that in Oakland and Wayne counties there are teams of environmental technicians who sample river water to find evidence that people either intentionally or accidentally have hooked sewage drains to streams.

“The idea is to make the money available to get some positive change and then to monitor again in a while,” Ridgway said.

It’s no secret that federal funding for the Rouge project is winding down. Bill Craig, co-chair of the Rouge River Remedial Action Advisory Plan Council, forecast the funding drawdown to me three years ago. I can understand that officials like Ridgway with the best intentions are struggling to pay for programs once considered essential.

Still, I find the monitoring cutoff disturbing, because the history of data pertaining to pollution of the Rouge River already was very short. The federal Clean Water Act went into effect in 1972, but Kurt Heise, director of the Wayne County Department of Environment, told me the county has no pollution data for the 1970s or earlier. I found that data for the 1980s also is spotty.

There are other sources, for sure, but they are not necessarily easy to find or reliable. For instance, while I couldn’t find public records of bacteria in the river for the 1970s, I found references in journalist Bob Pisor’s magazine account of his aborted attempt at canoeing the Rouge in 1979. Pisor noted reports of dangerously high levels of fecal matter in his story, “My Search for the Source of the Rouge,” in the October, 1979 issue of Monthly Detroit. Not official, but better than nothing.

But still, there’s been a lot of celebrating the comeback of the Rouge, yet the baseline for making past vs. future comparisons is simply not there. You’re left with anecdotes about the river catching fire in the old days, but the documentation that a historian would require is simply not there, and I get the sense that environmental officials don’t think that gaping vacuum of data matters.

On our canoe trip, we paddled past combined sewer overflows (CSOs) draped with papier mache blends of toilet paper and sanitary napkins and suspended from a low tree branch hung a bulbous, buff-colored water balloon. Condom.

That is evidence of a different nature. If more people canoed the Rouge and witnessed such travesties on nature, I think more people would demand that authorities resume data collection.

As it is, you have to work to get a picture of what the river was like pre-Clean Water Act. I’m reading from Bob Pisor’s 1979 Monthly Detroit magazine article:

“The Rouge, first of all, and I apologize that there is no more delicate or honest way to state the fact clearly, is filled with shit. Aquatic biologists dipped a scoop into the Rouge at the Fenkell bridge several years ago and came up with a six-tablespoon sample that contained 224,000 fecal coliform, microscopic bits of bacterial badness that grow only in the intestines of human beings and other warm-blooded animals. A more recent survey, taken during a storm, found an average of 360,000 fecal coliform and several individual samples that approached ten million!”

Certainly, things are better now. But when raw sewage hits the river, readings go up. Bob Burns is the Detroit Riverkeeper, employed by Friends of the Detroit River to monitor water quality on the Detroit River and on its most important tributary, the Rouge. He drives up the Lower Rouge in a Riverkeeper boat watching for signs of pollution.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on the Rouge, and I’ve never seen a day in the Lower Rouge when I would even remotely consider swimming in it,” Burns said. “It’s bad. We’ve had E. coli counts out of the Rouge of as much as 120,000,” meaning 120,000 colonies of fecal bacteria, far exceeding the maximum tolerance for human contact. The fact that high E. coli readings still occur where test samples are taken is a concern not mentioned in the Report Card.

The real measures of water quality come from monitoring, which has been eliminated or dramatically reduced, like measuring dissolved oxygen and E. coli.

Pleading that “you can’t have done all the things that have been done and not have some achievement” doesn’t say anything about the quality of life in the river.

From the USGS gauging station in Dearborn, I followed Howell to another station, a shed beside the Hines Drive bridge over the Middle Rouge in Dearborn Heights. From there, we drove to River Rouge Park in Detroit to another USGS station beside a golf cart bridge. We wound up the day at a plastic shed behind an Arby’s restaurant on Telegraph north of I-96 in Detroit.

We were working our way upstream. I wondered, What about measurements on the heavy industry area of the Rouge downstream from Michigan Avenue? Well, turns out there’s a USGS station at Rotunda, but it hasn’t been used in a couple years. But even Rotunda is too far upstream to monitor discharges from industry farther downstream.

Say you’ve got a river that’s, oh, 127 miles long with four major branches that start in farmland, wind through heavily-populated cities, converging to flow past one of the biggest auto factories in the world, two steel mills, open piles of salt, gypsum and cement and the biggest single-unit wastewater treatment plant in the country. All the water comes down those four branches, running past all that industry, passing a trio of iron blast furnaces on Zug Island where it dumps into a big stream called the Detroit River. Say further that you are assigned to measure water quality, but you are allowed only one monitoring station. Where would you place it?

Seems like you’d want it at the mouth.

But there are no USGS monitoring stations downstream from Rotunda. None in the Turning Basin at the Ford Motor Co. Rouge plant and Severstal steel mill or downstream from the Morton Salt or U.S. Gypsum operations, or at U.S. Steel on Zug Island.

A good place for monitoring would be at the O’Brien Drain, which dumped 289 million gallons of raw sewage into the Rouge between January and October of this year.

I mentioned the official emphasis on E. coli and dissolved oxygen, both very important measurements that ought to be sustained. But we’ve been lulled away from looking at what probably is a much more serious problem – toxic chemicals and heavy metals in the Rouge.

It’s easy to understand how it has happened, when organizations like the RAP Council declare toxics to be insignificant. The Report Card in 1999 and again in 2005 awarded up arrows for toxics and declared, “Toxic chemicals, although present throughout much of the river, do not pose a public health threat.”

End of discussion?

Not quite.

Human waste is bad, but it’s not the worst thing in the Rouge, Detroit Riverkeeper Burns said. “The biggest concern I have is all the toxic chemicals and heavy metals and bio-accumulates getting into the system. The thing people don’t understand is that not only to you have the CSO discharges with large amounts of sewage, but you have all the pre-treated industrial wastes coming out of the 125,000 commercial entities connected to the system as well as 350 major industrial users like U.S. Steel, Marathon Oil, Ford and Severstal. Some have direct discharges going direct into the river, and a lot like Marathon, their only discharge goes into the sanitary sewer system.”

“In a perfect world when the system is working perfectly on a good day it can take care of some of the stuff, but when you add the rain events, you get a lot of stuff by-passing the system and going directly into the Rouge River,” Burns said.

MDEQ is looking now at what Burns called “five or six major contamination hot spots from in front of the Turning Basin to Zug Island.” They’re finding toxic chemicals like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), lead and mercury, Burns said.

Mention of PCB brings to mind Newburgh Lake on the Middle Rouge. The collection of E. coli data throughout the Rouge in the mid-2000s was paid for by the federal government and managed by MDEQ, Ridgway told me. “It was completed, and the communities have been required to do more to eliminate E. coli based on the results,” Ridgway said.

ARC has conducted E. coli testing in the Main Branch of the Rouge as recently as last summer. “The ARC monitoring moves around the watershed,” Ridgway said. “Thus we can focus our activities in a way that helps us find sources. We can’t afford to do the whole watershed every year and thus make it around the watershed about once every five years.”

There were some poor results from E. coli (sewage) testing at Newburgh Lake during the summer of 2008. Bacteria levels exceeded swimming standards five times, two samples of which would have banned partial body contact activities like canoeing and fishing. Upstream in Phoenix Lake on June 25, the count of E. coli bacteria of 5,582 colonies exceeded state full body contact standards by a factor of more than 18. Of 12 water samples taken from Phoenix Lake over the summer, seven contained too many colonies of bacteria for swimming. In nearby Wilcox Lake on the Middle Rouge, half of the dozen samples contained too much bacteria for safe swimming.

There are no recent data for the Main Branch where we canoed in 2005, but that year, near 7 Mile Rd. in Detroit, many, many E. coli readings were too high for swimming. Some of the samples had thousands of colonies of bacteria — one reading was 18,000, when the maximum even for partial body contact (boating) is 1,000. More than 20,000 bacteria colonies were found in a sample taken near Rotunda, in Dearborn, where in 2005, again, many readings were too high for swimming. In Oakland County, numerous samples taken from Riverside Park in Beverly Hills were too high for swimming.

On the Middle Branch, Newburgh Lake has special interest to Wayne County environmentalists, because they were hoping a $12.5 million cleanup of PCB-laden river bottom directed by Ridgway and ECT would make it possible to allow swimming and a canoe livery. Many high E. coli counts in Newburgh and nearby Phoenix and Wilcox ponds require a ban on swimming and canoeing.

There’s another danger lurking in Newburgh Lake – trichloroethylene, a solvent found at an unremediated Livonia factory site. TCE is traveling with groundwater into Newburgh Lake, I learned from Kent Murray, the professor and groundwater hydrology scientist at UM-Dearborn.

The Rouge, Kent Murray told me, is “the dirtiest river in the country.” I’ve read some of his academic papers. One, published in Michigan Academician in 1197, is titled “Heavy Metal Contamination of Bed Sediments in the Rouge River, Southeastern Michigan.” The abstract states:

Eighty years of industrial development in southeast Michigan has contaminated the bed sediment of the Rouge River with heavy metals and other contaminants. Surface sediment, collected along the four branches of the Rouge River in 1994 and 1995, was analyzed for (arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, lead, mercury, nickel, selenium, zinc), total organic carbon  (TOC) and grain size distribution. Arsenic and the in trace metals are widely used in industry and are released as byproducts in the combustion of coal in electrical power plants and water incineration. The metals are introduced to the river as a result of surface runoff, discharges of contaminated groundwater, air-fall deposition of particulate matter, and contributions from combined sewer overflows (CSOs). Metal concentrations in the bed sediment of the Rouge River were found to generally increase with decreasing rain size and increasing TOC content of the sediment. Although a progressive increase in the concentration of (copper, chromium, lead and mercury) was observed in the downstream reaches of the watershed, which is associated with increasing urbanization and industrialization, the entire watershed suffers from heavy metal contamination which exceeds EPA criteria limits for the protection of surface water quality.

Kent Murray told me he’s done research that indicates degradation of aquatic life upstream as well as downstream from combined sewer outlets. That data was paid for by Wayne County through a federally-funded Rouge project, but never appeared on the Wayne County website, he said.

Murray’s research also shows significant fecal contamination originates upstream as well as downstream from CSOs. Some of the contamination may come from farming in Washtenaw County. Some may come from wild animals – ducks, geese, muskrats, rats. Remember the guy who died in 1985 of rat fever after swallowing mouthfuls of Rouge water?

Murray told me he thinks the expenditure of hundreds of millions on sewer improvements is a partial solution to somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the overall Rouge River contamination problem.

Murray’s work has received little attention from the mainstream press.

I asked Ridgway about his claim that the Rouge is “swimmable.” I told him about the infections I got after too much contact with the Rouge River on our canoe trip in 2005, and I mentioned the high E. coli readings in many parts of the Rouge, including in Oakland County where an MDEQ engineer assured me there’d be no great exposure to pollution. How could anyone claim the Rouge is “swimmable most of the time”?

The city of Detroit, Ridgway told me, is planning to build a billion-dollar tunnel that will conduct almost all sewage to the city’s wastewater treatment plant without dumping overflows into the Rouge. That will solve the pollution problem, he said.

When will that happen? I asked.

“I don’t know off the top of my head,” Ridgway replied. “I know the design is in process of being designed. It’s a big project and it takes a long time. They’ve started, but I don’t think dirt has hit the ground yet. Dearborn has a similar really big project.”

Fact is, the Detroit tunnel is dead until Detroit, virtually bankrupt, finds money for the project. Back in 2005 before our canoe trip, I was told by an MDEQ engineer, Phil Argiroff, that the Detroit tunnel might be in service between 2010 and 2020. The tunnel is supposed to solve most of the sewer overflow problems – you know, toilet paper and condoms in the river. Without the tunnel, expect to see more papier-mache-draped sewer grates.

Thus, when Ridgway told people at a public meeting at UM-Dearborn on October 24 that the Rouge is “swimmable most of the time,” I’m guessing he meant “most of the time — sometime after 2020.”

I can’t help recalling that GAO report’s criticism of officials using “outputs” rather than real quantifiable data as a basis for conclusions. The tunnel is an output. It is not even a real thing, certainly nothing like countable data. It’s not a criterion at all, only a promise of something better in future.

According to Prof. Murray, “The entire watershed suffers from heavy metal contamination which exceeds EPA criteria limits for the protection of surface water quality.” Yet the Rouge RAP Council gave toxics an up – positive progress arrow – in the 2005 Rouge Report Card.

Who did they think they were fooling?

Only the public.

The environmental industrial conspirators get away with their lies because the media mostly parrot them.

Last November 1, when Robert Howell had packed all the government measurement gear into the blue USGS van, I realized I’d unwittingly stumbled onto a historical divide, a temporal partition between a time when gathering water quality information in a scientific way was deemed important and a new epoch when measurement is on the wane, replaced instead by bold but misleadingly optimistic proclamations that all is well with the Rouge.