Warning, reads the sign on the Indianapolis Boulevard bridge 19 miles southeast of the Loop in East Chicago, Indiana. UNSAFE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT SWIM IN THESE WATERS. YOU SHOULD NOT EAT FISH FROM THESE WATERS. The channel under the bridge is the Lake George branch of the Indiana Harbor Canal, which slowly empties into Lake Michigan. It’s still OK to toss a rock into the water, and if you do, bubbles swirl up, pop, and leave a rainbow slick.
Back in 1969 researchers put small water-dwelling midges in a laboratory tank with some of the canal sediment. The little bugs tried to stay above the mud, but 70 percent of them died within a day and 90 percent were dead within two. If the experiment seems cruel, bear in mind that for decades this stuff has been flowing from the canal into the lake in giant belches after every big rainstorm.
The corps and EPA put environmental cleanup front and center when touting the benefits of the project. But they back off when asked to consider doing more than what’s necessary to improve navigation. How about dredging several feet deeper than the ore boats need, to ensure that no more pollution washes into the lake, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggested in 1996? Too expensive. The corps’ project manager, Bill White, says he’d be accused of wasting taxpayers’ dollars. The project’s supporters add that you can’t expect to clean up a century of pollution all at once and that more programs, perhaps under the Great Lakes Legacy Act, will eventually come along to help finish the job.
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Project supporters concede many of these points but insist that it’s still the least bad alternative. They say the long-term benefits to Lake Michigan will exceed any short-term increases in air pollution.
God neglected to create a good harbor on the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan, so when Illinois oil refineries and steel mills began to cross the state line a century ago they had to make their own. While they were at it, they decided to dig a canal that would link Lake Michigan with the Grand Calumet River to the south and with Lake George to the west.
All this dredged mud had to go somewhere. From 1924 to ’66 it was barged out to a 90-square-mile area in Lake Michigan 10 to 20 miles east of Chicago, where it was dumped in about 70 feet of water.
In 1975 the corps began studying the possibility of dumping dredged mud at the northeast corner of Inland Steel’s lake fill. In 1978 the EPA declined to approve that plan, saying pollution would leak right back into the lake unless the corps built a “separate impermeable containment facility.”
