ValleyWatch

Did you know that living near a toxic coal ash site can be worse for kids’ health than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day?
Much of our country’s energy comes from dirty coal, which leaves behind toxic ash after it is burned. This toxic coal ash is dumped at thousands of sites nationwide and is full of dangerous pollution that can, and has, seeped into our drinking water.

The good news is, there’s something you can do about it. EPA is considering stronger laws to protect our families from toxic coal ash – tell EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson it’s time to do the right thing.
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September 20, 2010-by Bob Femandez in the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was that plant, according to plaintiff claims, that dumped toxic chemicals into an unlined retention pond between the early 1960s and late 1970s. The chemicals traveled to nearby McCollum Lake through a shallow aquifer and a deepwater aquifer, the plaintiffs claim.
Joanne Branham, a restaurant night manager near Apache Junction, Ariz., flew into Philadelphia last week. She’s not here to tour the Constitution Center or shop in Manayunk.

Taking a hotel room near City Hall, Branham is a plaintiff in a complex and high-stakes environmental lawsuit that will play out in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court over the next two to three months. The trial starts Monday at 9:30 a.m. before Judge Allan L. Tereshko.

Branham’s husband, Frank, a former factory and construction worker, died of a glioblastoma brain tumor in 2004. He was 63 and had been a longtime resident of McCollum Lake Village in Illinois. The lawsuit claims that massive contamination oozing into the groundwater from a Morton International Inc. chemical plant about a mile from his home caused his cancer.

The defendant is Rohm & Haas Co., the former Philadelphia-based owner of the Morton plant, although the case is being handled by Rohm’s new corporate parent, the Dow Chemical Co.

The Branham case is the first of 31 related cases from picturesque McCollum Lake, in McHenry County, winding their way through the Philadelphia court system.

Branham’s attorney, Aaron Freiwald, says it’s one of the largest brain-cancer-cluster litigations to reach trial yet. The Branham outcome could set the stage for the related McCollum Lake cases.

Jurors were selected Wednesday, and on Thursday Tereshko issued an order cautioning both sides against speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, or maintaining websites that could prejudice the case.

“I don’t want to discuss the case substantively now that the trial has started, but after five years of preparation, obviously we’re ready to go,” Freiwald said late last week. (MORE)

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September 19, 2010-by Jeanette Sturges in the Naperville Sun. he city’s locked in to a full-requirements contract with the IMEA until 2035. Short of expensive lawsuits, Naperville is tied to IMEA, and thus to Prairie State, for 24 years, beginning June 1, 2011. The smoke stack from the Prairie State Energy Campus towers over farms and farmland in Washington County, IL. (Sid Hastings/For Sun-Times Media)
(Editors Note: Forty municipal utilities in Indiana are faced with the same prospect through the Indiana Municipal Power Agency, including Jasper and Tell City.)

When Naperville bought into the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency in 2007, it bought into coal.

A lot of it.

Just months after Naperville signed on to IMEA, a cooperative of 30 municipalities and rural electric cooperatives, IMEA signed off on its purchase of 15.17 percent of the Prairie State Energy Campus, a 1,600-megawatt, coal-fired supercritical power plant.

Now, as the over-budget burner of fossil fuels rises out of the corn fields near Lively Grove, 40 miles southeast of St. Louis, Naperville is left to wonder whether the deal will deliver on its promise of clean, cheap, reliable energy, and if not, what can be done about it.

At what cost?
“We still think it’s a good deal,” said Mark Curran, director of Naperville’s electric utility. “Everyone wants to concentrate that this is a big lump of money, but you have to look over the whole life cycle of the plant. The cost is going to stay much flatter than where I think the market’s going to go.”
And it is a big lump of money. After construction overruns, the total bill for the plant, its adjacent coal mine, new transmission lines, and a host of other costs, ran 25 percent over budget, topping out at $4.9 billion.

Do the math, accounting for the fact that Naperville makes up about 40 percent of IMEA, and the city’s share comes in just under $300 million, to be paid over the next 24 years.

According to the IMEA and the city, that 25 percent project overrun means Naperville will see about a 3 percent rise in its wholesale electricity costs, which will be passed on to customers.

But that doesn’t factor in the environmental costs of getting energy from coal in the first place, costs that may translate into actual dollars in the future. (MORE)

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September 17, 2010-by Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine. Even my iPhone was forbidden on the grounds that no photos should be taken. Michelle, the very nice tour guide, explained that curious members of the public and reporters couldn’t tour the plant itself or take any photos on orders from Homeland Security, even of the model.”
“…The other solution was to turn coal into methane. In 1980, Congress created the Synfuels Corporation, endowing it with $20 billion with the goal of eventually building as many as 22 enormous coal gasification plants, each one producing 300 million cubic feet of natural gas per day. Since coal gasification was an unproven technology in the U.S., natural gas pipeline companies were reluctant invest in it. The federal government rushed to the rescue. The Department of Energy helped create a public/private partnership with five natural gas pipeline companies that agreed to put up 25 percent of the cost of building a demonstration plant while the government supplied the remaining 75 percent in the form of loan guarantees. Out of this bold alliance between business and government was born the hugely ambitious Great Plains Coal Gasification plant.

The plant was built at a cost of $2.1 billion and shipped its first thousand feet of natural gas in July 1984. Due to escalating costs, the plant was scaled back to half size so that it was designed to produce 150 million cubic feet of gas per day. In the meantime, the hapless Jimmy Carter unknowingly had already undercut the rationale for constructing a massive coal gasification industry by a simple change in policy—he deregulated the price of natural gas. It turned out that the country wasn’t running out of natural gas; it was running out of natural gas with a government imposed price cap. That old truism—only governments create shortages—was once again proven correct.

Gas supplies soared and the price crashed, meaning that there was no need for the Great Plains Synfuels plant nor for the liquefied natural gas facilities along the coasts. In the face of faltering prices, the five gas pipeline “partner” companies demanded that government give them a price guarantee on the gas, or they would default on $1.5 billion in government backed loans. To its credit, the DOE refused to meet this demand and the companies promptly defaulted, abandoning the project.

The bankrupt plant was sold at public auction by the sheriff of Mercer County, North Dakota, on the local courthouse steps. The auction took five minutes and the only bidder was the DOE which bid $1 billion. No money changed hands since DOE already held $1.5 billion in defaulted loans. The DOE began operating it and looking for someone else to take it off their hands.

As it happens, the electric power generation company Basin Electric had built the next door Antelope Valley station in good part to supply the coal gasification facility with electricity. Closing the coal gasification plant would have had a significant negative effect on the company’s bottom line. In 1988, a desperate DOE agreed to sell the plant to Basin for the fire-sale price of $85 million and a split of future profits, if any. In other words, Basin Electric acquired an operating facility for 4 cents on the dollar. “Not having capital investment is the key,” said Keith Janssen, the head of the Basin Electric subsidiary in a 1990 Washington Post article. Well, yes. But even with taxpayers picking up the tab for building the plant, running it profitably was still a challenge. (MORE)
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September 10, 2010-by David Biello in Scientific American. Coal-burning poses other threats as well, including the toxic coal ash that can spill from the impoundments where it is kept; other polluting emissions that cause acid rain and smog; and the soot that causes and estimated 13,200 extra deaths and nearly 218,000 asthma attacks per year. Photo © 2010 John Blair shows Duke Energy’s Edwardsport (IN) plant under construction which is slated to emit 9 million tons of CO2/year.
Humanity has yet to reach the point of no return when it comes to catastrophic climate change, according to new calculations. If we content ourselves with the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure we can hold greenhouse gas concentrations below 450 parts per million in the atmosphere and limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—both common benchmarks for international efforts to avoid the worst impacts of ongoing climate change—according to a new analysis in the September 10 issue of Science. The bad news is we are adding more fossil-fuel infrastructure—oil-burning cars, coal-fired power plants, industrial factories consuming natural gas—every day.

A team of scientists analyzed the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure to determine how much greenhouse gas emissions we have committed to if all of that kit is utilized for its entire expected lifetime. The answer: an average of 496 billion metric tons more of carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere between now and 2060 in “committed emissions”.

That assumes life spans of roughly 40 years for a coal-fired power plant and 17 years for a typical car—potentially major under- and overestimates, respectively, given that some coal-fired power plants still in use in the U.S. first fired up in the 1950s. Plugging that roughly 500 gigatonne number into a computer-generated climate model predicted CO2 levels would then peak at less than 430 ppm with an attendant warming of 1.3 degrees C above preindustrial average temperature. That’s just 50 ppm higher than present levels and 150 ppm higher than preindustrial atmospheric concentrations.

Still, we are rapidly approaching a point of no return, cautions climate modeler Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, who participated in the study. “There is little doubt that more CO2-emitting devices will be built,” the researchers wrote. After all, the study does not take into account all the enabling infrastructure—such as highways, gas stations and refineries—that contribute inertia that holds back significant changes to lower-emitting alternatives, such as electric cars. (MORE)

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August 26, 2010-by Gitte Laasby in the Post Tribune. Ed. Note: Apparently the Indiana Department of Environmental Management does not give a hoot about the law or the health of the people who must live with the consequences of their inaction.
HAMLET — The Indiana Department of Environmental Management won’t answer questions from the Post-Tribune about how the agency is handling an illegal, scalding-hot discharge from a mint farm that killed a dog in Starke County.

IDEM has ignored five requests for information over the last eight days from the paper, which sought an update on the situation. IDEM did not acknowledge receipt of the Post-Tribune questions, but did provide the requested information to a TV station in South Bend.

An IDEM manager told WSBT last week that the Materna Mint Farm reduced the temperature of its unpermitted discharge to 75 degrees — within the state’s legal limit. About a week earlier, the station had measured up to 190 degrees in Robbins Ditch where the discharged water ended up. On Aug. 7, the discharge killed a white Labrador who jumped into the ditch. The dog’s owner suffered second-degree burns on his foot when he tried to save the dog.

WSBT reported that “No trespassing” signs had also been posted last week.

Less than a week after the dog’s death, IDEM inspector Michael Kuss visited the Hamlet mint farm and told his bosses that he was worried about the threat to human health and the environment, sources told the Post-Tribune. Kuss said he had suggested lowering the temperature of the discharge by cutting back on production, but that mint farm owners didn’t seem interested. He also suggested diluting the 150-degree discharge with cold water.

At the time, Kuss said he found it “awkward” to advise the mint farm on how to lower the temperature in the discharge, knowing the discharge is illegal. Kuss indicated that someone in IDEM’s Office of Water Quality didn’t want the discharge shut off.

One source said Kuss’ superior, IDEM Northern Regional Office director Michael Aylesworth, had cited concerns that shutting down the discharge would endanger the mint crop.

The source said the incident should have been treated as a spill, which generally means emergency crews are dispatched to take care of the problem immediately.

IDEM spokeswoman Amy Hartsock previously told the Post-Tribune that the discharge didn’t meet IDEM’s definitions of a spill. She did not elaborate on why.
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August 17, 2010-by Karl Grossman in the Huffington Post. “The evidence is there that the majority of cancer cases are environmentally caused,” says Dr. David Carpenter, founding dean of the University of Albany School of Public Health and now director of the Institute for Health and the Environment there.
The World Health Organization projects that this year cancer will become the world’s leading cause of death. Why the epidemic of cancer? Death certificates in the United States show cancer as being the eighth leading cause of death in 1900.

Why has it skyrocketed to now surpass heart disease as number one?

Is it because people live longer and have to die of something? That’s a factor, but not the prime reason as reflected by the jump in age-adjusted cancer being far above what could be expected from increased longevity. And it certainly doesn’t explain the steep hike in childhood cancers. Is it lifestyle, diet and genetics, as we have often been told? They are factors, but not key reasons.

The cause of the cancer epidemic, as numerous studies have now documented, is largely environmental — the result of toxic substances in the water we drink, the food we eat, the consumer products we use, the air we breathe. (Some of the pollution is voluntarily caused — by smoking. But most is involuntary.)

As the President’s Cancer Panel declared in May, in a 240-page report titled “Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now,” : “The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.” It said: “With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.”

It pointed to chemicals and radiation as major causes of cancer and stated: “Cancer continues to shatter and steal the lives of Americans. Approximately 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and about 21 percent will die from the cancer. The incidence of some cancers, including some most common among children, is increasing…The burgeoning number and complexity of known or suspected environmental carcinogens compel us to act to protect public health.”

The panel urged President Obama “most strongly to use the power of your office to remove the carcinogens and other toxins from our food, water, and air that needlessly increase health care costs, cripple our nation’s productivity, and devastate American lives.”

In 1980, another presidential panel, the Presidential Toxic Substances Strategy Committee, came to the same conclusion. It declared:

“Of the hazards to human health arising from toxic substances, cancer is a leading cause of concern. Cancer is the only major cause of death that has continued to rise since 1900. It is now second only to heart disease as a cause of death… Some of the increase in cancer mortality since 1900 is a function of the greater average age of the U.S. population and the medical progress made against infectious disease. But even after correcting for age, both mortality (death) rates and incidence (new cases) of cancer are increasing. Many now believe that environmental (nongenetic) factors — life style and work and environmental exposures — are significant in the great majority of cancer cases seen.”

Meanwhile, through the years solid science done by independent researchers — not those taking money from the chemical or nuclear industries — has extensively documented this cancer/environment connection. (MORE)
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August 15, 2010-by Gitte Laasby in the Post Tribune. On Thursday, South Bend TV station WSBT measured temperatures of water downstream from the mint farm as high as 190 degrees Fahrenheit. Photo shows IDEM Commissioner Thomas Easterly who happily says his job is economic development.
WALKERTON — A yellow labrador was boiled alive after jumping into a ditch with scalding-hot water from an illegal water discharge.

The dog’s owner sustained third-degree burns on his lower leg when he tried to save the dog. The mint farm responsible faces fines, but continued its deadly discharge Friday — nearly a week later — with the knowledge of state environmental officials.

An anonymous staff member at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said the handling of the case is the latest example of the continuous dismantling of Indiana’s environmental enforcement, which has included rewriting enforcement guidance and canceling contracts for local air pollution monitoring in Gary and Hammond.

IDEM spokeswoman Amy Hartsock acknowledged Friday that the Materna Mint Farm in Hamlet in Starke County was discharging without a permit. But despite a multiday investigation with the conclusion that the mint farm likely caused the scalding hot discharge, IDEM did not ask the company to stop discharging.

“My understanding is that we did conclude the discharge from the facility exceeds the limits,” Hartsock told the Post-Tribune on Friday. “Our goal is to work with companies to make sure they take appropriate measures.

“We have told them they need to reduce the temperature and they need to do that as soon as possible. There are alternatives to achieve that, and we have told them to get that done. We are taking action. We want people to know we are just as concerned as they are that this matter is resolved. That’s why we’ve been out there.” (MORE)
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August 11, 2010-byDonald A. Brown, Penn State University. “Ethical arguments that could counter the national-interest based arguments are rarely heard in the climate change debate and are now virtually absent in the U.S. discussion of proposed domestic climate change legislation.” This NASA satellite image shows an island of ice, 251 square kilometres in size, breaking away from the rest of the Petermann Glacier on Aug. 5. (NASA/MODIS)

What is the worst ethical scandal in the US Congress? Could it be climate change?

Although the US media has recently paid attention to the comparatively minor ethical stories unfolding in the US House of Representatives, there is not a peep in the US media about a much more momentous unfolding ethical failure in the US Senate. While many press stories have appeared in the past few week about potential ethical problems of Representatives Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters in the House, ethical lapses that harm society because public servants may have abused their power in ways that enrich themselves or their families, the US Senate ethical failure is more ethically reprehensible because it is depriving tens of millions of people around the world of life itself or the natural resources necessary to sustain life. The failure in the US Senate to enact legislation to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions is a moral lapse of epic proportions. Yet it is not discussed this way.

There are several distinct features of climate change that call for its recognition as creating civilization challenging ethical questions.

First, climate change creates ethical duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem’s harshest impacts are some of the world’s poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

Second, climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world. Climate change harms include deaths from disease, droughts, floods, heat, and intense storms, damages to homes and villages from rising oceans, adverse impacts on agriculture, diminishing natural resources, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, and the destruction of water supplies. In fact, climate change threatens the very existence of some small island nations. Clearly these impacts are potentially catastrophic and there is a growing scientific consensus that we are running out of time to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The third reason why climate change must be seen as an ethical problem stems from its global scope. (MORE)
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August 9, 2010- Ozone and fine particles will rise to an Orange alert today and tomorrow.
Air Quality Action Day has been forecast for Southwestern Indiana for today, August 9th and Tuesday, August 10th for Ozone (O3) and Fine Particles (PM2.5). This includes Vanderburgh, DuBois, Gibson, Knox, and Spencer counties in Indiana. Ozone and Fine Particle levels are expected to be in the orange or Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups range for today, August 9th and Tuesday, August 10th . People with heart or lung disease, older adults, and children should reduce prolonged or heavy exertion when outdoors.

July 29, 2010-By Stewart Elgie, Nic Rivers and Nancy Olwwiler in the Times Colonist. The carbon tax has obvious moral appeal. By tying the pollution tax to reduced income taxes, B.C. has shifted from taxing “goods,” like working and entrepreneurship, to taxing “bads,” like pollution.
It’s hard to tell which has sunk lower: BP’s share price or the prospects for government action on climate change.

Despite daily reminders of the growing costs of oil addiction — from blackened Louisiana shorelines to the melting Arctic — climate change seems to have dropped off global leaders’ agendas. The recent G20 declaration paid lip service to the issue, the U.S. Congress seems increasingly unlikely to pass a climate bill this year and Canada’s official policy position is to say “after you” to the U.S.

All of which makes British Columbia’s approach even more remarkable. On July 1, 2008, B.C. embarked on an ambitious climate policy path and brought in North America’s first carbon-tax shift.

Though praised by environmentalists and economists, the measure was met by a host of concerns — that it could increase taxes, decrease growth and hurt low-income families. Some pundits labelled it political suicide.

Two years later, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of the tax. The conclusion is that B.C.’s policy experiment seems to be working.

B.C.’s carbon tax has two parts. First, it puts a price on emissions of carbon — the main greenhouse gas, which comes from burning oil, gas or coal. That cost is now $20/tonne (it rises by $5 annually).

Second, the revenues are returned as tax cuts for individuals and business.

What effects has this had so far? Although it’s impossible to precisely identify the impacts of the tax shift in an economy with thousands of changing variables, initial results allay concerns that it would harm the economy.

In fact, B.C.’s economic growth in 2009 — the first full year the tax was in effect — was higher than Canada’s national rate. Unemployment, although high because of wider economic events, is below the national average and does not appear to have jumped when the tax shift came in. (MORE)

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July 26, 2010-By Lee Wasserman, Director of the Rockefeller Family fund in the New York Times. Had Lyndon Johnson likewise relied on polling, he would have told the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to talk only about the expanded industry and jobs that Southerners would realize after passage of a federal civil rights act. I could imagine Dr. King’s response.
If President Obama and Congress had announced that no financial reform legislation would pass unless Goldman Sachs agreed to the bill, we would conclude our leaders had been standing in the Washington sun too long. Yet when it came to addressing climate change, that is precisely the course the president and Congress took. Lacking support from those most responsible for the problem, they have given up on passing a major climate bill this year.

It’s true that passing legislation to rebuild our fossil fuel-based economy was always going to be a momentous challenge. Senators and representatives feel in their bones (and campaign accounts) the interests of utilities and the coal and oil industries. Even well-intentioned members of Congress struggle to balance the competing needs of energy-intensive industries, coal workers and American families.

But with climate change a stated priority for President Obama and Congress, how did they fall so short? By weaving four coordinated threads into a shroud of inaction. This began long before President Obama took office, but rather than rip up the old pattern — as he advocated during the campaign — the president quickly took his place at the loom.

• Thread No. 1: Climate is out; green jobs are in.
• Thread No. 2: Devising a bill for historic polluters, not the American people.
• Thread No. 3: A Rube Goldberg-policy construction.
• Thread No. 4: The public sits it out.

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July 22, 2010-by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor. The full moon is Saturday night. This picture was shot one month ago as a waxing moon rose over Marina Point and the LST 325.
The boat is a Landing Ship Tank, this LST that was similar to those made in in Evansville during World War 2. As such we use it as a tourist attraction to memorialize the War.

Lots of ground soldiers were transported on LSTs as they invaded places like Normandy Beach on D-Day.

We always celebrate war in Indiana as if it is a good thing. At least as long as we win.

July 22, 2010-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratioon. The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record. Graph credit: NOAA

Last month’s combined global land and ocean surface temperature made it the warmest June on record and the warmest on record averaged for any April-June and January-June periods, according to NOAA. Worldwide average land surface temperature was the warmest on record for June and the April-June period, and the second warmest on record for the year-to-date (January-June) period, behind 2007.

The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.

Global Temperature Highlights – June

• The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for June 2010 was the warmest on record at 61.1°F (16.2°C), which is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average of 59.9°F (15.5°C).
• The global June land surface temperature was 1.93°F (1.07°C) above the 20th century average of 55.9 °F (13.3°C) — the warmest on record.

••  Warmer-than-average conditions dominated the globe, with the most prominent warmth in Peru, the central and eastern contiguous U.S., and eastern and western Asia. Cooler-than-average regions included Scandinavia, southern China and the northwestern contiguous United States.
••  According to Beijing Climate Center, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Jilin had their warmest June since national records began in 1951. Meanwhile, Guizhou experienced its coolest June on record.
•• According to Spain’s meteorological office, the nationwide average temperature was 0.7°F (0.4°C) above normal, Spain’s coolest June since 1997.

The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.97°F (0.54°C) above the 20th century average of 61.5°F (16.4°C), which was the fourth warmest June on record. The warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean.
Sea surface temperature continued to decrease across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during June 2010, consistent with the end of El Niño. According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, La Niña conditions are likely to develop during the northern hemisphere summer 2010.

April – June 2010 and Year-to-Date

• The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for April-June 2010 was 1.26°F (0.70°C) above the 20th century average—the warmest April-June period on record.
• For the year-to-date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 57.5°F (14.2°C) was the warmest January-June period. This value is 1.22°F (0.68°C) above the 20th century average. (MORE)

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July 19, 2010-by Gitte Laasby, in the Post Tribune. According to an IDEM inspection report this spring, the pile is 900 feet long and 67 feet tall. It contains slag and 274,000 cubic yards of basic oxygen furnace sludge and rubble interspersed with burned lime. The pile sits a couple of hundred feet from Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Nearby are tall piles of rubble.
ndiana Department of Environmental Management Commissioner Thomas Easterly is getting fed up with media reports and activists’ complaints about how his agency handles environmental issues in Northwest Indiana.

In a recent letter to IDEM employees, Easterly voiced his disgruntlement with activists’ challenges of BP Whiting’s air permit, and delays in issuing U.S. Steel Gary Works’ wastewater permit.

» Click to enlarge image

Thomas Easterly, IDEM Commissioner
(Post-Tribune file photo)

He also denied the existence of a pile of steelmaking waste that representatives at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor named after him.

“Recent stories about recycling, materials management, and waste management at Arcelor Mittal Burns Harbor … have even named a non-existent feature after me,” Easterly wrote in the June 3 memo obtained by the Post-Tribune. “Recent observations by a State Legislator and IDEM staff, including Chief of Staff (Kent) Abernathy, confirm my recollection from 10 years ago that the area called a ‘pile’ by the press is actually a depression partially filled with stockpiled materials for recycling to make steel.”

Valparaiso lawyer Kim Ferraro, of the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation of Indiana, said the definition of the area is a matter of semantics.

“Whether it’s a depressed area or level ground doesn’t matter. It’s full of stockpiled materials. It doesn’t make a difference,” she said. “There are definitely wastes sitting out there next to Lake Michigan, and IDEM has documented it in their own inspection reports.” (MORE)
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