Rouge 2008: Festival of self-congratulation
10/22/08
[donation]
By Joel Thurtell
Somehow, I can’t get all that excited about a new, $1 billion blast furnace at the Severstal steel mill on the Rouge River in Dearborn. I’m still blinking from the dust and grime that blew into my eyes last month when I drove my boat up the Rouge River to the Severstal plant in Dearborn.
To tell the truth, I can’t get all that excited about Henry Ford’s massive Rouge auto manufacturing plant on the same site. What with generations-long pollution, dredging the river to freighter depth, building steel and concrete sea walls and wharves, the Rouge plant has to be the Number One cause of environmental degradation on the Lower Rouge River.
Nor do I get all carried away with the other Rouge River steel mill — the one owned by U.S. Steel whose three blast furnaces are situated on Zug Island at the mouth of the Rouge.
Maybe it’s ’cause I’m still mad (I am!) at the way a Severstal security guard illegally tried to eject me and my motorboat from the public waters of the freighter bay leading into the huge Ford-Severstal complex.
I thought maybe the stooge didn’t like me taking photos of the rising columns of ore, coke and limestone dust being blown off the open piles of said raw materials lined up alongside the freighter dock. But a friend tells me a Severstal guard ordered him to leave when he came by boat into the Turning Bsin at the Rouge plant.
Guess Severstal and its Russian owners think think they own everything, including the water that floats our boats and the disgusting air they ruin before we can breathe it. That’s nothing new — industries that settled along the Lower Rouge have acted like what’s good for their short-term needs must be great for Michiganders and Ontarians, too.
Now they’re celebrating their near-complete destruction of the Lower Rouge as a habitat for wildlife Friday, October 24 at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. UM-D is hosting this annual festival of self-congratulation at 8 a.m. in UM-D’s Fairlane Center North Building.
By the way, that expression, “festival of self-congratulation,” is not my own creation. I heard it from a friend who used the term to describe Rouge 2006. I was invited along with my colleague, Patricia Beck, to be part of the show at Rouge 2006. We were to show photos and talk about our five-day June 2005 canoe trip 27 miles up the Rouge. We were later dis-invited. I don’t know why. It is correct that some of my comments about the condition of the Rouge were, well, a bit critical.
It’s been a long wait, but for anyone who might have found our show interesting in 2006, our canoe adventure story will be reprised more completely in book form, to be published by Wayne State University Press next April. We call the book Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River.
Rouge 2006 and all the other year-Rouges are organized by a group called the Rouge Gateway Partnership, which includes UM-D, Henry Ford Community College, plus many municipalities and industries in the Rouge watershed.
It will be quite an amazing show, if you enjoy oxymorons like “corporate environmentalism.”
A press release from UM-D proclaims, “Annual report on Rouge River to celebrate $7B in investments.”
The subhead says, “Corporate investments along the lower Rouge River have created thousands of jobs and enhanced environmental status of the region.”
It was hard for me to see how the “environmental status of the region” has been enhanced as I looked across the banks of the Rouge from my motorboat one warm day last September.
The biggest pile of table salt I’ve ever seen stood blowin’ in the wind beside the river. It was Morton Salt Co.’s contribution to enhancing the environmental status of the region.
Ditto U.S. Gypsum, enhancing the environmental status with open piles adding grit to the breeze. And ditto a pair of cement companies, and U.S. Steel’s blast furnaces on Zug Island. All adding environmental status.
Try flying over Zug island in an open-door helicopter. I’ve done it, and at 1,000 feet the stench of sulfur is awful.
On the ground, it’s not just the grit, either.
Noise! The roar of those Zug Island blast furnaces has an amazing reach. In our canoe in June 2005, we
could hear that roar for miles as we paddled against headwinds in our little canoe.
Every time I open the door of my car, I think about what it costs to produce a vehicle made primarily of steel.
But that bad air! Last year, while still working as a Detroit Free Press reporter, I wrote about a garden cultivated by kids at the Delray Community Center. I watched kids harvest some nice squash and tomatoes, but nobody wanted to eat them. They were covered with a film of who-knows-what — particles of crud that fell from the sky, having been spewed upward by the steel mills, salt mines, cement plants and the nation’s largest single-site waste water treatment plant whose stacks can be seen from the garden.
Environmental status?
Give me a break.
Okay, I’ll give them this: Thanks to the Clean Water Act and some actual enforcement, industrial pollutants have been reduced. The Rouge no longer catches fire.
But is that the standard we want?
The host of these annual Rouge “reports,” the University of Michigan, doesn’t have clean hands, either. According to the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, one of the two biggest impediments to a viable fishery in the Rouge River is the dam at Fair Lane, the Henry Ford Estate now owned and operated as a tourist draw by UM. The dam diverts water to electric generators installed in 1913 for Henry Ford by his pal Thomas Edison. It’s considered, rightly, a historic artifact.
But the dam blocks the passage of fish that might swim up the Rouge to spawn. The solution is a fish passageway. It’s actually been proposed by the Rouge Gateway folks, but nobody, including UM, is ready to cough up the money — roughly a million bucks — to build one. UM has a huge endowment. Take a walk around the Ann Arbor campus and check out all the new consgtruction. Seems like they could fine a million bucks for a fish ladder, doesn’t it?
Less known is the suspicion, voiced to me by the engineer who placed one of Henry Ford’s old generators into operation at UM-D’s Fair Lane mansion, that the mill’s head race may contain sediments contaminated with toxic chemicals. A few years ago, Wayne County spent $12.5 million cleaning toxic chemicals out of the bottom of Newburgh Lake a few miles up the Middle Rouge, so toxics are not a new thought when it comes to Fair Lane.
The Fair Lane generator runs at a fraction of its capacity because the head race is clogged with silt, engineer David Wheeler told me.
Why not clean it? I asked. Because, he told me, nobody wants to know what’s in that sediment.
Some enhancement.
So what’s to celebrate?
Well, it wouldn’t be the other impediment to fish breeding in the Lower Rouge — the four miles of concrete pavement laid under the Rouge by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1972 to prevent flooding. Add all the concrete wharves and steel seawalls that line the Rouge — with four miles of the Corps’ concrete pavement — and you get nine miles of wildlife-hostile environment from Michigan Avenue to Zug island.
So tell me again, what is it we’re celebrating?
Well, according to UM-D, “We are celebrating these great corporate citizens who are leading by example and building a sustainable future for our region.”
Here’s an example of “leading by example”: Those inflated booms just downstream from the I-75 bridge. They’re meant to hold back oil and other industrial crap expelled by the Detroit Waste Water Treatment Plant through the O’Brien Drain. That’s where roughly a quarter million gallons of oil were let loose into the Rouge back in 2002. Last year, I reported in the Free Press that more oil was being dumped into the municipal drains and it was appearing in the Lower Rouge. That was around the time of Rouge 2007.
On Tuesday, October 21, 2008, a federal jury convicted three men of dumping 13 million gallons of industrial waste into Detroit’s sewer system, from whence it was disgorged into the Rouge River via the O’Brien Drain. According to the Wednesday, October 22, 2008 Detroit Free Press, one of the men faces up to 10 years in prison, another up to five years and a third could spend a year in stir.Hey, anybody wanta take a dip?
Before we went on our canoe trip, I checked to see how safe it might be for us if we fell out of our canoe. At best 5 percent of the time the Rouge is safe for swimming. At best. That counts the less-polluted headwaters, so figure this: You never want to fall into the Lower Rouge.
But that’s where they’ll be celebrating.
UM-D’s “sustainable future” may translate to “jobs, jobs, jobs,” but it doesn’t return the vast fish and animal breeding grounds destroyed by the late 19th and early 20th century industrialists who converted the Lower Rouge to a shipping channel and an industrial sewer. Their heirs may boast of sustainable this and that, but if you drive your boat up the Rouge, or paddle a kayak or canoe, you’ll see as I did that nothing much has changed.
Unless you’re ejected by their security guards.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
