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Essex Paving
Essex Paving
Somewhere near “the middle of the mitten” you'll find the twin towns of Alma and St. Louis, Michigan. When I was a kid we called Alma “Smellma” because of the odors from its refinery. St. Louis has its industrial history too.
The Pine River flows through here, and as it passes St. Louis it goes by a large earthwork structure that looks remarkably like the base of a huge pyramid. The resemblance is apt, because this is indeed a tomb.
What it contains is less romantic than a mummified Pharaoh and his treasures, however. For this is what's left of Hooker Chemical. All the most toxic waste from that plant (and that is saying much) is entombed here waiting for Judgment Day – which is going to come a bit earlier than expected for anyone foolish enough to dig a hole here. Ever.
Downstream, the Pine flows into the Tittibiwassee, which stream gently waters the feet of another toxic landfill belonging to another upstanding American chemical company which is headquartered here in Midland, Michigan. “Dow Lets You Do Great Things,” including defoliating a significant percentage of Southeast Asia, and the waste materials from that operation are still here. Or at least most of them are.
It would not behoove me to point fingers, but for some reason the Tittibiwassee River, the Saginaw River downstream from that, and the associated floodplains are heavily contaminated. Dioxin headlines this particular cast of characters. In late 2007 the EPA reported finding a dioxin hot spot in the Saginaw River that is apparently the highest concentration of the stuff they've found anywhere in the United States.
My Department caught hell a year or two ago when they announced that the Tittibiwassee and Saginaw River flood plains were contaminated. Untold numbers of property owners arose in their wrath to complain, not that the land contained poison, not that the Department hadn't found it earlier, not that they were breathing, eating, and drinking one of the deadliest poisons known to mankind, but rather that the Department had told the world so and had therefore lowered their property values. The local State Senator or Representative, I forget which, made angry speeches about the Department saying the land was contaminated, including pieces of property where they hadn't actually tested for contamination.
Fair enough on the face of it, but if you are unfortunate enough to own a quarter acre lot smack dab in the middle of a contaminated floodplain, the indications are your little slice o' heaven is contaminated too. Nor is it reasonable to require a public agency assigned to protect the public safety to test every quarter acre before they can start warning the public about the problem.
That's my opinion. But as a Damned Bureaucrat I feel that warning of danger is more important than preserving your God-given right to sell your home to the next poor sucker while pretending that you still don't (officially) know it's poisoned. Human nature being what it is, I might feel differently if it were my property. I don't know.
Anyway, the Tittibiwassee meets other streams in the City of Saginaw to form the Saginaw River, which then flows northward through Bay City. Here, the town couldn't think of anything better to do with Middle Grounds, an island in the middle of the river, than to put their landfill there. Bay City used to manufacture a lot of electrical equipment, including transformers containing PCBs. Yes, you guessed it.
No matter what the horrible country music song says, nobody ever made a living in Saginaw, Michigan, as a Saginaw Fisherman. There used to be commercial fisheries in Saginaw Bay, but the Saginaw River only gets there long after it passes through Saginaw, even after it passes through Bay City. The mouth of the river is in Essexville. There it flows past a couple of coal-fired power plants and gathers (or used to gather) the mercury and sulfur-laden runoff from the plants' coal piles, before this miserable whipping-boy of a river manages to slip out of the hands of Man and sink into blessed oblivion in the Great Lakes.
I was involved in a minor case of water pollution along the Saginaw River once, years ago now. It involved a company I will call Essex Paving, because as far as I know no company by that name exists. I'm sure there must be one somewhere, but if so, I'm not talking about that.
Essex Paving had been operating on its riverfront site since God was a teenager, more or less. They had two hot-mix asphalt plants. One used a baghouse for pollution control. The other used a scrubber.
Now, when I was young and foolish and a Concerned Citizen would ask me “Does this plant have a scrubber?” I would say something like “No. It has a regenerative thermal oxidizer for VOC control, low-NOx burners and selective non-catalytic reduction for further NOx control, and a baghouse for particulates. There's total containment and a secondary baghouse for fugitives.” I'd watch their eyes glaze as I said all this. These days I just say “Yes. It has a scrubber. Yup yup.”
The fact remains that a scrubber is a very specific kind of pollution control device. If you have one on an asphalt plant it's going to be a venturi scrubber. This is a machine designed to throttle down the flow of air through a narrow throat, the venturi. It takes a lot of horsepower of fans to move the air at high speed through the narrow opening. Meanwhile, you have a lot of horsepower of water pumps pushing water as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The fast-moving air meets the fast-moving water head-on. Any grit in the air goes SPLORT into the water, making mud.
If you find a true scrubber on an asphalt plant, it will be a venturi scrubber. It will also be ancient. This technology was ancient even when I started this job. They don't put venturis on asphalt plants much any more. That's because a venturi scrubber is a nightmare.
High velocities. Outrageous pressure. Water. An environment where it's impossible to keep paint on anything. Sandblasting that will machine what once was a water nozzle into the smoothest, most perfectly polished flat plate you'll ever see. If you designed a machine expressly to destroy itself in normal operation, you couldn't do much better than a venturi scrubber.
Worse, in the unlikely event the thing is working properly, all you've done is turned an air pollution problem into a water pollution problem. What do you do with the muddy water?
One day, Lucy from the Water Division and Sergeant Tyrell from Criminal Investigations came by. They told me that Essex Paving, being right on the banks of the Saginaw River and all, had found a rather obvious place to dispose of their scrubber water.
You have no idea how bad this made me feel. The guys at Essex had always treated me well and had seemed to be on the up-and-up, and then someone tips us that something like this is going on. Worse, it seemed so obvious to me once I heard the suggestion. Scrubber. River. Kersplash. Duh.
We went to the plant to talk to Earl, the operator. Earl knew what was wrong, who had committed a crime, and it wasn't himself. Some guy on the picket line had ratted him out. He was going to identify the rat and Take Action! The union thugs were just trying to get to him as part of their harassment tactics during the strike.
And indeed, years of experience have taught me that there's nothing quite like a strike to make workers develop a conscience about environmental practices at their workplaces.
“That's as may be,” Sergeant Tyrell said, “but could you start the plant for us?”
“No. We can't get the asphalt out because there's nobody here to drive the trucks. No place to put the asphalt anyway.”
“Well, could you please run some water into the scrubber's water settling tank, then?”
“No. There's no water line to the tank.”
“How do you fill it when you run the plant, then?” I asked.
“We use a water truck. But there's nobody here to drive the water truck. They're all on strike.”
“There's a spigot over here,” Lucy said.
“That's not connected.”
“It's dripping.”
“Oh? I wonder when they fixed it? But there's no hose.”
“Isn't that a hose behind the tank there?”
As sourly as ever you could imagine, Earl attached the hose to the spigot and ran water into the tank. Lucy poured a little bottle of certified-safe red dye into the tank. I spotted where the plume of red water emerged from beneath the riverbank's riprap.
Before we went to court, Essex Paving claimed that the asphalt plant had been built on the right of way of an abandoned street. Somehow, a leak in the scrubber tank must have let water get into the abandoned storm drain of that defunct street.
At this moment Tyrell showed the guys from Essex a little engineering drawing I had done, showing what I could see by looking in each end of the “accidental” pipe. The drawing had notes like “Bend appx 30 degrees, two pieces pipe, welded seam... Box welded to scrubber tank, then to pipe; right-angle bend... 8 inch dia seamless steel tubing, cut end, excellent cond., riprap stones piled across end concealing it...”
They settled out of court.
If those guys are still around, I'm sure they remember me as a soulless, paper-pushing bureaucrat who enforced unfair, burdensome regulations and wouldn't let them off when they made an honest mistake. I'm not sure if I buy all that, but I'd have to agree that given the condition of the Saginaw River, a bit of grit, clay, and whatever mercury or lead might have been in the waste-oil fuel they used in the asphalt drum's burner probably wouldn't make much of a difference.
But if we ever want the river to stop being a sewer, we need to stop treating it like one.
Somewhere near “the middle of the mitten” you'll find the twin towns of Alma and St. Louis, Michigan. When I was a kid we called Alma “Smellma” because of the odors from its refinery. St. Louis has its industrial history too.
The Pine River flows through here, and as it passes St. Louis it goes by a large earthwork structure that looks remarkably like the base of a huge pyramid. The resemblance is apt, because this is indeed a tomb.
What it contains is less romantic than a mummified Pharaoh and his treasures, however. For this is what's left of Hooker Chemical. All the most toxic waste from that plant (and that is saying much) is entombed here waiting for Judgment Day – which is going to come a bit earlier than expected for anyone foolish enough to dig a hole here. Ever.
Downstream, the Pine flows into the Tittibiwassee, which stream gently waters the feet of another toxic landfill belonging to another upstanding American chemical company which is headquartered here in Midland, Michigan. “Dow Lets You Do Great Things,” including defoliating a significant percentage of Southeast Asia, and the waste materials from that operation are still here. Or at least most of them are.
It would not behoove me to point fingers, but for some reason the Tittibiwassee River, the Saginaw River downstream from that, and the associated floodplains are heavily contaminated. Dioxin headlines this particular cast of characters. In late 2007 the EPA reported finding a dioxin hot spot in the Saginaw River that is apparently the highest concentration of the stuff they've found anywhere in the United States.
My Department caught hell a year or two ago when they announced that the Tittibiwassee and Saginaw River flood plains were contaminated. Untold numbers of property owners arose in their wrath to complain, not that the land contained poison, not that the Department hadn't found it earlier, not that they were breathing, eating, and drinking one of the deadliest poisons known to mankind, but rather that the Department had told the world so and had therefore lowered their property values. The local State Senator or Representative, I forget which, made angry speeches about the Department saying the land was contaminated, including pieces of property where they hadn't actually tested for contamination.
Fair enough on the face of it, but if you are unfortunate enough to own a quarter acre lot smack dab in the middle of a contaminated floodplain, the indications are your little slice o' heaven is contaminated too. Nor is it reasonable to require a public agency assigned to protect the public safety to test every quarter acre before they can start warning the public about the problem.
That's my opinion. But as a Damned Bureaucrat I feel that warning of danger is more important than preserving your God-given right to sell your home to the next poor sucker while pretending that you still don't (officially) know it's poisoned. Human nature being what it is, I might feel differently if it were my property. I don't know.
Anyway, the Tittibiwassee meets other streams in the City of Saginaw to form the Saginaw River, which then flows northward through Bay City. Here, the town couldn't think of anything better to do with Middle Grounds, an island in the middle of the river, than to put their landfill there. Bay City used to manufacture a lot of electrical equipment, including transformers containing PCBs. Yes, you guessed it.
No matter what the horrible country music song says, nobody ever made a living in Saginaw, Michigan, as a Saginaw Fisherman. There used to be commercial fisheries in Saginaw Bay, but the Saginaw River only gets there long after it passes through Saginaw, even after it passes through Bay City. The mouth of the river is in Essexville. There it flows past a couple of coal-fired power plants and gathers (or used to gather) the mercury and sulfur-laden runoff from the plants' coal piles, before this miserable whipping-boy of a river manages to slip out of the hands of Man and sink into blessed oblivion in the Great Lakes.
I was involved in a minor case of water pollution along the Saginaw River once, years ago now. It involved a company I will call Essex Paving, because as far as I know no company by that name exists. I'm sure there must be one somewhere, but if so, I'm not talking about that.
Essex Paving had been operating on its riverfront site since God was a teenager, more or less. They had two hot-mix asphalt plants. One used a baghouse for pollution control. The other used a scrubber.
Now, when I was young and foolish and a Concerned Citizen would ask me “Does this plant have a scrubber?” I would say something like “No. It has a regenerative thermal oxidizer for VOC control, low-NOx burners and selective non-catalytic reduction for further NOx control, and a baghouse for particulates. There's total containment and a secondary baghouse for fugitives.” I'd watch their eyes glaze as I said all this. These days I just say “Yes. It has a scrubber. Yup yup.”
The fact remains that a scrubber is a very specific kind of pollution control device. If you have one on an asphalt plant it's going to be a venturi scrubber. This is a machine designed to throttle down the flow of air through a narrow throat, the venturi. It takes a lot of horsepower of fans to move the air at high speed through the narrow opening. Meanwhile, you have a lot of horsepower of water pumps pushing water as fast as possible in the opposite direction. The fast-moving air meets the fast-moving water head-on. Any grit in the air goes SPLORT into the water, making mud.
If you find a true scrubber on an asphalt plant, it will be a venturi scrubber. It will also be ancient. This technology was ancient even when I started this job. They don't put venturis on asphalt plants much any more. That's because a venturi scrubber is a nightmare.
High velocities. Outrageous pressure. Water. An environment where it's impossible to keep paint on anything. Sandblasting that will machine what once was a water nozzle into the smoothest, most perfectly polished flat plate you'll ever see. If you designed a machine expressly to destroy itself in normal operation, you couldn't do much better than a venturi scrubber.
Worse, in the unlikely event the thing is working properly, all you've done is turned an air pollution problem into a water pollution problem. What do you do with the muddy water?
One day, Lucy from the Water Division and Sergeant Tyrell from Criminal Investigations came by. They told me that Essex Paving, being right on the banks of the Saginaw River and all, had found a rather obvious place to dispose of their scrubber water.
You have no idea how bad this made me feel. The guys at Essex had always treated me well and had seemed to be on the up-and-up, and then someone tips us that something like this is going on. Worse, it seemed so obvious to me once I heard the suggestion. Scrubber. River. Kersplash. Duh.
We went to the plant to talk to Earl, the operator. Earl knew what was wrong, who had committed a crime, and it wasn't himself. Some guy on the picket line had ratted him out. He was going to identify the rat and Take Action! The union thugs were just trying to get to him as part of their harassment tactics during the strike.
And indeed, years of experience have taught me that there's nothing quite like a strike to make workers develop a conscience about environmental practices at their workplaces.
“That's as may be,” Sergeant Tyrell said, “but could you start the plant for us?”
“No. We can't get the asphalt out because there's nobody here to drive the trucks. No place to put the asphalt anyway.”
“Well, could you please run some water into the scrubber's water settling tank, then?”
“No. There's no water line to the tank.”
“How do you fill it when you run the plant, then?” I asked.
“We use a water truck. But there's nobody here to drive the water truck. They're all on strike.”
“There's a spigot over here,” Lucy said.
“That's not connected.”
“It's dripping.”
“Oh? I wonder when they fixed it? But there's no hose.”
“Isn't that a hose behind the tank there?”
As sourly as ever you could imagine, Earl attached the hose to the spigot and ran water into the tank. Lucy poured a little bottle of certified-safe red dye into the tank. I spotted where the plume of red water emerged from beneath the riverbank's riprap.
Before we went to court, Essex Paving claimed that the asphalt plant had been built on the right of way of an abandoned street. Somehow, a leak in the scrubber tank must have let water get into the abandoned storm drain of that defunct street.
At this moment Tyrell showed the guys from Essex a little engineering drawing I had done, showing what I could see by looking in each end of the “accidental” pipe. The drawing had notes like “Bend appx 30 degrees, two pieces pipe, welded seam... Box welded to scrubber tank, then to pipe; right-angle bend... 8 inch dia seamless steel tubing, cut end, excellent cond., riprap stones piled across end concealing it...”
They settled out of court.
If those guys are still around, I'm sure they remember me as a soulless, paper-pushing bureaucrat who enforced unfair, burdensome regulations and wouldn't let them off when they made an honest mistake. I'm not sure if I buy all that, but I'd have to agree that given the condition of the Saginaw River, a bit of grit, clay, and whatever mercury or lead might have been in the waste-oil fuel they used in the asphalt drum's burner probably wouldn't make much of a difference.
But if we ever want the river to stop being a sewer, we need to stop treating it like one.