Songbirds Dying From DDT in Michigan Yards Superfund site blamed by Brian Bienkowski

Songbirds Dying From DDT in Michigan Yards

Superfund site blamed

by Brian Bienkowski

ST. LOUIS, Mich. – Jim Hall was mowing the town’s baseball diamond when he felt a little bump underneath him. “And there it was, a dead robin,” he said.

Just last week, he found another one. “Something is going on here,” said Hall, who has lived in this mid-Michigan town of 7,000 for 50 years.

Two dead birds may not seem like much. But for this town, it’s a worrisome legacy left behind by a chemical plant-turned-Superfund site.

After residents complained for years about dead birds in their yards, 22 American robins, six European starlings and one bluebird were collected for testing.

The results, revealed last week: The neighborhood’s songbirds are being poisoned by DDT, a pesticide that was banned in the United States more than 40 years ago. Lethal concentrations were found in the birds’ brains, as well as in the worms they eat.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. When people told me about it I didn’t believe it. And then we ran these tests. These are some of the highest-ever recorded levels in wild birds,” said Matt Zwiernik, a Michigan State University assistant professor of environmental toxicology who led the testing.

The birds’ brains contained concentrations of DDE, a breakdown product of DDT, from 155 to 1,043 parts per million, with an average of 552. “Thirty in the brain is the threshold for acute death,” Zwiernik said. “All the birds exceeded that by at least two- or three-fold, and many by much more than that.” Twelve of the 29 birds had brain lesions or liver abnormalities.

The culprit is a toxic mess left behind by Velsicol Chemical Corp., formerly Michigan Chemical, which manufactured pesticides until 1963, a year after Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring exposed the hazards of DDT, especially for birds. Populations of bald eagles and other birds crashed when DDT thinned their eggs, killing their embryos. The pesticide, known for accumulating in food webs and persisting for decades in soil and river sediment, was banned in the United States in 1972.

The nine-block neighborhood has become a real-life example of Carson’s “Fable for Tomorrow” in Silent Spring. “It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh,” Carson wrote.

Velsicol is infamous for one of the worst chemical disasters in U.S. history: In 1973 a flame retardant compound they manufactured – polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs – was mixed up with a cattle feed supplement, which led to widespread contamination in Michigan. Thousands of cattle and other livestock were poisoned, about 500 farms were quarantined and people across Michigan were exposed to a chemical linked to cancer, reproduction problems and endocrine disruption.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took control of the site in 1982 and the plant was demolished in the mid-1990s, leaving behind three Superfund sites in the 3.5-square mile town.

EPA officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the poisoned birds and the Superfund cleanup.

Of most concern is the 54-acre site that once contained Velsicol’s main plant, which backs up to the neighborhood where residents have found dead birds on their lawns.

“When he [Zwiernik] tells people about what we have going on here, people say ‘Really? That’s a 1960s problem,’ ” said Ed Lorenz, a professor at nearby Alma College and vice chair of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, which represents the community. Hall is the chair of the task force.

While there is a long-term health study for residents who had been exposed to PBBs, no one is monitoring their exposure to DDT or looking for possible human health effects. Elsewhere, traces of the pesticide have been linked in some human studies to reproductive problems, including reduced fertility and altered sperm counts.

“There’s definitely concern about the plant, the plant site, health and the environment,” said St. Louis City Manager Robert McConkie. “But we’ve learned to live with it.”

The town’s median household income is 43 percent lower than the state’s. About 22 percent of its families live below the poverty line.

The birds apparently have been poisoned by eating worms living in contaminated soil near the old chemical plant. No studies have been conducted to see whether the DDT has contaminated any vegetables or fruits grown in yards.

Jane Keon, secretary of the task force, said the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality ignored their complaints about dead birds for years.

But Dan Rockafellow, the state agency’s project manager for the site, said it took time to collect enough bird samples to test.

“People would tell us they found dead birds all the time, but birds disappear quickly. Cats, raccoons, other animals get to them,” Rockafellow said. “They weren’t just lying around everywhere.”

Keon said that for two decades the EPA stayed only on the plant site, “as if the chain link fence would hold in the chemicals or something.”

State officials didn’t start testing people’s yards until 2006, when they found several yards highly contaminated with DDT and PBBs.

EPA contractors now are cleaning up 59 yards. (One homeowner refused the cleanup.) Next year the agency plans on adding another 37 yards outside of the nine-block area.

Most of the contamination is in the top six inches of the soil, probably from the chemicals drifting over from the plant, Rockafellow said. However, some yards have DDT and PBBs deeper in the soil, which could be due to Velsicol’s offer of free fill dirt to their neighbors decades ago.

The cleanup is driven by ecological risk, not risk to the homeowners, Rockafellow said. “This is because of the dead robins.”

When asked why it took so long to address the contaminated yards, Rockafellow said it came down to “knowing where the chemicals were. Once we did we fenced those areas off.” Those areas were cleaned up in the fall of 2012, he said, and that spurred “aggressive sampling in the neighborhood.”

Now the neighborhood is buzzing with trucks and workers. Clad in construction helmets and orange vests, workers contracted by the EPA tear up yards, remove dirt, fill it back in and lay new sod.

It isn’t the first time St. Louis wildlife has been contaminated. The Pine River’s contaminated sediment has resulted in a no-consumption advisory for all species of its fish. From 1998 to 2006, most of the Superfund site’s cleanup money – about $100 million – went toward cleaning up the river. After polluted mud was dredged up, preliminary testing has shown that DDT levels are declining in bass and carp downstream of the site, Rockafellow said.

However, DDT and PBBs remain in the river’s sediment and soil, he said. In addition, traces of a chemical that is a byproduct of DDT manufacturing, pCBSA, have been found in the city’s water system, so new water mains will tap into a nearby town’s water supply.

“Our first priority was water and the second priority is now getting the lawns cleaned up,” Rockafellow said.

The bird testing by the Michigan State researcher was largely unfunded, except for a small amount from the community task force. Zwiernik said the EPA and state need to determine if the cleanup actually stops birds from dropping dead.

“They have to have some kind of future monitoring program to test the remediation effort’s success. We’ve had a difficult time to get regulators to listen to that,” he said.

While birds in the rest of the region aren’t at risk, “the robins’ population in the nine-block area is decimated year over year,” he said.

Residents of the neighborhood go about their business of watering flowers and walking their dogs. “It’s sad because a lot of people here are losing some beautiful trees,” Keon said. She pointed to a large Victorian home with new, patchy sod. “The owner of that home said this was going to be his retirement home,” Keon said.

For Hall, leaving St. Louis is not an option. Pollution or not, this is home.

“It’s a nice place to raise your family, great community, people love and take care of each other,” Hall said. “If I ran away, I’d be running away from my responsibility to leave this place better for the next generation.”

By Brian Bienkowski
Staff Writer
Environmental Health News

August 6, 2014

Health experts are questioning the Environmental Protection Agency and Michigan state officials for their decades-long delays in cleanup of a Superfund site that is killing songbirds in yards, possibly leaving people at risk, too.

After years of complaints from residents, researchers recently reported that robins and other birds are dropping dead from DDT poisoning in the mid-Michigan town of St. Louis, which was contaminated by an old chemical plant.

“The more we know about DDT the more dangerous we find out it is for wildlife, yes, but humans, too,” said Dr. David Carpenter, director of the University at Albany – State University of New York’s School of Public Health and an expert in Superfund cleanups.

Velsicol Chemical Corp., formerly Michigan Chemical, manufactured pesticides at the plant until 1963. DDT, known for accumulating in food webs and persisting for decades in soil and river sediment, was banned in the United States in 1972.

The dead robins and other songbirds tested last month at Michigan State University had some of the highest levels of DDT ever recorded in wild birds. They were contaminated by eating worms in the neighborhood’s soil.

The EPA has been in control of the Superfund site since 1982, and the residents and songbirds have been living with the highly-tainted soil in their yards for decades. This summer, EPA contractors are excavating contaminated soil from 59 yards in the town of 7,000 people. Another 37 yards will be cleaned up next year.

EPA and state officials are not conducting any testing to determine how highly exposed the residents are, or whether they are experiencing any health effects.

Carpenter said research elsewhere has linked DDT exposure to effects on fertility, immunity, hormones and brain development. Fetuses are particularly at risk. It also may induce asthma.

“Let’s say your backyard has DDT in it. If wind blows, and kicks up dust, you might [be exposed to] DDT. The sun shines, water evaporates, you might get a little DDT,” Carpenter said. “And who knows what other chemical exposure they’re getting from the site.”

Michele Marcus, an Emory University epidemiologist, said she and her team of health experts heard “shocking stories” when they visited the neighborhood near the dismantled chemical plant last December.

“We heard from several people in the neighborhood that back in the day [decades ago] on several occasions alarms would go off and the neighborhood would be covered in white powder,” Marcus said. “It would take the paint off of people’s cars. Imagine what it was doing to people.”

When asked why it took three decades to address contamination in people’s yards next to the plant, Thomas Alcamo, remedial project manager for the Superfund site, said “hindsight is 20-20.” He said there were some “obvious problems” with the initial cleanup but he maintained it was “not an oversight.”

“This was just a natural progression of the Superfund. It’s just a continual investigation of the plant site itself,” Alcamo said. “Then we looked at the [Pine] river and focused efforts there. Then the state looked at residential areas.”

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality started sampling some yards in a nine-block area near the plant in 2006, after complaints from residents. Orange fences were installed around heavily contaminated areas. The EPA cleaned up those yards in 2012, Alcamo said. Further sampling, however, found that nearly the entire neighborhood needs cleanup so more excavations began this summer.

Jonathan Chevrier, an epidemiologist at McGill University, said research suggests that fetuses and young children are most vulnerable to DDT. The major worry is brain development in the womb, he said. “Research shows those with prenatal exposure scored lower on neurodevelopmental scales,” which can indicate lower IQs, he said.

There also is evidence that DDT is linked to low birth weights. In addition, a study last month found female mice exposed as a fetus were more likely to have diabetes and obesity later in life.

“The way it kills insects is by affecting the nervous system. It induces a rapid firing of neurons, exhausts them, and then the insect is killed,” Chevrier said. “It’s very plausible that it would attack humans’ nervous systems in the same way.” DDT also may disrupt thyroid hormones, which are critical for brain development, he said.

Nevertheless, EPA officials said St. Louis residents are not in danger. Alcamo said the levels in the soil are not high enough to pose an immediate risk to people.

“This [cleanup] is all for long-term risk so there’s no one that needs to leave during cleanup activities,” he said.

The EPA has not issued recommendations on gardening or other activities while the yards are cleaned up, other than keeping people away from the removed dirt. The agency is monitoring air and controlling dust, Alcamo said. “As long as they wash vegetables,” they should be fine because DDT doesn’t uptake into plants, he said.

However studies have found that some plants can take up DDT, including pumpkin and zucchini and some corn.

Health experts disputed Alcamo’s contention that the DDT levels are not high enough to pose a risk to people. There is no such thing as a level of DDT that “we don’t need to worry about,” Carpenter said.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s a clear health threshold,” Chevrier added. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but, if there is, scientists haven’t found it.”

Velsicol is infamous for one of the worst chemical disasters in U.S. history: In 1973 its flame retardant compound – polybrominated biphenyls, or PBBs – was mixed up with a cattle feed supplement, which led to widespread contamination in Michigan.

Marcus and her colleagues are studying people exposed during the PBB mix-up. They also have launched a new study to examine the levels of PBB, DDT and other chemicals in former Velsicol workers and their families.

Some of the chemical workers in Marcus’ study live adjacent to the plant, but the study does not cover the entire contaminated neighborhood.

Alcamo said community health studies are “outside the scope” of what the EPA does.

Most of the contamination is in the top six inches of the soil, probably from the chemicals drifting over from the plant, but some yards have DDT as deep as four feet, according to an EPA report from April.

All 59 houses tested had at least one soil sample that contained more than 4.1 parts per million of DDT that the EPA set as a cleanup standard. Two-thirds of the yards had at least one sample with more than double the 4.1 parts per million guideline.

The EPA uses a DDT cleanup standard of 5 parts per million based on studies to protect wildlife health, Alcamo said.

“We are using an excavation level of 4.1 ppm DDT to ensure that we are 95 percent confident that we are meeting the 5 ppm number,” he said.

Michigan’s cleanup criteria, based on protecting people from exposure, is 57 ppm for DDT. One home had levels more than twice that amount –140 parts per million in the top six inches of soil.

Alcamo said the EPA is now over-excavating many yards to be certain of cleanup. Contractors will remove about 30,000 tons of contaminated soil this summer.

Alcamo said the EPA has made “great progress,” including a Pine River cleanup. There’s been a “98 percent reduction in fish tissue concentrations of DDT,” he said.

In addition, the EPA is providing 90 percent of the funding to overhaul St. Louis’ drinking water supply because low levels of a DDT byproduct, pCBSA, have been found in the city’s water system.

But Gary Smith, a lifelong resident of St. Louis, said the EPA failed St. Louis on the first round of cleanup, and it cannot happen again.

“We just want the doggone neighborhood cleaned up so we can put an end to this,” said Smith, 63, who is treasurer of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force. “We don’t want to be called a toxic town. We want people to say ‘hey, they cleaned it up.’

“Let’s go the extra mile and not have this be an embarrassment for the EPA again,” he said. “’We have no money’ may be true, but it’s a poor excuse.”

Carpenter said it’s unfortunate that people were probably exposed to DDT for many years.

“The EPA is simply overwhelmed with hazardous sites,” Carpenter said.

EHN welcomes republication of our stories, but we require that publications include the author’s name and Environmental Health News at the top of the piece, along with a link back to EHN’s version.

For questions or feedback about this piece, contact Editor in Chief Marla Cone at mcone@ehn.org.

Follow Brian Bienkowski on Twitter.

http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2014/aug/michigan-ddt-cleanup

Read Full Post »

Poisoning Michigan: Author revisits PBB crisis 30 years later by GREAT LAKES ECHO – 2010

“Abraham Lincoln once said that the greatest danger to our country lies not from the outside, because as freedom-loving people we would band together to protect ourselves from invasion. Rather, our greatest threat lies from within. I believe that he was right. We must protect ourselves from those of us who, through ignorance, stupidity, or criminal neglect, would destroy our civilization. If we allow these environmental disasters to continue, sooner or later we will kill or seriously impair the health of millions of our fellow countrymen.” – Thomas H. Corbett, physician (referring to Michigan’s PBB disaster) Introduction to The Poisoning of Michigan by Joyce Egginton

How harmful are these useless flame retardants? (They do nothing to prevent materials from going up in flames and cause even more lethal fumes to our firefighters fighting those flames)

“In late 1974, soon after the first highly contaminated meat and dairy food must have been sold, the Babbits noticed their children’s performance falling off badly. Scott, the youngest, then aged fourteen, was the hardest hit. He lost thirty pounds between November and Christmas. His hair began to fall out. His coordination became uncertain. His personality changed–“from open eagerness to surly withdrawal,” said his father. Hospital tests failed to produce a diagnosis but, in March 1975, a photographer friend who had taken some pictures of contaminated cattle remarked, “My God, Scott has the same symptoms as those cows!” Hank Babbitt asked afflicted farmers about cattle symptoms, and was convinced.” – page 250 of The Poisoning of Michigan.

“Also, agencies don’t always respond properly. There were plenty of warnings that this might happen. There were organizations, institutions, companies and universities that could have prevented this from happening. They didn’t intervene and they made mistakes. The [Michigan] Department of Agriculture took the position that they were going to protect the farmers more than consumers of food.* For a few months, it allowed the contaminated animals to be processed, which made the early mistake get worse and worse….”

*The small family farmers were not actually protected because most lost their farms after the poisoning. The industrial farms, however, were protected and expanded their production in the poisoning aftermath. Should also mention that shortly after, the industrial farms rolled out Monsanto’s new roundup technology crops.

For those who were living in Michigan from 1973 – 1975 there is a study you can participate in here http://pbbregistry.emory.edu/

Poisoning Michigan: Author revisits PBB crisis 30 years later

GREAT LAKES ECHO

JUN 4 2010

The accidental poisoning of Michigan dairy cattle in the 1970s sparked the largest chemical contamination in United States history.

Nine million residents consumed contaminated meat and milk for a year after a Michigan chemical plant mistakenly added PBB (polybrominated biphenyl) — a toxic fire retardant — to dairy cattle feed, and distributed it to farms throughout the state.

In the Poisoning of Michigan — published 30 years ago — investigative reporter and author Joyce Egginton sheds light on the PBB disaster and how federal and state authorities failed to respond.

PBBs were banned in 2003, but equally toxic substitutes are still commonly used. The Michigan State University Press reprinted Egginton’s book last August to draw attention to the subject once again.

In a phone interview from her home in New York, Egginton discusses the impact of the book 30 years later and how the risk of chemical contamination is a long-lasting concern.

Q: What sparked the story?

A: “One day I picked up the New York Times and there was, way tucked on an inside page, a very insignificant-looking story placed down the bottom of the page. It talked about the fact that there had been a contamination in Michigan and that it was estimated that everybody in the state had, by this time, drunk contaminated milk and eaten contaminated meat. And I thought, immediately, why isn’t anybody taking more notice of it? So I proposed that I should go out there and write it, and I did.”

Q: What was the immediate impact of the PBB contamination?

A: “What had happened is that the whole quantity of PBB had gotten mixed in cattle feed. It was the biggest cattle feed plant in the state of Michigan and farmers from all over the state ordered their feed from there. With any sort of poison that people are slowing taking, the symptoms started appearing gradually.

“At first, it didn’t seem too bad. Then, after a few weeks or months, farmers were saying their cows were aborting and cattle were dying. Cows began looking deformed: their coats were mangy and their hoofs would overgrow. The farmers did the obvious thing of going to the Department of Agriculture and saying, ‘I’ve got a problem here. Can you help me?’

“The general view presented to them by the Department of Agriculture at that time was well, ‘You must be doing something wrong.’ Because in the early days, the symptoms that the cattle showed could have been put down to bad husbandry or poor feeding methods. Farmers weren’t talking to each other about their troubles.

“It was over a year before the state acknowledged that the problem existed. And even then, it didn’t know how to handle it. I’m not saying that in any way blaming the state of Michigan, but simply, this was something so widely outside their experience that there was no way they could know what to do. It’s like a bunch of doctors faced with a brand new disease. They started looking at the diseases they knew rather than looking for something they didn’t know.”

Q: Why was the PBB crisis underreported when it happened? Do you think it’s been covered fairly since then?

A: “Even at that time, although it was this little downpage story in the New York Times, there was nothing in any of the Detroit papers. The Grand Rapids Press started covering it very early, and did a good job. A monthly magazine called the Michigan Farmer did, but nobody else that I could see. At the beginning, it was thought to be the complaints of farmers that couldn’t be substantiated.

“It was an enormous story and no one was interested. I’m still, all these years later, amazed that that story has not been more widely told. Here is the biggest recorded contamination alone in this country — one that affected nine million people — and where have you read much about it?

“Not long after it happened, there was a story of contamination in a place up in New York state called Love Canal. It was a modern housing estate that had been built on top of an old toxic dump. Everybody had been told the dump was sealed and safe, and it wasn’t. After some years, the toxins from the dump started permeating into people’s homes and there was a high degree of illness, particularly among children.

“Now that got a lot of attention — a huge amount of attention. I reported on Love Canal. It was all contained in one place. It was easy to find people to interview because were all living in adjoining streets. They were all activists in the fight against the whole contamination issue.

“When you had come to report the Michigan story, what have you got? You got a farmer here, another farmer 50 miles away, another farmer a long drive across the countryside. I drove hundreds of thousands of miles crisscrossing Michigan, interviewing farmers. Newspapers don’t give that much time to a story. It took an awful lot of time. It wasn’t easy. Is that why it didn’t get better reported? I often wonder how many stories are easier to report get reported much better because of that.”

Q: What were the hurdles to gathering and presenting the material?

A: “I really had to learn how to report differently from the way I had been taught. This is true of any environmental reporting. As a journalist, I had been trained that once you get a story, always check it out with the authorities. Here you get a story that you go to the authorities — the Department of Agriculture and Farm Bureau — and they’re telling you, ‘Oh, look, he’s making a lot of fuss, we know about him. His farming methods aren’t that great.’

“That was a huge obstacle. It was an obstacle for me because I didn’t know about dairy farming. I studied it as hard as I could, and as quickly as I could, but I think it was an obstacle that daunted a great many journalists in the state. I always remember that the head of the Department of Public Health in Michigan saying later, several years later, this was something beyond their comprehension.

“He used the phrase: ‘We were mired in a swamp of ignorance.’”

Q: Why reissue the book 30 years later?

A: “This event in Michigan did cause PBB to be outlawed. It’s never been made since. And so there is a general reaction, ‘Well, Thank God.’ It’s caused this trouble — it’s no longer a menace.

“Now, one discovers, that what replaced PBB is a great variety of similar chemicals that are used as fire retardants without real testing on the market. They’re not tested on people and many of them aren’t even tested on animals. And they’re terribly widely used.

“This country has the highest incidents of these kinds of chemicals being found in people’s bodies. They’re used as fire retardants in practically every home. For example, it’s in the kind of foam rubber that is used in mattresses and armchairs. It’s used in carpets and drapes.

“Doing the job it’s said to do is a huge amount of overkill. OK, it’s a fire retardant but it’s poisoning people the whole time. It’s a good example of trying to come up with a preventive before you really find out what dangers the preventive can pose. I thought it’s about time to draw some more attention to that.”

Q: How would you have approached this book in 2010?

A: “In some ways, it would be easier to cover because there’s more knowledge in place. When they tried to settle this one by a lawsuit on behalf of the farmers there was no such thing as environmental law. Now, there’s more protection for the public. But the more protection is coming at the same time as the more exposure. The one is never catching up with the other.

SPECIAL FEATURE:

After the statewide PBB contamination, the chemical plant at fault, owned by a company now called Velsicol Chemical Corp., became a federal Superfund site due to contamination of a nearby river. See what an environmental policy expert has to say about its cleanup.

Here is the interview referenced above.

Chemical legacy lingers in town 30 years later

GREAT LAKES ECHO
JUN 3 2010

After the statewide PBB contamination, the chemical plant at fault, owned by a company now called Velsicol Chemical Corp., became a federal Superfund site due to contamination of a nearby river. An Environmental Protection Agency community advisory group was created in response to the cleanup. Ed Lorenz, an instructor at the nearby Alma College, chairs its legal committee.

Q: How did you get involved in the cleanup of the Michigan PBB crisis?

A: “Apparently, the Environmental Protection Agency has a procedure that says a community can have a community advisory group if there’s a major contamination cleanup in the area. We formed one of these back in 1998. We keep getting invited to train people around the country because we’re apparently the biggest and most effective, they say. We’ve met every month since Jan. 1998. About 25 to 30 people come every month year in year out to comment on what the EPA is doing. There’s an awful lot of interest. I became sort of an environmental expert. When I started out it was not my thing.

“I was living in Chicago in graduate school when this happened. I vaguely recall watching the news and seeing these cows getting shown in Michigan. It was so dramatic and bizarre. My field wasn’t environmental policy, it was public policy at Alma College. I went to this workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technlogy; there were people from all over the world. This guy in the middle of the room interrupted my introduction and said if we wanted to study problems in the American economy, we have to go to this guy’s hometown. It turns out, he knew about Michigan Chemical Corp. and how it was a disaster waiting to happen. I spent the whole time there talking to this guy and he gave me the history of it.”

Q: What impact did the book have 30 years ago?

A: “It spread the news about PBB beyond two places: the community the mistake was made that caused the problem and the diary farming community. The book also spread it beyond Michigan.”

Q: What was the most important lesson learned?

A: “On one hand, it’s that mistakes can be made and no one knows they’re made. No one was intending to ship the wrong material in the cattle feed system and contaminate the food chain.

“Also, agencies don’t always respond properly. There were plenty of warnings that this might happen. There were organizations, institutions, companies and universities that could have prevented this from happening. They didn’t intervene and they made mistakes. The [Michigan] Department of Agriculture took the position that they were going to protect the farmers more than consumers of food. For a few months, it allowed the contaminated animals to be processed, which made the early mistake get worse and worse.

“The reason the book is important is because she did a good job of describing all of those errors of organizations that were set up to protect us as people. It’s important to see that that can happen.”

Q: What led you to write Containing the Michigan PBB Crisis, 1973-1992: Testing the Environmental Policy Process?

A: “It was the 20th anniversary of the mistake. I was teaching in the area where the feed mistake started. Michigan Chemical Corp. was the company that made the contaminant that got into the food chain. As a result of the food contamination mistake, the company closed and lost its tax base. There was sort of a bitterness about the way the process had worked. Plus, there were people who were exposed to the contamination. There was the whole thing about the public health system failing to protect them.”

Read Full Post »