In 1978, Velsicol agreed to shut down its St. Louis factory. Two years later, under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), or Superfund Act, the state and the owners of Michigan Chemical contained the site and created a landfill for much of the contaminated materials. They did this by moving as much contaminated material as possible onto the former Velsicol site and sealing it with a clay cap, designed to barricade contaminants from the adjacent river.
Unfortunately, this barrier did not contain the tons of DDT and other chemical pollutants that had already been dumped into the Pine River during Velsicol's operation. Velsicol, as part of an agreement under the Superfund Act, had no responsibility to cleanup the river, even the portion adjacent to their site. This proved disastrous years later when the levels of contamination in the river began to rise again.
NorthWest Industries was the owner of Velsicol after 1965. Originally it was called the Chicago Northwestern Railroad, before selling the railroad and changing to NorthWest. At the time, NorthWest owned Fruit of the Loom, the well-known underwear company. Then in an internal restructuring in the 1980s, Fruit of the Loom became the parent company. Velsicol, once a part of Northwest, now became a part of Fruit of the Loom.
Fruit of the Loom then sold off Velsicol in two parts, one to a Swedish company, and the rest was sold to the seven former managers. But the managers knew when they took the parts of Velsicol, they would have to deal with a lot of polluted sites. So they made a deal that the seven worst contaminated sites would be retained by Fruit of the Loom, effectively handing over their own responsibility . Because of this, the Pine River CAG is pursuing Fruit of the Loom alongside Velsicol in their insurance lawsuit.
Dredging of the Pine River at the Pine River Superfund Site. This shows where one side of the river was emptied so that the contaminated riverbed could be cleaned out.
When the EPA returned to the Velsicol site to take measurements in 1997, they presented their troubling findings to a meeting of the community. As a result, the concerned citizens formed the Pine River Citizen's Advisory Group (CAG) in October 1997. Then in 1998, the EPA launched an emergency cleanup of DDT contamination in the Pine River. This cleanup would tackle the hardest part of the contaminated area: the river itself.
The cleanup was accomplished by sectioning off the two sides of the river adjacent to the Velsicol site with a wall of steel pillars, some of which remain today. Then the river bed on one side was emptied of water. The contaminated material was dredged from the area and fresh sediment replaced it.
The Pine River CAG has attempted to take out a lawsuit against AIG Insurance, the provider of a pollution liability policy for the Velsicol site under Fruit of the Loom. Their ongoing legal battle with AIG Insurance has potentially been settled for $91,000, but this is only 1/10th of the full $10 million policy that Velsicol and Fruit of the Loom had out on their site. The CAG has spent the past decade attempting to claim the funding to clean up their community from whom they see as the responsible party.
Jane Keon - Current Chair of the Pine River Community Activism Group
Jane Keon is the current chair of the Pine River CAG. She was born in St Louis, Michigan, and was aware of the threat that DDT posed at an early age. Her father worked as an assistant to George J. Wallace, in his experiments at MSU to prove the devastating effects DDT was having on bird populations. Watch her video interview or read the highlights here.
Jane Keon: "Back in 1997, when DEQ and EPA came back to St. Louis and did tests in the sediments of the river, I personally was against them doing anything in the river. My thinking was that the site was in St. Louis above the Dam, and I lived downstream from St. Louis on the Pine River. So I didn't want them stirring up any of the sediments in the town, because then they'd come on down and pollute the river where I was.
Well, at that first meeting that took place in October of 1997, a community meeting, studies that had been done showed that DDT levels in fish and animals down where I lived were already high...and were getting higher. Everytime there was a new study, there was more DDT build up in the animals and the river. And the fish...a lot of the fish just died. They (EPA) would do caged fish studies...they'd come back and all the fish would be dead. So that made me think, 'Okay, so we're already polluted.'
So then EPA was talking about cleaning up bodies of water with DDT contaminants and what the levels of contamination had to be before they'd come in for a clean up. I think it was like 240 parts per million, and then they would come in and do a clean up. Well, they had already told us previously during the meeting that the area already had over a thousand parts per million or more. So it became clear to me that night that we really needed a clean up."
Ed Lorenz is a professor of Social Sciences at Alma College and was chair of the Pine River CAG for 4 years. Here he talks about the ongoing legal battles the Pine River CAG has been going through to see their community rehabilitated.
Watch the video interview or read the highlights here.
Ed Lorenz(EL): There has been a lawsuit between St. Louis, the city government is suing because of contamination in their drinking well. That is still in the courts actually.
GLW: And that's contamination that broke through the clay wall?
EL: In a way. We know somehow the contamination is into the (underwater) aquifer where the people get water. You know, I think no one really knows how it got there. I'm not the geologist but I think what most people believe is that somehow it started going through the bottom, which never had a wall. It never had a liner.
GLW: I imagine it's hard to contain contamination underneath.
EL: One of the community complaints is that in 1982 it was a requirement that you had to put in a double liner, which is sort of a plastic membrane. And they didn't do that. And so there's some argument between the community and the state and the federal government that we should have forced that to be built.
GLW: And the people who did that, is that government or actually Velsicol?
EL: You're right to ask. There's this duel responsibility. The company produced the contaminants...I mean they produced the product, they sold it, they made money off it. In fact, they made huge amounts of money off it, but EPA and the state were the ones who reached the agreement with them. So in that sense EPA and the state are responsible. But we don't like to lose sight of the fact that the one who's really responsible is the company (Velsicol). But then the company, because of the buying and selling of the assets of the overall company, the Velsicol that exists today is a very small version of the company that did this stuff.
GLW: Velsicol is actually still around, isn't it?
EL:Yes, but it's not a major chemical company any longer. I'm assuming all of this was intentional, maybe it wasn't. But they did an effective job at shielding a lot of the assets of the overall company.
