Scrubbing Bay Harbor

April 26, 2006

In 1988, a stroller looking for Petoskey stones on the beach of what is now Bay Harbor noticed a dark-colored discharge in the water along the shore.
Little did anyone realize at the time, but this toxic tea of dangerous pH levels and heavy metals, including arsenic, chromium, mercury, copper, lead, nickel, selenium and zinc, would linger and seep along the shoreline, cursing the billion-dollar development which was built atop the dust piles of a long-gone cement factory.
Yet today, thanks to a massive cleanup that began in August, 2004, the region just south of Petoskey is looking forward to the completion of at least the first stage in restoring the shoreline and Little Traverse Bay to health, through the combined efforts of several major players. Those players include CMS Energy, Bay Harbor/Boyne USA, Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality, the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, the City of Petoskey, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others.
For some, however, the final effort to reclaim Petoskey’s East Park this summer and the last stretch of polluted shore is just the beginning. Area environmentalists wonder what damage has been done to Little Traverse Bay itself? How far out did the toxic wastes drift? And what sort of threat might they pose to area residents and the Great Lakes?

THE BACKGROUND
To understand the problem, you need to go back nearly 90 years to the establishment of the Petoskey Portland Cement Company in 1917. Along with its successors, the Penn Dixie Company in 1954 and the Dundee Cement Company in 1980, some 2.5 million cubic yards of toxic cement kiln dust was simply dumped on the grounds of what is now Bay Harbor over the decades.
That’s the equivalent of 2,343 football fields covered to a depth of six inches with toxic dust, according to information provided at a public forum held in March by the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council.
What is cement kiln dust? A  manufacturing  byproduct. Although cement is made of
simple ingredients, including limestone, sand, clay and iron ore, when these materials are heated in a rotating kiln to temperatures up to 2,700 degrees, the resulting ash-like waste is a dust that is rich in toxic chemicals.
Easily released through the dust’s solubility with water, these poisons bled for decades into the bay from the massive dust piles along the shore.

RISK DOWNPLAYED
The toxic nature of what’s buried under Bay Harbor has been a topic of concern in Petoskey for nearly two decades now, despite assurances by Michigan’s DEQ during Gov. John Engler’s administration that the property was safe to build on.
“I remember we had a forum on this property in 1989 when the Three Fires Point development was being considered, which 250 people attended,” recalls Gail Gruenwald, executive director of Tip of the Mitt.  “Many years have passed and now here we are again.”
Back in the late ’80s, many in Northern Michigan were anxious to see the  reclamation of the blighted moonscape along the bay south of Petoskey.  An initial plan for a development called Three Fires Point fell through and was superseded by developer David Johnson’s vision for Bay Harbor.
Many in the environmental community still wonder, however, why Bay Harbor got the go-ahead from agencies such as Michigan’s DNR and the federal EPA when there were warning signs well before the first building went up on the property.
At the recent public forum, DEQ environmental manager Bob Wagner responded that when studies were done by the State DNR in June, 1989, there was no connection made between the kiln dust piles and the high pH levels of water leaching into the bay.    
As a result, the DNR granted what was called a “designation of inertness,” certifying that the dust piles were stable and in no danger of their wastes migrating to the bay.  
In the following years, however, researchers turned up evidence of hazardous pH levels in the groundwater around Bay Harbor, and that springs under the dust piles were seeping toxic wastes into the bay.

SEEPAGE
   In 1994, the developers of Bay Harbor signed a “covenant not to sue” with the State regarding any future contamination problems. In exchange, Bay Harbor and its partner at the time, CMS Energy (which had purchased the abandoned property for $3 million), would conduct remediation measures on the site which proved too little, too late.
Requirements included covering the two largest dust piles with six inches of soil.  The biggest pile on the western end of the property was transformed into Bay Harbor’s golf course. Seep water was collected from the golf course dust pile and piped to Petoskey’s wastewater plant for treatment.

WAKEUP CALL
In 2004, DEQ researchers discovered that pH levels and traces of toxic metals had shot up along Bay Harbor’s five-mile shoreline. The DEQ also learned for the first time that Petoskey’s wastewater plant had discontinued treatment of Bay Harbor’s ground water seven months earlier as the result of clogged pipes.
The pH scale, which measures the balance of acidity and alkalinity in liquids, ranges from 0 (battery acid) to 14 (liquid drain cleaner). In the human body, an optimum pH is about 7 -- the same as “neutral” water. Fish become sensitive to pH levels above 8.5, and pH water levels above 9 are considered hazardous to human health. 
The pH of kiln dust ranges from 12.5 to 13. Anyone who’s ever had the skin stripped from their flesh by contact with wet cement can well appreciate the hazards of pH levels in that range. 
At Bay Harbor, the DEQ took samples every 25 feet along the five-mile shore and discovered that the pH of the water had risen to the level of 9 along 11 percent of the shoreline. In the fall of 2004, a pH of 13.3 was measured along the shore, with contamination extending up to 170 feet into the bay.
In response, the Northwest Michigan Community Health Agency closed East Park on Labor Day, 2004, comparing the threat of the bay’s water to that of bleach.  The Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians also got involved out of concern for the health of the bay and its impact on the Great Lakes fishery.
Since that time, CMS Energy has been playing catch-up, digging three-foot-deep collection trenches into the bedrock along the shoreline adjacent to several dust piles and diverting seep water and leachate for treatment. The EPA has approved a plan for restoring East Park which will include the construction of collection trenches and water treatment measures established by Sept. 15.
Tim Petroskey, a spokesman for CMS Energy, said the company is seeking EPA  approval for a plan which would involve measures such as digging up the contaminated dust and moving it to the east side of the park; diverting water around the dust pile; and treating contaminated water at the site before returning it to the bay.

LOOKING AHEAD
In the last 200 days, CMS Energy had collected more than 17 million gallons of contaminated groundwater for treatment.   That’s 19,184 gallons of toxic seepage per day at one major site and 38,108 gallons per day at another.  
That collection and treatment is expected to continue into the far distant future. The ultimate cost of the cleanup to CMS could total more than $85 million.
“We look at this development as positive and this cleanup as positive,” said Tribal Chairman Frank Ettawageshik, summing up the feelings of many in attendance of the Watershed Council’s recent public forum.
But questions from the audience regarding the level of damage to Little Traverse Bay remain unanswered.  There are other factors to consider from the distant past, including mercury contamination from an old leather tannery on Tannery Creek back in the 1940s and ’50s,and the byproducts of a former gas-from-coal plant which was once located at the site of Bayfront Park on the Bear River.
“There’s no data on how far out the contamination extends into the bay and what heavy metals we’ll find,” said Diana Malley of the EPA. She added, however, that the EPA would be conducting a study of the contamination of Little Traverse Bay over the summer, with the results to be presented to the Watershed Council.