Nations Waterways Focus of Mercury Emissions Attention

Hg-ATME tries to stick mainly to smokestack mercury emissions issues in this blog but recent concerns over some of the nations most prominent bodies of water and their own battles with mercury is worthy of note.

A recent Indiana Dept of Environmental Management permit for BP's Whiting, IN refinery would allow massive increases in ammonia and toxic sludge releases directly into Lake Michigan. What are they thinking. I read in one article the plant expansion would create 80 full time jobs. Now I'm all for creating jobs but to allow huge increases in refinery emissions into the lake for a measly 80 jobs, not even 800 would justify that.

Our Senator, here in Illinois, Dick Durbin, will not let this go unchallenged. From an excerpt in All American Patriots we see this;

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) today sent a letter to Benjamin Grumbles, Assistant Administrator for the Office of Water at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to express his strong opposition to a permit that will allow BP’s Whiting refinery in Indiana to discharge more pollution into Lake Michigan. The National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit, recently approved by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM), will allow BP to increase ammonia and sludge pollution discharges into Lake Michigan by 50 percent and 35 percent respectively.

In today’s letter Durbin said, “Lake Michigan is one of our nation’s greatest natural resources and serves as the drinking water supply for over 40 million people – including the entire Chicago metropolitan area, supports a significant commercial fishing industry, and supports numerous recreational activities… It is our responsibility to support efforts to restore, rather than further degrade Lake Michigan. We should be working toward the goal of eliminating pollution in this fresh water ecosystem.”

The permit runs counter to the Clean Water Act and the State of Indiana’s anti-degradation policy. A specific provision in the federal Clean Water Act prohibits any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source even if discharge limits are met.

You can read full contents of his and IL Congressman Rahm Emanuel's letters here too.

And then a decades long battle over mercury and other toxic pollution in the San Francisco Bay is being addressed with some new standards that are long overdue. It was always a battle over who was responsible. No one disputed that the problem existed they always wanted to know who to blame. Well now we will know who not to blame for future contributions as the standards kick in and limit future releases. This excerpt from KGO-TV/DT;

For decades, there have been concerns about mercury pollution in San Francisco Bay. Environmentalists have fought for changes to protect our water and our health, and today, state officials approved a plan to try to reduce mercury levels.
[...]
For years environmentalists have been pushing the state to adopt a process to identify the sources of mercury and set goals for reducing the pollution.

Today the California Water Resources Board listed the old gold mines as the number one source, but Baykeeper says a contemporary culprit are refineries.

Deb Self: "It probably is coming from the smokestacks and we're urging the state to require the refineries to do the studies to show where the mercury is going. It may be the most important pollutant source."

I guess one cannot totally disassociate mercury stack emissions from Clean Water issues, they are really tied together. Sort of a cause (stacks) and effect (polluted water) situation when it comes to mercury.