Pine River Environmental Project

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The Pine River Environmental web site maintained by Alma College for the Pine River Superfund Task Force, documents various aspects of the pollution and community restoration efforts occurring on the Pine River in Gratiot County, Michigan. From 1835 until 1978, Michigan Chemical Company, later acquired by Velsicol Chemical, operated a chemical plant in St. Louis that dumped vast quantities of pollutants into the regional environment. Several refineries (later owned by Total Petroleum) and an auto parts firm (Oxford Automotive) contributed petroleum by-products and heavy metal contaminants to the watershed. After making a major food contamination mistake in 1973, Velsicol came under intense legal scrutiny, resulting in its closure in 1978. After several years of negotiation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the State of Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), a settlement was reached on November 18, 1982. In 1983, the EPA designated the old Velsicol Chemical plant site on the Pine River, the nearby Gratiot County landfill, into which Velsicol had dumped tons of contaminated wastes, and parts of the Gratiot County Golf Course [called the burn pit] as superfund sites. This action served to confirm a half century of environmental abuse in the watershed. Then in 1997, EPA reopened the site and the local Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force formed to provide EPA with citizen inout on the renewed clean-ups in the watershed. This web project grew out of the collaboration of Alma College and the Task Force in encouraging public participation in EPA policy making. It includes historical and current information about the Pine River. Among the numerous documents found on this web site are important legal records, correspondence, and environmental and health research, particularly relevant to the chemicals DDT and PBB manufactured by Velsicol. Residents of the community and other interested citizens are invited to participate in the Town Hall Forum or by emailing pineriver@alma.edu.

Important Public Meeting and Information:

Before Thanksgiving 2006, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Remedial Investigation Report (RI) for the Velsicol plant site in St. Louis and related sites, including the burn pit, called the Gratiot County Golf Course superfund site by EPA. This is an important document, prepared by Weston Solutions, a DEQ environmental contractor from Okemos, Michigan.

There will be a public meeting at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2006, at the T.S. Numberger Middle School at 312 N. Union St, in St. Louis. Please note, this is NOT the usual location of Pine River meetings. Directions are below. At the meeting, DEQ and EPA will summarize the RI Report, answer questions, and identify next steps to achieve final remediation of the Velsicol sites in our community.

This may be the most important meeting in the last eight years related to remediation. Please come and urge friends and neighbors to come. Click here to see the text of the RI Report. It is in Adobe Acrobat format. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer, you can download it free from the Adobe Acrobat site (download Adobe Reader).

Because of the size of the full RI Report, which includes eight (8) large three ring binders of tables and maps, we only have placed here the first “text” volume. The other volumes are tables and maps. A paper copy of the tables and maps is in the St. Louis Public Library, 312 Michigan Avenue. To orient those unfamiliar with the contamination in the watershed, we have placed two fairly recent reports that include many helpful maps and other information on contaminated sites in the watershed.

DIRECTIONS TO THE MIDDLE SCHOOL: From M-46, go north on either Mill or Main Sts. In St. Louis, after crossing the Pine River, turn right on Prospect. Union is parallel to Mill and Main (3 blocks east of Mill and 2 blocks east of Main). When you intersect Union, turn left (North) until you see the Middle School.

Helpful Background Information

On March 11, 2005, Ed Lorenz and Murray Borrello of the Pine River Task Force made a presentation to update the local economic development agency, the Greater Gratiot Development Corp., on the remediation of environmental sites in the watershed. This presentation, while in outline form, has an overview of the status of the clean-ups at the Velsicol site in St. Louis, the Total refinery site in Alma, the concerns with Oxford Automotive's former plant, and the Smith Farm site south of St. Louis. It has good photos of each year of the EPA river sediment remediation project in St. Louis from 1999 through 1994. It concludes with before and after photos of two remediations outside the region that we see as models - Wyandotte, Michigan, and Astoria, Oregon. The last slide in the presentation is a copy of the map of Velsicol plant site reuse plans developed by the EPA funded community task force.

At the March 16, 2005, Task Force meeting we had a presentation (download Adobe Reader)by U.S. EPA on the future plans for remediating sediment in the Pine River adjacent to the Velsicol plant site. The "powerpoint" presentation can be viewed here. It is especially helpful in understanding the site, since it has many photos and maps.

For those unfamiliar with the term, DNAPL is an abbreviation for dense non-aqueous phase liquid, a syrup like compound that at the Velsicol site is moving off site and recontaminating the river and,perhaps, the water table under the site.

The Velsicol site, as most superfund sites, is divided into sub-units, called operable units or OUs. (OU2 is the Pine River). These are identified by numbers at the Velsicol site.Finally, note that this report is prepared by Rob Stryker of CH2M Hill, the prime contractor for EPA at the site.