Clean Watershed Campaign

Congressional Knee Jerk

On New Year’s Eve, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released the interim dioxin cleanup number for soils. The number proposed is 72 parts per trillion of dioxin for yards/residential and 950 ppt for commercial and industrial land uses. Thus lowering the numbers from 1,000 ppt for residential soil and lowering the range from 5,000-20,000 ppt in commercial and industrial soil.

According to the Midland Daily News, Congressman Dave Camp, R-Midland, called the EPA’s actions radical and he will be calling for public input. Of course the congressman didn’t expound on why the decision was radical and as for public input perhaps the Congressman missed the opening sentence in the EPA Press Release where the agency is soliciting public comment:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today it is seeking public comment on draft interim preliminary remediation goals (PRGs) for cleanup of dioxins in soil.

The Congressman needs to take a breath and look across the country. Most states are and have been much lower than 72 ppt on their residential numbers for dioxin in soil. For the Congressman’s illumination:

• Georgia 5 ppt

• Iowa 14 ppt
• Arizona 38 ppt
• North Carolina 4 ppt
• Nevada 4 ppt
• Washington 9 ppt
• Delaware 4 ppt
• Florida 7 ppt *

(* Governor Bush cleaned up a residential site using Florida’s commercial level of 30 ppt)

Only in Mid-Michigan is the toxicity of dioxin debated and denied while other states clean it up. Only in Mid-Michigan do we defend and uphold the polluter’s agenda while people raise their children on contaminated land and contaminated fish.

(What is a ‘ppt’? One part per trillion (ppt) denotes one part per 1,000,000,000,000 parts, one part in 10¹², and a value of 1 × 10^–12. This is equivalent to 1 drop of water diluted into 20, two-meter-deep Olympic-size swimming pools (50,000 m³), or about three seconds out of every hundred thousand years. So is dioxin toxic? If they measure its cleanup levels in such small quantities you can assume that it is very toxic, can’t you?)