Environment & Science

Arctic Grayling are a fish that used to be native to Michigan's waterways. About a century ago, Michigan's populations were decimated by overfishing, habitat destruction, and nonnative competitive species. 

Now, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians are hoping to reintroduce the fish to the state's waterways.

Ed Eisch is the statewide fish program manager for the DNR. He's also overseeing the Arctic Grayling Initiative.

A road construction project beginning this week in Northeast Michigan hopes to improve fish habitats.

Josh Leisen, a senior manager at the nonprofit organization Huron Pines, which is overseeing the project, described the area where Gilchrist Creek passes beneath Greasy Creek Road in Montmorency County.

“These are two undersized culverts that are creating a pinch point, forcing the water to flow underneath the road at unnaturally high velocity, preventing the fish from swimming upstream to spawn,” Leisen said.

It's been a mosquito-heavy July for many Michiganders. Experts say the reason for this boom is recent warmer temperatures and heavy rainfall.

It’s just before 6 p.m. on a breezy Wednesday evening in Little Village, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Department of Water Management staffers lift two tables out of the trunk of a minivan on the 3100 block of Ridgeway Ave. They drape them with blue tablecloths bearing DWM’s logo. 

A small crowd gathers as the staffers, alternating between English and Spanish, explain that Chicago has embarked on a novel public health program. The city is offering to replace toxic lead water pipes leading to their homes — at no cost to the residents. 

There’s been a significant increase in the number of Legionnaires' disease cases in Michigan.

In the first two weeks of July, the state saw more than 100 cases – over 60% of them happening in Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties.

Over the same period last summer, only 16 cases were reported.

The U.S. House has approved a comprehensive bill to regulate and control a class of chemicals known as PFAS.

The bill would require the U.S. EPA to designate two of the most common PFAS as hazardous substances.

It would also require the EPA to set a national drinking water standard for those two chemicals -- and study whether other PFAS should be added later.

Rebecca Meuninck is with the Ecology Center.

She said the bill will go far to help Michiganders and people all over the country protect themselves from the health risks of PFAS. 

An attorney at a Detroit-area law firm is looking at options to reduce the amount of money people have to pay to rebuild dams that were damaged during flooding last year, but some local leaders fear the effort could prevent the dams from ever being restored.

Slap! Spray! Scratch! The most biting of topics in Michigan right now is mosquitoes. Yes, there's a boom of bloodsuckers going on in the Great Lakes state.

A coalition of groups is asking the Michigan Public Service Commission to schedule public hearings on Consumers Energy's proposed 15-year plan, known as an Integrated Resource Plan, or IRP.

The plan lays out how the utility will maintain reliability while reducing emissions from its operations.

Bill Wood is Executive Director of the West Michigan Environmental Action Council. He noted Consumers plans to shut down all its coal plants by 2024, which is good. But it's switching to natural gas to take coal's place.

Ann Arbor residents could see a proposal another millage on their ballots this November. This 20-year tax would go towards fighting climate change.

Mayor Chris Taylor saw how voters supported the affordable housing millage last year, and floated the idea at the June 6 city council meeting. He says he will introduce a resolution to put the millage on the November ballot at the next meeting.

The new administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency was in Flint Wednesday, in part to address the agency’s battered image in the community.

Michael Regan toured a community lab where young people test the quality of water samples. The lab was set up after Flint residents grew mistrustful of claims of government agencies, including the EPA, that their lead tainted water was safe to drink.

State wildlife agencies in several states, including Ohio and Indiana, are issuing alerts about a mysterious illness that’s killing an alarming number of songbirds.

Blue jays, robins, grackles, starlings, house sparrows, cardinals and cowbirds are affected by the illness. The birds behave as if they're blind before dying. Many of the agencies report birds have swelling around the eyes and a crusty discharge.

President Joe Biden took a tour of a northern Michigan cherry orchard today.

At Kings Orchard in Central Lake, Biden met with several Michigan politicians including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senators Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow.

But the real reason for the visit was to get some northern Michigan was "Cherry pie,”  Biden joked.

Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy plans to test the soil from an abandoned rail bed near the former Velsicol Chemical Co. plant in St. Louis for hazardous chemicals.

The old rail bed lies just outside a federal superfund site on which the Environmental Protection Agency has spent more than $100 million cleaning up after Velsicol.

Researchers say they expect cyanobacteria blooms on Lake Erie to be smaller than average. On a scale of one-to-ten, the severity of the blooms is forecast to be a ‘three.’

The harmful algal blooms can produce a toxin that can harm the liver in people and animals.

Heavy rain in Southeast Michigan over the weekend left many residents dealing with massive flooding. There was several feet of water in some basements, vehicles stranded on flooded streets, and some people also lost power. Wayne County remains in a state of emergency due to ongoing public health threats.

Such heavy flooding is only expected to occur once every 100 years or so, but the area saw similarly devastating rains in 2014 and 2016. Nick Schroeck, an associate professor of law at Detroit Mercy School of Law, told Stateside that these once-rare storms are becoming the new normal.

In the early 1970s, Chicago embarked on one of the region’s most ambitious and expensive infrastructure projects to date: the Tunnel and Reservoir Project or “Deep Tunnel,” a massive storage system that will be able to hold more than 20 billion gallons of water when it’s finished in 2029. 

Consumers Energy says it will retire all of its coal-burning power plants by the year 2025, years ahead of an earlier schedule.

Environmental groups say it's a surprising and highly positive step, but there's still more the utility can do.  

Margrethe Kearney is an analyst with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

She said the announcement is great news. Coal burning power plants are more expensive to operate than renewable sources of energy, and they spew a lot of harmful chemicals into the air.

Canada is expanding its rules for ballast water in ships. The Canadian Minister of Transport outlined the new regulations intended to prevent the further spread of invasive species in Canada.

Ballast water helps keep ships level by pumping it in or out of the ship when loading and unloading. Doing that also can suck up invasive species such as quagga and zebra mussels and then spread them to the next port.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it will conduct an extensive review of Enbridge Energy's plan to build an oil pipeline tunnel beneath a Great Lakes waterway in Michigan. The Canadian company wants the tunnel to house an underwater section of its Line 5 pipeline that runs beneath the Straits of Mackinac linking Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. Permits from several agencies, including the Army Corps, are needed. The Corps said Wednesday the project will require an environmental impact statement, which involves a lengthy study of the plans and potential alternatives.

For the second year in a row, northern Michigan’s tart cherry farmers are expecting a small harvest — less than half as much as 2019’s crop.

Allen Steimel is the general manager at Leelanau Fruit Company. He says low rainfall Up North is stunting the cherries’ growth.

“The drought, it’s gonna affect the size of the individual fruit. What we’re seeing right now is the cherries look fairly small.”

The Grand Haven Board of Light and Power has approved building a new natural gas powered plant to supplement buying power from the grid.

The west Michigan municipal utility is asking City Council to approve bonds for up to $50 million. The money would also be used to clean up pollution from a now demolished coal-burning power plant and to build an office complex.

The Obama administration enacted regulations to protect some sensitive bodies of water, but the Trump administration removed those protections.

Now the Biden administration plans to protect them again.

Changing the Waters of the U.S. protections under the Clean Water Act meant about 25% of the waterways were no longer protected. Some headwater streams and wetlands don’t have water all the time, but when they do, they need to be protected from pollution and silt. Keeping them pristine is important to wildlife such as fish and frogs downstream.