superfund

On December 20, a neon green slime was discovered leaking onto I-696 in Madison Heights. 

According to a report by the federal Government Accountability Office, 60% of Superfund sites nationwide are threatened by floods, wildfires, and hurricanes that are becoming worse due to climate change.

In Michigan, twenty toxic sites are at a high risk of spreading due to increased flooding. The sites are scattered across the state, but most are located near former industrial hubs, including the Velsicol Chemical Company in St. Louis. 

Gary Sayers, the owner of a Madison Heights electroplating company, has been sentenced to a year in prison. 

That's after he violated hazardous waste storage laws for more than two decades.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has named the former McLouth Steel site in Trenton to its Superfund National Priorities List.

That list is reserved for sites with the most serious or uncontrolled legacy contamination. The contamination on the southern end of the property is from steel-making processes and an acid pickling line operation, according to the EPA.

President Donald Trump's proposed budget calls for cutting money for cleaning up Superfund sites by a third. 

But the EPA's new head, Scott Pruitt, has told employees that he's going to make Superfund cleanups a priority.

Activists fighting for the cleanup of a Superfund site along the Pine River in St. Louis, Michigan hope Pruitt will get some more money so he can keep the promise.  It's one of the most polluted Superfund sites in the state.

U.S. EPA announced Friday it will consolidate and cap one-and-a-half-million cubic yards of old industrial waste in Kalamazoo. It’s been dubbed a compromise plan after residents and city leaders urged the EPA to choose a plan that would remove the waste entirely from the Allied Site.

“I’m reluctant to use terms like compromise because protectiveness is something the EPA can’t compromise on,” EPA Remedial Project Manager Michael Berkoff said.

The Environmental Protection Agency is hosting a meeting in Kalamazoo tonight to get feedback on its proposed plan to clean up a 22-mile section of the Kalamazoo River.

For decades, paper mills dumped waste into the Kalamazoo River. Some of it had polychlorinated biphenyls; or PCBs.

People living near a Superfund site in Kalamazoo seem to like the compromise cleanup plan posed by the city. About a hundred people came to the first public meeting Thursday night to learn more about the plan and to provide feedback.

Kalamazoo residents will get a chance to weigh in on a compromise plan for an old landfill that’s full of toxic material. The Allied Site once served as a dumping ground for the paper mill industry.

There’s 1.5 million cubic yards of wood pulp and waste laced with toxic chemicals at the site. Kalamazoo officials want it gone. But that’s too expensive.

KALAMAZOO   (AP) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced it will be several more years before cleanup work begins on the next phase of an 80-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River.

  According to agency officials, it will take at least until 2017 to select and implement a plan for cleaning 22 miles of the Kalamazoo River Superfund site.