By - Associated Press - Friday, February 5, 2016
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) - The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will closely monitor a dioxane plume that’s been slowly expanding in Ann Arbor as it moves closer to the Huron River, according to the agency.
Currently, agency officials are limited by state law and court orders on what they can do from an enforcement standpoint.
The department can’t force Pall Corp., which dumped large amounts of the chemical into the environment from 1966 to 1986, to do a full-scale cleanup, and the pollution is still spreading despite ongoing pump-and-treat remediation efforts to reduce the amount of dioxane in the groundwater.
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Under current state law and court orders, the plume is allowed to continue to spread and contaminate more groundwater and eventually reach the Huron River.
A map produced by MLive showing Ann Arbor's underground dioxane plume, based on the county's interpretation of monitoring well data in 2013, and more recently based on newer data from the third quarter of 2015 as mapped by Roger Rayle, co-founder and chairman of Scio Residents for Safe Water. Officials monitoring the plume say it's still spreading.
Read the full story
here.
For me the biggest "take home message" of this article is to realize that we can NOT depend on the current laws and legislation to protect the health of the planet and its people. We have to ENFORCE much stricter laws to ensure that corporations like the Pall Corp in this case, Tecumseh Product, the Adrian car interior manufacturer Dura, who sold the plant to an LLC that essentially scrapped the more valuable components of the building and left a mess of asbestos pollution behind, and the asbestos companies in this nation that poisoned thousands if not millions of miners, builders and home residents can get away with their CRIMINAL and UNETHICAL conduct and can be FORCED- if necessary - to cleanup their mess and re-tribute some of the damage they have done to this planet! Grandfathering-in old sins and putting the burden of proof to the victims of environmental crime are MEDIEVAL practices - any country that does not step up to modern ethical standards and enforces stricter laws on CRIMES against humanity and the planet is unworthy to call themselves civilized! People and the Environment are not externalities that can be written off by accounting!!!!
More info on this unbelievable criminal conduct committed by the Pall Corp.
here
