Starting this week, residents near a plume of contaminated groundwater extending beneath part of Scio Township and the west side of Ann Arbor can chat with a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency about their experience.
The former Gelman industrial site on Wagner Road, just outside Ann Arbor, is now part of the agency’s Superfund program. “Superfund” refers to a list of hundreds of severely contaminated sites the EPA manages.
The Gelman plume has spread in Ann Arbor’s groundwater over the past 40 years, contaminating it with a chemical called 1,4 dioxane that the EPA classifies as a “probable carcinogen.”
But EPA officials said before the agency can start planning how to clean up the plume, it needs to learn more about the contamination from the community.
Representatives from the EPA explained what they need from residents at Tuesday’s quarterly meeting of the Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane. The organization represents decades of citizen advocacy for the plume’s clean up.
Diane Russell, the EPA’s community involvement coordinator for the Gelman site, said the agency is providing several options for feedback because of the site’s long history.
“We wanted to cast a big net,” she said at the meeting. Often, the agency only hosts one set of listening sessions over a week. For Gelman, it's offering three opportunities for one-on-one chats throughout the summer, as well as an online survey, and community workshops.
“We get a lot of good information from community members in this process that maybe EPA doesn’t know going in,” Russell said.
Local activists have tracked the plume’s spread and pushed for more aggressive cleanup of the contamination since a University of Michigan graduate student discovered it in the 1980s.
While the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy monitors the plume, advocates argue that the state regulator doesn’t have the teeth it needs to enforce a clean up.
For years, local activists have seen EPA intervention as the last, best solution. Those advocates include Roger Rayle, the chair of the community coalition advocating for cleanup. He’s trying to reach residents who live over the groundwater contamination so they can get in touch with the EPA.
“This is a time for democracy to actually work and influence the decisions being made,” he said. “It might take some door-to-door work.”
Rayle said he appreciates that the EPA has jumped right into getting the community involved, and that the agency is providing more opportunities for residents than it usually would.
“That was pretty key to me,” he said.
Russell clarified that the meetings aren’t meant to be town halls. Instead, they represent a starting point.
“It’s really an information collecting exercise,” she said. “We’re trying to gather where the community is first.”
Rayle said the EPA can bring the enforcement and due diligence needed to hold the polluter accountable, but the agency needs residents to weigh in.
“Concerned citizens helped get us to this point. But we gotta continue on,” he said.
“The EPA can't do this on their own. They need boots on the ground.”
