Cleaning up the Lower Fox

Marketplace, Aug 5, 2008 by Reinsch, Lee Marie

Eight years into the cleanup of the lower Fox River, tons of toxins have been removed, and proponents of clean water see light at the end of the culvert.

"We want what's best for the river, and from everything I've been involved with in the process, both the EPA and the DNR are really trying to do their best to clean it up," says Candice Mortara, president of Friends of the Fox advocacy group.

The lower Fox River's PCB contamination, believed to have been caused at least in part by the production of carbonless copy paper, is among the area's most well-known toxic waste dilemmas. Categorized by the Environmental Protection Agency an "NRDA" - that's Natural Resource Damage Assessment - it's also one of the state's largest Superfund sites (see story, page 30).

Despite its having more paper and pulp mills per mile than any other place in the world, it's hard to say how Northeast Wisconsin stacks up against other states in pollution production.

One "can't really say one state is better or worse, since all states and sites are different," says Susan Pastor, EPA's Superfund project manager for Region 5. Pastor works with most of the state's more than 40 Superfund sites.

PCB dangers

The Fox River flows into the bay of Green Bay, which flows into Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan is the source of drinking water for much of Northeast Wisconsin.

PCBs aren't something to shrug off, like those reports that the average computer keyboard contains more bacteria than a public toilet seat. PCBs are carcinogenic to animals and wildlife and likely people, too. They don't disintegrate and decompose on their own. Instead, they affect plant, fish and wildlife chains.

Once they get into a bay or lake, such as Green Bay and Lake Michigan, they're next to impossible to retrieve, says the EPA. That's why it's important to remove PCBs from the Fox River before they get to the larger water bodies.

Between 1957 and 1971, it's estimated that 250,000 pounds of PCBs (not just 250,000 pounds of sediment containing PCBs) were released into the river, tainting 11 million tons of sediment. PCBs were banned around 1977, but they're hardly gone from the environment.

The EPA reports that several hundred million cubic yards of sediments in the Bay likely contain some 150,000 pounds of PCBs.

In the late 1970s, the state issued an advisory for Sheboygan-area residents not to eat fish from three rivers in Sheboygan County that had been tainted with PCBs believed to be from a tool-and-die maker located near the Sheboygan River. The advisory not only still stands but was expanded in the late 1980s to include wildlife from the area. The same thing happened with the bay of Green Bay in the mid-1970s, and people are still being cautioned against eating fish or wildlife from the Fox River, Green Bay and area.

"Of course, everyone wants the river to be as safe as possible," says Mortara. "We wish there weren't so many fish advisories. There is no way to return the system to as pristine as it was in nature."

But Mortara said she's just happy that work is being done on the cleanup projects.

Mortara would have preferred to have seen the PCBs undergo the vitrification process and be turned into bits of a glass-like substance - another option, albeit a very pricey option. In the vitrification process, sediment containing PCBs is used in place of limestone and sand in the heating process of glass creation, and tiny blackish, almost gem-like opalescent nuggets are the result.

The lower Fox, up North

It seems counterintuitive to the non-river person, but the upper Fox is down in southern Wisconsin, while the lower Fox is up north.

The Upper Fox River starts in southwestern Green Lake County, then winds west-southwest to Portage before flowing north into Marquette County and east into Lake Puckaway (ironically only 10 miles north of its headwaters) before taking a northeast route through the White River Marsh into Lake Poygan, Lake Winneconne, Lake Butte des Morts and Lake Winnebago in Oshkosh.

The Lower Fox River begins at the Menasha and Neenah channels leading from Lake Winnebago and flows northeast for 39 miles to the bay of Green Bay. So downstream is north.

(There is a second Fox River in Wisconsin, which flows through Waukesha, Racine and Kenosha counties into Illinois.)

The Lower Fox has a dozen dams. The Superfund cleanup focuses on the 39-mile stretch of the river plus the bay past the Door County tip to its outlet into Lake Michigan.

The Fox River locks project - a project involving the maintenance and opening of as many of the 17 locks on the lower Fox as possible - won't be impacted. The locks will still be navigable, Mortara said.

Progress report

The EPA separates the river into what it calls "operable units" - segments for measuring and observing progress.

The operable units include Little Lake Butte des Morts, Appleton to Little Rapids, Little Rapids to De Pere, De Pere to Green Bay, and the Bay of Green Bay.

An update on where cleanup is on each of the segments:

Little Lake Butte des Morts: The lake has been fully dredged, and the sediment is draining (known in technical terms as "dewatering") in huge black rubber tubes that look like colossal, flat loaves of bread the length of several cars.