A river and region face a toxic past

This fall a two-man dredge not much bigger than an oversized pontoon boat began sucking mud from the bottom of the Fox River, whose gray-green waters run through 39 miles of dams, paper mills, and blue-collar cities before emptying into Lake Michigan at Green Bay.

The dredging, scheduled to go around the clock until the river freezes later this month, is a first step in what promises to be one of largest cleanups of contaminated sediments ever in the US. It could pump up 7.25 million cubic yards of river bottom - enough to fill five Empire State Buildings - and cost an estimated $400 million.

To people who live along the river, this marks long-awaited progress on an environmental and public health problem that has eluded a solution for 30 years. But the effort also has wider implications nationally and in particular for this region, where freshwater lakes and industry intersect.

Because of their size and position at the industrial heart of the country, the Great Lakes have a large number of contaminated sites. The one here - focusing on toxins from paper mills - is among 43 "areas of concern" identified in a US-Canada agreement, many of which contain contaminated sediments. Contamination also tends to persist in the lakes, in contrast to coastal areas where it can be washed out to sea and flushed out by tides.

"The Great Lakes as a whole are crying out for cleanup," says David Allen, a former US Fish and Wildlife Service official who surveyed pollution from the Fox River to Lake Michigan. "There's probably more to be done than resources available."

Still, many see promise in the simple hum of the hydraulic dredge here in Menasha, the up-river end of the contaminated area. Improved technology has made it possible to suck up the sediments. Work has begun here at one of the worst sites. And paper companies - who were faced with the threat of a federal Superfund lawsuit - have agreed to pay.

"It's been pretty slow," says Bob Garfinkel, who owns a bait and tackle shop in Green Bay, near the river's mouth. "We realize it's a big project, but it's the only responsible thing to do."

The project, indeed, could take as long as two decades to complete. The aim is to remove polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) as well as other industrial waste that accumulated on the river bottom.

PCBs in places like the Fox are a problem left over from largely successful efforts in the 1970s to clean up pollution in the nation's waterways. Despite the success, contaminated sediments remain in many rivers, streams, estuaries and harbors across nationwide. But with better technologies, widespread cleanup efforts have begun in recent years.

Stephen Ells, an expert on contaminated sediments for the US Environmental Protection Agency, says cleanups have begun at most of the 67 worst sites around the country. But progress is slow, and work has not begun on many. One of the best known projects, an effort to remove PCBs from 40 miles of the upper Hudson River in New York, still awaits the beginning of dredging.

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