Who knew?

The poultry industry uses chicken feed containing arsenic. Yum.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, Delegate Tom Hucker (D-Montgomery County) and other lawmakers think this is not such a great idea and have introduced a bill to ban the practice in Maryland.

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by MARK REUTTER
     Environmental regulators are asking the Sparrows Point steel mill to prepare final cleanup procedures at three sites where chemical wastes have been buried for decades. Although the sites were part of a court-ordered cleanup in 1997, this is the first time regulators are requiring corrective measures, rather than open-ended studies, to handle the waste.

     The directive, however, does not address pollution leaking from the sites into Baltimore Harbor, raising the hackles of critics who say such “off-site” cleanup is required under the 12-year-old consent decree signed by Bethlehem Steel Corp., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE).
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Maxine Thompson and Phyllis Seward by Bear Creek. Photo by Mark Reutter.

by MARK REUTTER

      Phyllis Seward is not surprised by the Maryland Port Administration pollution study showing that Turners Station is the community most affected by contaminated water coming from Sparrows Point. Born and raised there, Seward has watched her community’s quality of life deteriorate under a pall of pollution.

     “We’ve been bombarded by land and sea for years — no, make that decades,” Seward said.

     Turners Station, tucked into the southwest corner of Dundalk, is dwarfed by the steel mill that looms to the east on Bear Creek. The mill is the reason for the community’s existence and has been the cause of much of its distress, according to Seward.

     “I’ve seen our beaches close and watched fish die,” she said. “The whole marine atmosphere has changed.”

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Tyler Chambers, 13, fishing at Chesterwood Park, less than a mile from the Sparrows Point steel mill. Photo by Fern Shen.

A special report by MARK REUTTER
Something wasn’t right with the government-ordered cleanup of the Sparrows Point steel mill. The tip-off for Beth L. McGee, senior water quality scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, was the level of contamination in sediment samples brought to light last year not by state or federal regulators, but by a third party.

The new sediment tests indicated that environmental conditions in the waterways near the Point had not improved and, in fact, many hazardous chemicals were in greater concentrations than what was reported back in 1996.

AES Energy Corp., which had commissioned the tests as part of its effort to put a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at Sparrows Point, found sediments in the Patapsco River laced with chromium, copper, lead, mercury, zinc and other toxic metals.

“The results were alarming,” McGee said, “because they were higher than samples that had been previously collected in the harbor, including around the steel mill.” Read the rest of this entry »

Sparrows Point, 1953. Photo courtesy Bethlehem Steel Corp.

By MARK REUTTER
Patapsco Neck has long been the greasy elbow of greater Baltimore, a dumping ground for hazardous wastes and cancer-causing metals produced by the steel mill at the boot of the peninsula, then spread by wind and water to surrounding communities.

A recent report by the Baltimore Sun’s Tim Wheeler — that the Sparrows Point mill has allegedly failed to live up to a 1997 agreement to clean up contaminated soil and ground water around its 2,500-acre facility — is part of a long history of regulatory neglect by state officials.

It was neglect that flourished at a time when everyone, from Johns Hopkins University experts to Dundalk homeowners, was predisposed to downplay dirty discharges from the area’s largest employer. Read the rest of this entry »