Last week, I took off from the tumult of Madison for a few days to talk to undergraduate journalism students at Indiana University. I talked about what it’s like working at the Center as a reporter, multimedia producer and website manager. (Eventually, I hope to have time to think up a less cliched phrase than “wearing many hats.”) I gave them a few tips on reporting, storytelling and how to use multimedia more efficiently. The students had great ideas and questions — I had a ball talking to them.
But the best part was my unofficial Toxic Tour of Bloomington, led by Steve Higgs, the IU lecturer who brought me out there.
Steve’s a longtime Bloomington-based environmental reporter and advocate who covered the cancer threat from PCBs in the 1980s for the Bloomington Herald-Times.
Welcome to Lemon Lane, one of six landfills where Westinghouse Electric Corp. dumped PCB-laden electrical capacitors in the 1960s and 1970s. The toxic chemicals drained into the soil and ended up in the aquifer below, where they still are. An activist discovered a small spring at the surface, full of PCBs. Higgs says most people around there at the time were drinking well water.
A group of mobile homes is next to the site. During the cleanup, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offered to relocate three families, the H-T reported at the time. But Higgs also recalls seeing agency types in moon suits on the toxic side of the chain-link fence, while a kid on a little Hot Wheels bike rolled back and forth on the other side.
Lots of polluted sites end up marked for “long-term groundwater treatment and monitoring” — the $100 million, 100-year-old toxic tar site in downtown Ashland, Wis., that I wrote about will surely be one — but it’s instructive to see what that really means.
Today, the little spring is shunted under the railroad tracks to a pump house and then a giant warehouse with two big storage tanks next to it. Inside, the spring water runs through through activated charcoal, like a fish-tank filter, to remove the PCBs. The treatment plant (owned by CBS, the successor to Westinghouse) is undergoing a major expansion to deal with occasional major flows, and it could be going for decades to come.
All to treat one little toxic spring.
Not everyone’s notion of tourism, surely — but that’s how we environmental reporters roll.
Thanks to Steve Higgs for the tour, and for a writeup about us in the Bloomington Alternative, too.
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I live in Bloomington and am aware of this mess. But I think it is easily forgotten. Hopefully it is brought to light again.