Safe Drinking Water for All
By Doug Martz, St. Clair Channelkeeper

» My story began several years ago with an unlikely, but fortunate encounter. I was at a boat store when I overheard a man talking about chemical companies discharging waste into the St. Clair River. I kept wondering what he was talking about, so I approached him to find out more. The man was from the First Nations community of Walpole Island and they were up against the chemical company Imperial Chemical Industries, which was dumping waste into their nearby river. We walked out of the store together and spoke for nearly three hours. He was an incredibly passionate man and because I listened to every word of his story, he invited me to Walpole Island to meet the community myself.

The following week, I rode a ferry from my home in Michigan to Walpole Island, where 100 First Nations people gathered to learn about the chemical waste in their waterway. I listened to story after story of the problems that the community faced. They were suffering a bitter inventory of health problems from autism, attention deficit disorder, birth defects and miscarriages to cancer and diabetes, along with the resultant loss of their culture and traditions. Their story hit home for me. I felt emotionally attached to these people. I told them that I would go back to the other side of the river and do what I could to help them.

Within weeks, Imperial Chemical was due for a hearing. The public would be allowed to comment on the company’s performance and it seemed like a chance to the First Nations of Walpole Island to receive compensation for the calamity they were facing. But as the hearing progressed, the only concession Imperial Chemical was willing to make was to supply the First Nations with bottled water. Members of the First Nations told the company that this was not just about their drinking water. This was about their Mother Earth and all the life that depended on the water for survival; they were not going to compromise. But in the end the company was granted permission by the Canadian government to discharge their chemical waste into the St. Clair River and the First Nations would pay the price.

I was upset at what had transpired, but I knew that our fight had to continue because we could not keep going on like this. And the First Nations were tremendously organized themselves. I learned that every time there was a spill, they recorded it. Since I was also the chairman of our water board and in the position to hold meetings with our drinking water plants operators, I brought members of the First Nations and the water plant operators together for a meeting. And when they shared their data, it was hard to stomach. In 14 years, from 1986 to 2000, the First Nations recorded 700 chemical spills on their river. They had to shut their drinking water valves until the chemicals had gone by and they brought in water tanks to avoid the contaminated water.

Meanwhile, none of our water plant operators had heard about these spills. Their facilities regularly checked for bacteria and pathogens, but not chemicals. The truth was hidden from the public and there was no protection for our water if there was a chemical spill. It was clear that we needed a system to monitor our drinking water. I asked a friend to put together a report detailing the costs and the mechanics of a new drinking water monitoring system for our watershed. The report called for a new system for the 90-mile corridor from Lake Huron to Lake Erie. We had a plan, and I could now concentrate my efforts into convincing our public officials to put the system in place.

Spills and More Spills
I traveled across the state for more than four years, seeking support to build a drinking water monitoring system. Finally, two things happened that broke the camel’s back. The first major event took place when the Great Blackout eclipsed the Northeast, the Midwest and the province of Ontario, Canada in August 2003. Many of the companies operating in the industrial area known as “chemical valley,” no longer had electricity to operate or cool their product. They began spewing black smoke across the sky, and chemical valley was enveloped in darkness.

During the chaos that ensued from the blackout, Royal Polymers, a Canadian chemical company, dumped 300 pounds of vinyl chloride into the St. Clair River upstream of 13 drinking water plants. Neither the Canadian government nor the public was informed until five days after the spill. When I heard the story, I arranged for the Detroit News to write a front-page story about the spill so that the public could be warned about their drinking water. When they were, they were furious. The nearby communities began to question why they were not informed. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and the Ministry of the Environment in Canada tried their best to calm everybody down.

Soon after the chemical spill, Royal Polymers was due for a hearing, again giving the public the opportunity to review the company’s performance. Royal Polymers attended the hearing with their consultant scientists and I attended with two toxicologists from Wayne State Medical School. The company and their consultants stood at the microphone and assured the public that vinyl chloride would not hurt them. After the company testified, the toxicologists and I took the microphone and told the public about the toxic effects of vinyl chloride, one of the most potent causes of liver cancer known. We essentially took the information that Royal Polymers and the consultants were distributing and threw it out the window.

This information enraged the public. They were ready to go to chemical valley and bulldoze the Royal Polymer facility. They were being kept in the dark and started to bring up spills from the past that they were never warned about. There were the 700 spills that the natives documented that they were never informed about. There were also three American cities that discharged raw sewage upstream of drinking water plants. And then there were two paper mills in Port Huron, Mich., that discharged a chemical into the river that, to this day, is indeterminate. The Ministry of the Environment in Canada and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality decided that they would start reporting these spills to the public.

It was at this crucial time that a second major event happened. In February 2004, I was at home watching the Super Bowl when suddenly an emergency manager came on television and warned, “Drinking water contaminated. Don’t drink it,” and then went off the air within seconds. I was wondering what was going on, when again he came on the air and warned, “Drinking water contaminated. Chemical spill.” The announcement came on a total of six to eight times and my phone started ringing with people asking me what was happening to our drinking water.

Soon enough I received a fax from Walpole saying that that a Canadian chemical company, Imperial Oil Limited, had just discharged 1,200 to 1,400 barrels of organic chemicals called methyl ethyl ketone and methyl isobutyl ketone into the St. Clair River. The Walpole natives had to close their drinking water plant. Shortly after, I received a call from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. They had just closed all the drinking water plants on the St. Clair River all the way down to Mt. Clemens. They sent planes to Lansing, Mich., to test the river, which was ice-covered. The chemicals had already gone under the ice and where they went after that, it was hard to say.

The following week, the environmental agencies held a meeting at Port Huron and the room was even more crowded than after the blackout spills. Both the Canadian Environment Ministry and our Department of Environmental Quality stood up and assured the American citizens that there was no reason to worry about the chemical spill on the American side. They told the American citizens that there is a chemical spill on the Canadian side, it stays on the Canadian side and the water doesn’t mix. I was so angry at that point. I stood up and said, “What do you mean the water doesn’t mix? I used to fish in that river. If there is a spill on the Canadian side, it impacts us here. The international boundary line does not keep the water from mixing.” Anybody who would believe what they were telling us would believe that a cow could jump over the moon. I was tired of being kept in the dark.

Enough is Enough
At this point, I decided that the spills had to stop and the public had to know about their drinking water. I drew up an emergency meeting with my water board and I told them that we needed to do something once and for all. I remember sitting at that meeting and it hit me. There was one federal law that fined boat operators up to $25,000 for throwing bilge waste into our waterways. Now imagine what a company like Imperial Oil Limited would have to pay for spilling 1,200 to 1,400 barrels of organic chemicals.

Our county environmental prosecutor and I drew up a letter demanding that meaningful and immediate action be taken to protect the health of the citizens of Canada, the U.S. and the Walpole Island First Nations and sent it to Imperial Oil Limited and the press. The next thing I knew, television news reporters were in my driveway and radio stations were calling me. We had caused a firestorm and people wanted to know how ordinary citizens dared to take on a huge company like Imperial Oil for endangering our health. Soon the Canadian government fined the chemical companies between $500,000 and $700,000 and changed the protocol on telling us about spills.

We had won big, but we still needed a monitoring system to tell us that our water was safe. I decided that I would get the money to build this system. I lobbied one of our congresswomen who helped us secure $1 million and then some additional funding from St. Clair and Macomb counties. We could monitor from Port Huron to Macomb and down to Mt. Clemens, about half of the distance that we needed to monitor.

While we were securing funds to build the system, an official from the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was telling me that what I wanted was impossible, that the technology did not even exist. But we proved him wrong right then and there. I met a woman who told me about a state-of-the-art drinking water monitoring system that was installed in Cincinnati, Ohio, on the Ohio River after a tetrachloride spill closed every drinking water intake on the river and affected seven states. We sent our water plant operators, health department officials and state environmental agency representative to the Ohio River to learn more. When they saw it for themselves, they could not deny what we were saying all along and helped secure the final funding we needed for the entire system.

Today, we have the most sophisticated real-time monitoring system in the United States. Our new drinking water monitoring system is almost entirely installed and now measures water quality in 14 different Michigan cities from Port Huron to the city of Wyandotte, just south of Detroit. The system detects 29 specific chemicals and monitors for signs of a chemical spill or a water plant failure. We can identify hydrocarbons from gasoline and diesel fuel to oil; organic compounds from benzene and xylene to vinyl chloride; along with physical properties of water like pH, turbidity, temperature and dissolved solids.

The best part of the system is that it is not just me who can find out about the state of our drinking water — it’s the entire public. Up until now, the only monitoring system we had on our river was owned by the chemical industry. That’s like the fox watching the henhouse. But this system has put the information back into citizen hands so that we know that the water we are drinking is safe. Today, I or any other citizen can turn on the computer and look at the state of our entire watershed without even getting into a boat. This means that we can take the energy that we used to prove that our water was contaminated and put it into action and advocacy.

What I want people to know is that these things are possible and that they can be done. I had to stop listening to the government agencies that told me that it was impossible to monitor our water to ensure our health. I had to look past that and really fight for what our citizens needed. If I was able to do this in our watershed just downstream of one of North America’s most industrialized zones, anyone can. And if we all truly believe this, then we really can have safe drinking water for all. w