Part 2: Murky Waters, USACE, Toledo

-- second in a series of three --

The Maumee River watershed covers 8,316 square miles in northwestern Ohio, northeastern Indiana and southeastern Michigan.  The river enters the western basin of Lake Erie at Toledo, Ohio.  

The watershed is a fertile agricultural region that contains many concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), principally hogs, poultry and dairy. Agricultural runoff contaminates the river. In addition, industrial sites, wastewater treatment plants and combined sewer overflows continue to pollute, although not as much as in the past.

Consequently, the mouth of the Maumee River is loaded with sediment, toxins, pathogens and nutrients.  Among the nutrients, phosphorus is notable for its contribution to the algal blooms that plague western Lake Erie. Climate change is a factor, as well.

Toledo is a major Great Lakes port.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE or Corps) is responsible for maintaining a draft of 28 feet in the navigation channel and moorings in the river and harbor.  

                      

Every year, a Corps contractor dredges the polluted sediment and dumps it several miles out in Lake Erie.  For years, the dredgings (as much as one million cubic yards or more per year, enough to fill a 1000’ ship like the MV Tregurtha nearly twice) have been dumped at the same two-square mile site.

 MV Paul R. Tregurtha         Jeff, Greg & Amanda Barber

                                         

Environmentalists insist that open water dumping pollutes the lake and contributes nutrients to algal blooms.  In 2011, 2014 and 2015, toxic blooms of cyanobacteria (commonly referred to as blue-green algae) spread across the lake.  The 2014 bloom poisoned the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people in and around Toledo.  The Corps denies that open water disposal has a significant effect on algal blooms.
 

Earlier this year, a law was enacted in Ohio which prohibits open lake dumping as of 2020.

The Corps is working on a process which it claims will seal or cap contaminated dredgings dumped at open water sites.  Without solid, independent verification of such a theory, there is a substantial risk that the Corps will apply a flawed process at open water sites throughout the Great Lakes.

The confined (on-land) disposal site presently used for contaminated sediment dredged from the mouth of the Clinton River on Lake St. Clair in southeastern Michigan is near its authorized capacity.  Even though the volume of Clinton River dredgings is relatively small, a change from confined disposal to open water dumping in Lake St. Clair on the assumption that the dumped sediments would be capped is too risky for as valuable a recreational resource as Lake St. Clair.