Moroun Family Seeks EPA Superfund Status for Abandoned McLouth Steel Site on Detroit River

McClouth Steel, Trenton, 1950s-Reddit

McLouth Steel expanded its Detroit operations to a 188 acre site in Trenton, Michigan, south of Detroit on the Detroit River, in 1948. McLouth became one of the nation’s largest steel producers.

In 1996, the plant was sold. The Trenton facility remained idle after several failed attempts to restart it. The site has been and continues to be one of the most polluted on the Detroit River.


Wayne County foreclosed on the property in April 2017 for unpaid taxes. Past due city and county taxes exceeding $4 million are expected to be the Morouns’ purchase price.

A Michigan Department Environmental Quality (MDEQ) report said “contaminated soils at the site consist of slag fill material containing metals, arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, selenium and zinc, as well as documented spills with contaminated soils containing PCBs.”

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2017/05/18/mclouth-steel/101815090/

A spokesman for the Morouns’ real estate development company, Crown Enterprises, is quoted in Crain’s as saying, "This is going to be a Superfund site that's not going to sit and languish." (Easy for him to say. The property has been sitting, languishing and polluting for the better part of 70 years.)

It’s reported that Crown Enterprises and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have a tentative agreement to add the old McLouth property to the National Priorities (Superfund) List. The Wayne County Land Bank has extended the time for negotiations three times.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20180531/news/662351/epa-morouns-reach-tentative-deal-to-clean-up-mclouth-steel-plant-site

Who’s Minding Michigan’s Rivers? (Part 1)

For six decades, McLouth Steel conducted operations on the Detroit River.  It produced hot rolled, cold rolled and stainless steel, sold mostly to the auto industry.  At its peak, the company had plants in three cities along the river: Detroit, Trenton and Gibraltar.

The company filed for reorganization under the Bankruptcy Act in 1981 and again in 1995. Operations ceased and the last remnants of the company’s properties were liquidated in bankruptcy in 1996.

Buyers knew various sites were contaminated with industrial toxins which were discharging to the Detroit River, near the International Wildlife Refuge, and pledged but failed to clean them up.

The site of the Gibraltar plant was enrolled on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List (NPL) in March of this year, nearly 20 years after McLouth went out of business.  The NPL designates the worst hazardous waste sites in the nation, eligible for Superfund remediation.

“The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has been operating the leachate collection system at [a contaminated landfill on site] since completion of the removal action work by using the [the contaminated landfill’s] Perpetual Care Fund, but those funds were depleted in May 2015 and the State is using alternate funding sources to continue leachate collection activities.”  http://www.epa.gov/Region5/superfund/npl/michigan/MIN000510362.html

Too little, too late.