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Sunday, July 11, 2010

Environment - The end of "Easterly's Pile" on the Lake Michigan beach?

The Gary Post Tribune, through its environmental reporter, Gitte Laasby, has had a number of articles on the so-called "Easterly's pile," many of them quoted in this list of ILB entries. Today Laasby has a lengthy story headed "Mittal landfill permit appears to seal fate of 'Easterly's Pile': Some waste will make it to the recently approved landfill. The rest will be recycled, company insists." The story begins:

BURNS HARBOR -- When the Indiana Department of Environmental Management recently issued ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor a landfill permit, it marked the end of an intensive shell game and coverup of open dumping that had been going on for years, one critic says.

"They use these words 'recycling' and 'storage' and 'stockpiling' so they don't have to call it open dumping," said Kim Ferraro, attorney with the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation of Indiana, about ArcelorMittal.

"But they didn't deny they've been open dumping waste for 10 years and IDEM has been letting them get away with it."

Under state law, the mill can stockpile waste for recycling for up to six months. If stored longer, waste is presumed open dumped.

That's illegal and subject to enforcement. The company has stored several kinds of waste for years, insisting they were being recycled.

Still, some waste piles have continued to grow over many years, including a pile in the northeast corner of the company's property known as "Easterly's Pile."

It's 900 feet long and 67 feet tall and contains 274,000 cubic yards of basic oxygen furnace sludge and rubble interspersed with burnt lime, according to an IDEM inspection report from March and April 2010.

The pile is only a couple of hundred feet from Lake Michigan and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.

There is much more in the story.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 11, 2010 09:19 AM
Posted to Environment