Amelia Finefrock
On Wednesday, Mayor Rahm added Chicago to a lawsuit filed by Lake Michigan surfers over spills of toxic chromium from a U.S. Steel plant near one of Chicago’s drinking water intakes.
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According to the Chicago Tribune, Rahm said his decision to add weight to the legal challenge was due in part to U.S. Steel’s failure to notify the city about three chromium spills last year at the company’s Midwest Plant in Portage, Indiana.
Filed in the U.S. District Court in Hammond, the city’s lawsuit noted a spill in April that involved 298 pounds of hexavalent chromium – a highly toxic pollutant, according to the Tribune.
RELATED: U.S. Steel dumps more toxic chromium near Lake Michigan and is facing a HUGE lawsuit
Thanks to the Chicago Department of Water Management’s testing, hexavalent chromium was detected drifting towards the city’s drinking water intake off 68th Street, the news outlet reported. According to the lawsuit, it took five days for the amount of chromium to dissipate to levels normally discovered in the lake.
“This Great Lake is our most precious natural resource and we must preserve and protect it, while taking steps to punish those who pollute it,” Emanuel said in a statement, according to the Tribune. “We will not stand idly by as U.S. Steel repeatedly disregards and violates federal laws and puts our greatest natural resource at risk.”
According to the news outlet, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management were said to be close to a legal settlement with U.S. Steel that would help prevent future spills after the surfing group enlisted the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the Universtiy of Chicago to research pollution violations at U.S. Steel as well as other violations made by local and surrounding plants.
The Tribune reported the law students documenting repeated violations of limits in the Midwest Plant’s water pollution permit in the past six years. The two lawsuits were filed under the Clean Water Act, a provision that allows citizens along with their elected representative to challenge companies themselves after a 60-day notice. The Trump administrations new regional EPA administrator, Cathy Stepp, rejected Emanuel’s request for city lawyers to be involved in the negotiations with U.S. Steel.
“We believe that the compliance measures … will go far in protecting Burns Harbor and Lake Michigan from unlawful discharges and spills,” Stepp wrote to the city’s corporation counsel, Edward Siskel in a letter on Jan. 11, according to the Tribune.
After Surfrider filed its lawsuit on Jan. 17 – U.S. Steel, as well as the Indiana agency, issued similar statements, according to the Tribune.
“We acknowledge and regret the incidents and have consistently worked to identify, report, investigate and correct each issue,” U.S. Steel said in a statement, according to the news outlet.
In late October after another spill, according to the Tribune, the company and Indiana regulators did not inform the public of the toxic spill. The incident was noted as “confidential treatment” and sent to the state agency.
And the most disheartening fact of all? The U.S. EPA learned about it all from a Tribune reporter.
