U.S. Steel to pay nearly $900,000 to settle lawsuit over chromium spill into Lake Michigan
Steel mills in Indiana
Michael HawthorneContact Reporter
Chicago Tribune
U.S. Steel agreed Monday to pay nearly $900,000 to settle a complaint filed after one of the company’s plants spilled toxic chromium into a Lake Michigan tributary last year.
The Pittsburgh-based company also will begin testing daily for the most toxic form of chromium in water near its Midwest Plant in northwest Indiana, embark on a preventive maintenance program and upgrade other types of pollution monitoring in response to legal action taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
Filed in U.S. District Court in Hammond, the proposed settlement comes almost a year after chromium-contaminated wastewater spilled into a ditch that drains into Lake Michigan next to the steel mill.
Operators of the water supply for the nearby town of Ogden Dunes responded by temporarily shutting off its Lake Michigan intake, Chicago conducted emergency testing of its own water supply and the National Park Service closed four beaches at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore.
U.S. Steel initially reported that 346 pounds of chromium had poured out of a rusted pipe into the waterway, including 298 pounds of a highly toxic form of the metal known as hexavalent chromium. A month later the company filed another report that estimated substantially more hexavalent chromium ended up in the waterway — 920 pounds — but it dismissed the finding as an “absurd result” from a single water sample.
In either case, the amount of chromium released into the water was substantially higher than the daily limits in U.S. Steel’s water pollution permit for the plant. Total chromium discharges are restricted to 30 pounds a day, and the amount of hexavalent chromium allowed is just 0.51 pounds a day.
The Midwest Plant, part of an industrial complex that divides the national lakeshore in Portage, coats steel forged at the nearby Gary Works with chromium and other rust-inhibiting materials. U.S. Steel already has overhauled the faulty system that triggered the April spill, according to court documents.
Lawyers for the two government agencies began negotiating privately with U.S. Steel after the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit group representing Great Lakes surfers, enlisted the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago to research pollution violations at U.S. Steel and other factories on the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
A review of state records by law students at the clinic revealed that the Midwest Plant violated chromium limits at least four times since 2013. Two other spills were reported to Indiana officials last year, including one in October that the company asked Indiana regulators to keep secret.
Two months later, the state agency posted an inspection report online that showed U.S. Steel had failed to test for hexavalent chromium after the October spill, despite blue liquid “with visible solids” pouring out of a sewer pipe into the Lake Michigan tributary.
Mark Templeton, the law clinic’s director, said he was still reviewing the deal brokered by government lawyers and U.S. Steel. “We’re encouraged regulators are finally doing something,” Templeton said in an email.
The steelmaker pledged Monday to follow through on plans outlined in the legal settlement.
“U.S. Steel continually seeks opportunities for improvement in its environmental compliance program, and will apply lessons learned from this process to future operations company-wide,” a spokeswoman said in statement.
“I am pleased that through the coordinated effort of federal and state agencies, and with the cooperation of U.S. Steel, this settlement will help protect Lake Michigan and Indiana waterways,” Susan Bodine, assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, said in a separate statement.
Interested parties will get 30 days to comment on the proposed settlement before a federal judge makes it final. If nothing changes, the company will pay a fine of $300,621 each to the federal and state governments, another $253,068 for environmental damages and $27,512 to reimburse a government team that monitored water quality after the April 2017 spill.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered city attorneys to file a separate lawsuit against U.S. Steel, citing testing after the April spill that detected a plume of hexavalent chromium drifting toward the city’s drinking water intake off 68th Street. The EPA rejected Emanuel’s request for the city to be involved in negotiations that led to Monday’s settlement.
