Birds fall from sky in St. Louis, Mich., amid massive chemical cleanup

[SpartanDem]

It’s startling to watch robins drop from the air, flop around and die, Jim Vyskocil said.

But the St. Louis resident has seen it multiple times.

“It’s like they are having a convulsion, and then they’re dead,” he said.

The cause is no mystery to the nearly 7,500 people who live in this Gratiot County town — a toxic legacy of decades of pollution from the nearby former Velsicol Chemical site on the banks of the Pine River. Velsicol, and Michigan Chemical before it, made a variety of chemicals starting in the 1930s, including the insecticide DDT and polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB, a flame retardant.

Velsicol closed the plant in 1977, four years after accidentally mixing thousands of pounds of PBB-laced fire retardant into livestock feed. The illnesses that ensued in farm animals led to the contamination of food stocks throughout the upper Midwest. More than 500 contaminated Michigan farms were quarantined, and approximately 30,000 cattle, 4,500 swine, 1,500 sheep and 1.5 million chickens were destroyed.

As Velsicol went bankrupt, its consent agreement with the EPA and the state in 1982 left only about $15 million to $20 million for use in the cleanup — a relative drop in the contaminated bucket. Taxpayers, through the Superfund, are now funding the cleanup. And the bill has been, and will be, massive. A cleanup of Pine River sediments from 1998 to 2006 cost more than $100 million

http://www.freep.com/article/20140803/NEWS06/308030057/environment-robins-DDT-toxin-Superfund-EPA-Velsicol


Who needs the EPA, right? It's amazing 40 years later and the cleanup isn't even close to being finished. BTW I highly recommend to watch Cattlegate the documentary about feed disaster itself.

[JNelson6563]

1. Gratiot Co. is pretty rural and not terribly affluent overall.

Obviously, they have been easy to ignore.

Very sad state of affairs.

Julie

[KT2000]

2. There is no free lunch

Pollution costs - lives and money. The RW likes to stand up for businesses and keep any form of prevention and cleanup from being forced on business. It is time we all start putting price tags on all of these incidents and ask the question - who pays. If those RWers had any idea how much tax money is going to clean up messes caused by companies that skirted the laws, they would be quite upset.

Politicians have told me that the lobbyists for polluters are armed with costs of adhering to environmental laws so we need to communicate the cost - and to whom - to stop these companies from transferring their costs to the taxpayer. Money talks to politicians - and that includes the cost to taxpayers.