Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Wednesday added the city’s legal muscle 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.
Emanuel said his decision to piggyback on the legal challenge filed last week on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation was driven in part by U.S. Steel’s failure to notify the city about three chromium spills last year at the company’s Midwest Plant in Portage, Ind.
The city’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Hammond, highlighted an April spill that included 298 pounds of hexavalent chromium, a highly toxic version of the pollutant made infamous by the movie “Erin Brockovich.”
Testing by the Chicago Department of Water Management detected a plume of hexavalent chromium drifting toward the city’s drinking water intake off 68th Street. It took five days for the amount of chromium in the plume to dissipate to levels normally found in the lake, according to the lawsuit.
“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. “We will not stand idly by as U.S. Steel repeatedly disregards and violates federal laws and puts our greatest natural resource at risk."
Last week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management said they were close to brokering a legal settlement with U.S. Steel that is intended to prevent future spills.
The two government agencies began negotiating privately with the steelmaker after the surfing group enlisted the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago to research pollution violations at U.S. Steel and other factories on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan.
Law students documented repeated violations of limits included in the Midwest Plant’s water pollution permit during the past six years. The two lawsuits were filed under a provision of the Clean Water Act that allows citizens and their elected representatives to challenge companies on their own after a 60-day notice.
Cathy Stepp, the Trump administration’s new regional EPA administrator, 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 in a Jan. 11 letter to Edward Siskel, the city’s corporation counsel.
U.S. Steel and the Indiana agency issued similar statements after Surfrider filed its lawsuit Jan. 17.
“We acknowledge and regret the incidents and have consistently worked to identify, report, investigate and correct each issue,” U.S. Steel said.
After another spill in late October, neither the company nor Indiana regulators informed the public. A notice that U.S. Steel sent to the state agency requested “confidential treatment” of the incident. The U.S. EPA learned about it from a Tribune reporter.
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