After 17 years, the cleanup of the Lower Fox River has finally reached the finish line by joint efforts of Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), and other organizations, including Sierra Club.
Penny Bernard Schaber, former John Muir Chapter Chair and former Fox Valley Group Chair, said that they knew it would take a very long time.
“We knew that the process was going to be slow-going and that it wouldn’t be perfect,” Bernard Schaber said. “But it gave us a river that is safer and cleaner, so we were happy to start the project and now much happier getting it finished.”
The riverbed was heavily contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), a chemical that was released from wastewater treatment plants in the industrial process of recycling carbonless paper in the 1950s through 1970s. It was crucial to clean the sediments of the Lower Fox River because the PCBs were being eaten by fish and passed on to humans, leading to birth defects and other serious health issues.
“I moved up to the Appleton area in 1884 and lived close to the Fox River,” Bernard Schaber said. “I noticed that people didn’t really talk about the river and didn’t use it. I started asking the locals why we had this big river here, but nobody wanted to use it or go close to it.”
When the process started, a large number of local people became involved and attended public hearings. Throughout the cleanup, Sierra Club kept advocating for the project and got more people to participate. “The more people we had in the area working on it, the more effective we could be,” Bernard Schaber said.
Most PCBs were removed out of the river using a hydraulic dredge that limited the resuspension of the chemical and were disposed of properly. Some highly contaminated areas, where it was too dangerous to separate PCBs from the sediments, were covered by engineered caps and sand. In total, the project removed 6.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment and restored 10 billion gallons of river water.
Bernard Schaber said that the biggest obstacle they had was agreeing upon the best level of cleanup that would be realistic and would protect people’s health. Some people wanted a more robust cleanup that would involve more complicated equipment, but some just wanted to get the project started and waste no time. There was also a concern whether or not the paper companies would pay for the cleanup in order to not put it on taxpayers. There was a lawsuit for a number of years between the paper companies and municipalities, Bernard Schaber said.
Now that the cleanup is done, the Lower Fox River will be continuously monitored by EPA and DNR to ensure PCBs are not resuspended into the water, the caps stay sealed and the river remains safe to use.
“All of our rivers need attention, but the Fox River was probably the most polluted one,” Bernard Schaber said. “There are still a lot of industries that use water from our rivers, and we have to make sure that there are regulations on the wastewater cleanup level when they put it back.”
How can you make a personal impact on our waters? Bernard Schaber encourages Wisconsinites to pay attention to what we buy, how we dispose of products that have dangerous chemicals in them and what we use in our homes every day. We also need to pay attention where we invest our money – we shouldn’t be investing in companies that contribute to pollution, she said. Contacting our legislators, state representatives and congressmen is important as well.
“There is a lot we can do, and we need to stay on top of it,” Bernard Schaber said. “We can’t just sit back and wait for somebody else to do it.”
To watch the full interview with Penny Bernard Schaber, check out our #IssuesAtAGlance vlog posted a couple of weeks ago.