Great Lakes Article:

Region tops EPA list of mercury pollution
By Laura Johnston
The Journal Gazette
01/11/04

Somewhere north of Fort Wayne lies an area of nearly 500 square miles considered to be the most mercury-contaminated spot in the country, according to figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental Defense, a private non-profit organization, released the figures - compiled earlier by the EPA, but never published - in December, listing the 484-square-mile "hot spot" as leading the country in mercury deposits.

Mercury accumulates in fish and can threaten the development of infants and fetuses when consumed.

The report was released days before the EPA proposed its first regulations to cut mercury emissions from power plants. But environmentalists believe the regulations are not strict enough.

Report sketchy on source

Using data from 1998, the Environmental Defense report is based on a complicated computer model that analyzed weather patterns, mercury emissions from area coal-fired power plants and other information, said Michael Shore, a senior policy analyst for Environmental Defense.

The report from Environmental Defense, a national organization of 400,000 members founded in 1967, does not give a source for the contamination. Nor does it specifically define the hot-spot area by county lines or municipal boundaries.

Instead, the report used mapping done by the EPA that divided the country into 22-mile-by-22-mile square grids. The checkerboard square with the most mercury deposits was a grid ambiguously described as being north of Fort Wayne, Shore said.

"It's not a precise spot," he said. "When you look at the specific sites, when you look at the states in the Midwest and the East, there are hot spots all over. . . . The places where mercury deposition is highest, local sources dominate."

Shore blamed the coal-fired power plants in Indiana, as well as plants in northeast Illinois and western Ohio, for the contamination. Hot spots also are located in Michigan, Maryland, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

Indiana is home to 23 coal-fired power plants, more than any state except Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, said Leise Jones, field director for the Indiana Public Interest Research Group.

The group, which is staffed mainly by students at Indiana University in Bloomington, recently released figures that showed Indiana was responsible for the country's fourth-largest amount of mercury pollution.

According to the report - written by a coalition called Clear the Air and based on EPA data - the plants released 5,728 pounds of mercury in 2001.

About 91,000 pounds of mercury was emitted nationwide, the report states.

Residents 'not at risk'

People who live near the hot spot shouldn't panic, Shore said.

"People in northeast Indiana aren't necessarily at greater risk," he said. "However, it is emblematic that there is a lot of mercury pollution coming to that area."

Residents should not be concerned about digesting mercury through drinking water or absorbing it from soil. They should, however, restrict the amount of fish they eat, especially locally caught fish.

Mercury exists naturally in coal, and when coal is burned, it dissipates in the air. It mixes with rainand falls to the ground and into rivers and streams, where a biological process transforms it into a highly toxic form that builds up in fish, according to the EPA.

People are exposed to mercury mainly by eating fish at the top of the food chain, such as bass, carp, pike and swordfish. The mercury in the fish can cause birth defects and developmental disorders in young children, Jones said.

Fish consumption advisories issued by the Indiana Department of Health are especially strict for young children, pregnant and nursing women, and women who might have children in the next six years.

Health department officials in Allen County and in the mercury hot spot north of Fort Wayne stress moderation in fish consumption.

"My understanding is the amount of fish flesh you'd have to consume to be any issue is certainly more than anybody would consume," Noble County Health Officer Gerald Warrener said.

State advisories recommend that children and pregnant women never eat carp from Indiana rivers and streams.

Andy Knott, air and energy policy director for the Hoosier Environmental Council, called the advisories "a travesty."

"It's shameful that we can't freely consume fish out of our supposedly fresh waters," Knott said. "It can be avoided. We don't have to have fish contaminated with mercury."

Turning concern into results

The Indiana Department of Environmental Management is aware of the mercury issue, which it considers a national problem, spokeswoman Laura Pippenger said.

The agency is working with the EPA to find out how it gathered and interpreted the data that indicated the northeast Indiana hot spot.

"This sort of modeling can have discrepancies that can indicate a hot spot like this," Pippenger said.

But the Environmental Defense study shows that mercury pollution is caused by power plants nearby, Shore said.

"It travels to some extent, but communities that live around the power plants are most at risk to mercury pollutants," said Jones, of the Indiana Public Interest Group.

Shore and Jones hope that information will convince the Bush administration to enact tough regulations on power plants.

"If we're going to clean up pollution, . . . we need to reduce mercury from local sources," Shore said.

The EPA in December introduced two proposals to cut mercury emissions.

One proposal would decrease emissions 30 percent by 2008.

The other, called a "cap and trade" approach, would cut emissions nationwide 70 percent by 2018. It allows power companies to buy and sell emission credits, allowing some power plants to cut emissions by less than 70 percent if other plants slash emissions more.

The EPA favors the second proposal, spokesman John Millett said.

"There's still a lot of science to be done to be absolutely certain to make sure how mercury emissions behave in the atmosphere and how they deposit," he said. "What we do know is that this first regulation proposed to reduce mercury from power plants will certainly help the environment, and we'll see environmental improvement.

"That's the important part," he said. "We can address local issues as we get more information on them, but this is an important first step."

Fossil-fuel-fired power plants are the largest source of human-generated mercury emissions in the United States, according to the EPA.

American Electric Power releases 10 percent of all power plant mercury emissions, making it the country's largest contributor, according to the Clear the Air report.

"We're probably a large emitter of mercury because we're the largest generator of electricity in the country, and a lot of our electricity comes from coal," American Electric Power spokeswoman Melissa McHenry said.

Plants pushed to action

McHenry said that mercury pollution is a global issue and that mercury levels in the United States are significantly affected by global emissions. She said there's no commercially available technology to cut mercury emissions that would work in every power plant.

And whatever emissions the industry does cut, "it's not going to have a huge impact."

But Knott, of the Hoosier Environmental Council, disagrees.

"Mercury does travel some distance, so it's impossible to say exactly what power plants it's coming from," he said. "It's safe to say the overall problem is from those sources."

Knott, like other environmentalists, wants to see President Bush sign laws to cut mercury emissions in power plants by 90 percent by 2008.

He also dislikes the idea of emissions trading favored by the EPA because, Knott said, unlike sulfur and acid rain, mercury emissions remain local.

"What the Bush administration is proposing is too little, too late," he said. "It's 10 more years of contamination and in the end, still more contamination."

U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, R-Fort Wayne, said the hot spot is something the government should investigate.

"It's a warning sign," he said, "even if it's just hypothetical."