Dear Alliance for the Great Lakes,
We have been following with great interest your campaigns to keep Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes free of pollution. Particularly, you have been critical of British Petroleum’s increase of pollution accompanying its planned expansion in Whiting, Indiana, as well as identifying municipal pollution as a bacterial source in Lake Michigan.
On August 23, only a few days after BP decided to adjust its refinery application, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) of Greater Chicago dumped 220 Million Gallons of untreated sewage into Lake Michigan, to near complete media silence, and no notable reaction from the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
Have you taken a position on the MWRD discharge? Are we going to hold the MWRD to somewhere near the standard we hold private industry when dumping into Lake Michigan?
John Powers
President, Chicago Daily Observer
http://www.cdobs.com
Dan Kelley says:
Point well taken. On Saturday, I crossed the bridge over the North Shore Channel (the man made canal built by the Metropolitan Sanitary District, the special district that was eventually renamed the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, on Central Street in Evanston. It was quite clear that the water level in the canal was quite low on account of the fact that the raw sewage had been emptied into Lake Michigan by opening the flood gates opposite Wilmette Harbor.
The Chicago Park District has posted a message on its website congratulating those who opposed the plan for the BP refinery to expand its capacity and to allow it to discharge waste into Lake Michigan. Of course, the same site is silent about MWRD emptying raw sewage into the lake.
How many gasoline consumers will be thankful for paying higher prices for fuel, thanks to the environmentalist activists who oppose any expansion of refinery capacities?