Senator Herb Kohl
330 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-4903
Dear Senator Kohl,
I’m writing to urge you to uphold Congressman Kagen's action in the House of Representatives, and to pull a provision from the Senate version of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) that would enable the federally authorized Fox River shipping channel depth from the Georgia-Pacific Plant upstream to the De Pere Dam to be reduced from 18 to only 6 feet in depth, and the width from 150 to only 75 feet.
I am opposed to the corporation’s plan to cap PCB contaminated sediments in the Fox River, and urge you to do everything in your power to restore the Fox River cleanup to a dredging and removal plan.
I make these requests because:
1. The corporations should not be allowed to use the public’s river as their permanent private dumpsite.
2. Future uses of the Fox River should not be limited just because the corporations want to save money. The patchwork of caps proposed for the last 7 miles of the river could drastically limit any future dredging to traverse the river for public utilities or bridges, or to create marinas, docking structures or ship turning basins, to boost our Great Lakes shipping opportunities, or simply to promote our tourism industry. In particular, the WRDA provision would essentially cut everyone off from the Great Lakes who is unlucky enough to be upstream of the Georgia-Pacific Plant. (Of course, G-P is keeping its OWN access open...)
3. If portions of the river are capped to only a 6 foot depth, or less,
who will pay for the NEW dredging and maintenance needed to keep all the
capped areas from filling to even more shallow depths? The river
is guaranteed to add more material to the capped areas each year.
The upstream channel section currently requires no money or maintenance,
so the WRDA
provision and other capping proposals come with significant costs to
local or county governments. In addition, I’m wondering how maintenance
dredging can be done safely and repeatedly over the caps without damaging
them over the centuries. These questions have not been answered yet.
4. Many experts are raising serious questions about the technical assumptions used to calculate the effectiveness and durability of the caps. I’m concerned about the effect that future floods, storms, ice flows, Climate Change, droughts, long-term erosion, and accidental human damage will have. Experts are raising these concerns as well.
5. The government agencies can’t name a single place in the country where a comparable cap exists on a large northern river, where it has been effective over time. They refer only to projects that are very different: brand new, or on lakes, ponds, small streams or on ocean coasts. This means the Fox River capping proposal is an untested, experimental approach, at a time when we need a PROVEN permanent solution to a serious public health threat. Given that dredging and removal has already been used successfully for 3 years on the Little Lake Butte des Morts cleanup, I support that technology, as proposed in the prior version of the Fox River Record of Decision.
Finally, I’m very disturbed that the corporations have had such major
control over the Fox River cleanup planning process. Since the river
was nominated for Superfund status in 1997, all of the technical meetings
setting cleanup standards, methods, monitoring and disposal have been held
behind closed doors between the corporations and agencies. No public observation
or independent technical input was allowed at these meetings. This
is NOT how government
decisions should be made.
Please do what you can to convince the EPA and DNR to restore the Fox River Record of Decision to its prior version, which required dredging and removal of PCB contaminated sediments from the Fox River.
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