DDT Byproduct Brings Upheaval to Small Michigan Town

St. Louis, Michigan, a small city 50 miles north of Lansing, has been put on the map because of its problems with toxic waste. The government found old pesticides laced deep into the bottom of the river that cuts through the middle of town and a syrupy ooze of industrial poisons pouring out of the dump where the city's old chemical plant is buried. Every time it solves one problem, another turns up. And now something has bled into the city's drinking water. Federal officials insist the byproduct of DDT production they detected in three of the city's wells in tests over the past year is not dangerous, though many people don't believe them.

"We never drank the water. Everyone always knew it was contaminated," said a resident of St. Louis, "Now they just have proof."

The city is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to finally dig up all of the old pesticides and flame retardants buried beside the plant. As far as the EPA knows, St. Louis is the only city in the country where para-chlorobenzene sulfonic acid,p-CBSA, a byproduct of the pesticide DDT, has been found in drinking water. The agency told the city in September it had detected low levels of the chemical in wells that supply half of the city's water. No one knows how long it's been there. But the city isn't taking chances. It stopped pumping water from the wells where the EPA found contamination; city officials are thinking about drilling new ones. The schools turned off their drinking fountains and sent workers out to buy truckloads of bottled water. Not that many people drank the city water before mainly because of the chemical plant buried a quarter-mile from the closest city wells. "Who knows if it's safe or not," said another resident, who has lived for a decade in St. Louis without drinking the water. The highest concentrations of p-CBSA found in city wells are 140 times lower than the level the EPA has said could put people's health at risk. But water samples taken over the summer from a monitoring well across the street from the two city wells closest to the plant found concentrations of the chemical that are at least 11 times higher than the agency's safety threshold. The few studies that have been done found that p-CBSA is not harmful in low doses, but did not measure the effects of long-term exposure. Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow demanded last month that the EPA conduct a more thorough study. The discovery could point to bigger problems ahead: If fast-moving p-CBSA can find an underground channel from the chemical dump to the city's wells, other, more harmful chemicals might follow. That's why the EPA tested for it in the first place. When the Velsicol Chemical plant closed in early 1978, the entire operation was buried where the plant had once been. The company was then required to cover the dump with a layer of clay and surround it with an underground wall to keep the chemicals there from leaking out. This attempt to prevent the spread of chemicals failed miserably. In 1997, the EPA found dangerous levels of DDT in the muck at the bottom of the Pine River that flows through the town. The reparation of this problem dug up even more problems. The worst was a thick ooze of highly concentrated DDT and other toxins seeping out from beneath the plant. That prompted a state and federal investigation of what to do about the leaks from the site. And that's when they found something in the water