All Things Considered:
More than 60 species now swim in Onondaga, compared to about a dozen
at the lake's low point. Pollution in the lake was so bad for so long
that few people alive even remember when Onodaga had beaches, boathouses
and even an amusement park on its shore.
The
lake's remarkable turnaround is still not fully appreciated by many
local residents. It has come after a decades-long fight using federal
environmental laws and the courts to force remedial action. Sam Sage of
the Atlantic States Legal Foundation says there was no political will to
take on a costly cleanup of both raw sewage and toxic waste dumped
mostly by the company Allied Chemical.
"The
municipal [officials] could always say, 'Well, we're not the problem.
Allied's the problem.' And Allied could say, 'We're not the problem. The
municipality is the problem.' And as far as I'm concerned, they were in
cahoots with each other," says Sage, who filed a lawsuit, after which
Onondaga County eventually agreed to upgrade its sewage-treatment plant.
For the Superfund half of the cleanup job, workers will soon begin
suctioning up to 10 feet of toxic mud from parts of the lake, where as
much as 20 pounds of mercury were once dumped every day.
Honeywell, a successor to Allied Chemical, has already cleaned
factory sites and built an underground barrier wall to keep contaminated
groundwater from seeping into the lake. Still, the project will leave
85 percent of the lake bottom untouched.
Sid
Hill, a leader of the Onondaga Nation, calls the cleanup project an
expensive Band-Aid. He says the cleanup is not enough for a site that
has important historic and cultural significance to his people.
"In
seven generations, that's still going to be a Superfund site," Hill
says. "For that amount of damage that they've done to the lake, it
doesn't seem fair to the lake or to the people who use the lake."
The improvement is amazing, just like it has been in the Great Lakes and the nation's rivers. But if you listen to conservatives, we've done too much, and businesses need to be able to pollute things more. I would disagree.
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