POLLUTION: EPA's Big Win

• Share

In its constant skirmishing with companies, the Environmental Protection Agency last week won its biggest victory yet in a water-pollution case. After five years of litigation, U.S. Steel Corp. agreed to stop dumping cyanide, ammonia and phenols—all toxic pollutants—into Lake Michigan and the Grand Calumet River from its huge works at Gary, Ind. It has been pumping out 16,700 Ibs. a day of solids, part of them toxic.

In a negotiated truce with the EPA, the company also consented to pay $3.45 million in fines for violating federal and state water-and air-pollution standards.

Further, U.S. Steel pledged to spend $70 million to equip the Gary works with new water-pollution-control equipment, and $1 million to pay for research on water-treatment systems and the impact of dissolved solids on Lake Michigan.

EPA Midwest Enforcement Director James McDonald calls the consent decree a "monumental first" that will help the agency in bargaining with other companies and communities (including the city of Detroit) that resist its decrees. Says McDonald: "We are going to be very ties." firm One and seek indication of the substantial penal agency's hard line: before the consent decree, it had begun proceedings to make U.S.

Steel ineligible to win federal contracts.

By contrast, the stiff cost of the consent decree was a small price to pay.