On an overcast morning last month, as I followed Mapquest to a bridge on Military Street spanning the Lower Rouge River in Dearborn, I did a very un-Mapquest thing — hopped my car over a curb, stowing it on a sidewalk.
Then I popped the trunk, pulled on hip waders and tromped across the bridge. There I found the guy who e-mailed me that helpful parking tip. He wore an orange T-shirt and cap. He had on waders too, and was hauling deep-cycle storage batteries out of a big metal box supported by two 4-inch-by-4-inch posts.
A few steps away, a steep embankment dropped down to the Rouge. Robert Howell, a 30-year-old hydrological technician with the U.S. Geological Survey, was removing water quality monitoring equipment from a USGS stream-flow gauging station. I thought I was going to observe him mothballing the gear for the winter. I would be shocked minutes later to learn he was dismantling the water-quality measuring instruments, perhaps forever.
The equipment being removed gauged water temperature and the amount of dissolved oxygen in the river. Both are used to determine how healthy the Rouge is for its aquatic life. Later I would learn that testing for E. coli — the result of fecal waste that can cause serious illness for humans — had been discontinued three years earlier.
As for heavy metals and toxic chemicals, I could find no government source that's doing regular testing for those pollutants.
Despite the dearth of objective criteria, officials responsible for overseeing cleanup of the Rouge are assuring the public that conditions have improved dramatically. But experts I've talked with say that chemical pollutants and fecal contamination still make the river unsafe for swimming, and eating its fish can often be risky. Moreover, testing crucial to gauging the river's health and evaluating the effectiveness of massive expenditures of tax dollars has been substandtially curtaled or, in some cases, completely eliminated.
But, based on the data that is available, despite spending $1.6 billion since the late 1980s to clean the Rouge, that statement simply isn't true.
Long and dirty
At 127 miles, the Rouge is the longest river in southeastern Michigan. It drains 466 square miles of terrain in three counties and 48 municipalities. With its headwaters in feeder creeks stretching through farmland in Washtenaw County, the Rouge flows through suburbs with homes and stores in exclusive bedroom ZIP codes like Rochester Hills, Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, and through less-pricey burbs with homes, businesses and factories around Canton, Northville and Plymouth, Southfield, Dearborn Heights, Allen Park and others. The river stretches through miles of Detroit, winding through two big city parks.
In many of those places, the river is hidden away behind trees. Charles Beckham, one-time Detroit recreation director, explained in 2005 why both Eliza Howell and River Rouge parks are designed to keep park-goers away from the river: Because when it rains, the river can be a storm sewer, and you don't want park-goers near it.
Where it can be seen, the Rouge often looks like a rustic stream you might encounter in northern Michigan. Except for one thing: In the watershed for Detroit and its suburbs live 1.5 million people, most of whom flush toilets. It has been the Rouge River's downfall that, to keep from flooding streets and basements with sewage, the river must take some of the waste. And take it the Rouge does, even today, despite hard work by many people in government, engineering, architecture and environmental consulting firms.
As of this summer, government expenditures on cleaning the Rouge totaled $1.6 billion since the late '80s. Federal funding came through a congressionally approved program known as the Rouge River Wet Weather Demonstration Project.
To stem the tide of sewage flowing into the Rouge during wet weather, huge retention basins have been built in both Oakland and Wayne counties. The idea is to hold back sewage-laced rainwater during storms, pump chlorine into it and release it, partly treated, when the rain lets up. Governments in both counties have also improved sanitary sewer lines, separating storm from sanitary sewer pipes in the suburbs. Illicit sewer connections have also been targeted, as have myriad private septic systems, some of which contribute waste to the Rouge.
Kelly Cave of Wayne County's Department of Environment says the effort has been a big success. The amount of dissolved oxygen in the Rouge, once too low to support aquatic life most of the time, was meeting state standards 95 percent of the time by 2005, according to Cave.
But Kent Murray, a geology professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, questions the good tidings on dissolved oxygen (DO). Murray contends that dissolved oxygen data obtained by the USGS don't support the dramatic improvement Wayne County claims.
In an e-mail, Murray wrote: "When we did water quality testing back in the mid-1990s, we found DO levels approaching 10 mg/L [milligrams per liter] in the winter and about 5 in the summer. Below 4, the stream is considered dead, and we had frequent readings in the 4-5 range."
Readings of 8 and above are considered healthy, Murray said.
"Today, more than 10 years later and after spending hundreds of millions of dollars," wrote Murray, "you will still see winter values around 10 and summer values between 5 and 6. Perhaps some improvement, but not to the degree that you would expect after listening to Kelly Cave."
James Ridgway disagrees with Murray's criticism. Ridgway is executive director of the Alliance of Rouge Communities, or ARC, a consortium of several dozen local governments that had been underwriting the USGS cost of the data collection. Ridgway is also a vice president at Environmental Consulting Technologies, Inc., a for-profit corporation that provides staff, organizes public meetings and oversees testing programs for ARC.
"The dissolved oxygen regularly went to zero in the Rouge 10 years ago," Ridgway wrote in an e-mail. "That doesn't happen any more. There were no fish (and a bunch of bad bacteria) because the DO was zero."
Added Ridgway, "Kent views the problems of the Rouge as a toxic-type problem. It is, however, most feel, that first you have to control the 'standard' pollutants. As an example — if you're in a room and there is a toxic release that MAY kill you in the next 20 to 30 years, you should be concerned. If you are in that same room and the oxygen goes to zero and you suffocate in 10 minutes, you have a very real problem." more
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