chemical spill
© Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago TribuneThe chemical spill from the U.S. Steel facility in Portage caused beaches in and around Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to close and left officials scrambling to determine the extent of damage caused to the local environment.
While federal environmental officials scrambled to protect Lake Michigan from a cancer-causing metal spilled into a northwest Indiana tributary, their political bosses in President Donald Trump's administration are pushing a new budget that would scuttle efforts to crack down on the pollutant nationwide.

The spill of hexavalent chromium, reported Tuesday by the U.S. Steel Midwest Plant in Portage, prompted the neighboring Ogden Dunes community to shut off its drinking water intake and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to close four beaches as a precaution. Chicago conducted emergency testing of water drawn at an intake crib off 68th Street, about 20 miles across the lake from the spill, but found nothing unusual.

U.S. Steel said it appears a broken pipe joint allowed a still-undetermined amount of wastewater to spill into a ditch next to the plant, where steel forged at the nearby Gary Works is coated with hexavalent chromium and other rust-inhibiting materials.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said there was no immediate threat to Lake Michigan. But the spill draws renewed attention to a toxic metal made infamous by the movie Erin Brockovich.

chromimum
Steel mills and chrome plating operations are major industrial sources of hexavalent chromium, which testing nationwide shows already is routinely found in the water supplies of more than 200 million Americans, including millions in the Chicago area. The Portage plant is one of six facilities on the southern shore of Lake Michigan that legally released a combined 1,696 pounds of the metal into Lake Michigan and its tributaries during 2015, according to federal records.

The EPA and the National Toxicology Program linked the dangerous form of chromium to stomach cancer nearly a decade ago. Yet plans to adopt the first national standards for the metal in drinking water have been repeatedly delayed by objections from the chemical industry, and there are signs the new administration could scrap the effort altogether.

Trump's proposed budget would abolish the Integrated Risk Information System, the EPA office working on hexavalent chromium standards in drinking water, as well as sharply reduce funding for scientific reviews of toxic chemicals and cut back on the agency's enforcement of environmental laws.

The administration also is moving to eliminate a program that has provided roughly $300 million a year to fund cleanup and restoration work on the Great Lakes, including projects that address past environmental damage caused by U.S. Steel and other polluters in northwest Indiana.

"Considering what we're seeing right now in northwest Indiana, that doesn't make any sense," said Molly Flanagan, vice president for policy at the nonprofit Alliance for the Great Lakes.
"This situation is exactly what the EPA was created to do: respond to environmental emergencies, regulate polluters to make them follow the law and protect us from nasty things that endanger public health."
Chicago began quarterly testing for hexavalent chromium in drinking water about six years ago after the nonprofit Environmental Working Group reported finding the metal in the city's tap water and in drinking water from more than two dozen other cities.

Results posted online by the Chicago Department of Water Management show levels as high as 0.30 parts per billion in treated drinking water last year — 15 times higher than a health goal California officials adopted in 2009 based on the National Toxicology Program study. But levels in Chicago and other cities are below a controversial regulatory limit California later adopted: 10 parts per billion.

The California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment defines the health goal, 0.02 parts per billion, as an amount that reduces the lifetime risk of developing cancer to a point considered negligible by most scientists and physicians. The state's regulatory limit was adopted based on other considerations, including the added cost of water treatment.

At home, people can reduce chromium levels in their tap water with reverse osmosis technology or devices certified by NSF International, a nonprofit group that tests the effectiveness of water filtration. Inexpensive and widely sold carbon filters aren't certified to address the problem, the group says.
lake Michigan
© (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)Looking west from the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk in Portage, Ind. on Wednesday, April 12, 2017. The beach was closed after a spill of hexavalent chromium was reported by the U.S. Steel Midwest Plant. U.S. Steel's Gary Works plant can be seen in the distance.
Industry lobbied fiercely against tougher regulations after it became clear that hexavalent chromium has contaminated water supplies throughout the nation. The Erin Brockovich movie dramatized one of the most high-profile cases: a miles-long plume of the toxic metal dumped by a utility in rural Hinkley, Calif., that led to a $333 million legal settlement over illnesses and cancers.

The American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry's chief trade group, contends other studies show "no adverse health effects" at the current EPA standard of 100 parts per billion for total chromium, a measurement that includes the dangerous form of the metal and other forms, one of which is an essential nutrient in tiny amounts.

Health groups say hexavalent chromium is so dangerous that a national standard is long overdue.

"Even a single gallon of hexavalent chromium could contaminate billions of gallons of drinking water," said David Andrews, senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group. "The lack of a drinking water standard ... is just one more example of our failed drinking water regulations."

Indiana officials once sought to relax limits on chromium discharges from U.S. Steel's Gary Works, the largest industrial polluter on the Great Lakes. State officials backed down and imposed more stringent restrictions after Tribune reporting prompted federal regulators in 2007 to block a new water permit for the steel mill.