Asbestos danger on Illinois’ beaches

On top of that, several locals have been quoted by reporters in the past saying they worked for Manville breaking up pieces of asbestos-containing pipe so it could be dumped in the lake.
A Chicago Sun-Times story from the late 1990s reports on park employees finding a “a 30-pound, 2-foot piece of 6-inch asbestos piping between the shoreline and park headquarters, north of the park’s lodge.”
Inside the pipe was a gasket with “Johns-Manville” imprinted on it.
The strange thing is that water in this part of Lake Michigan has been shown to have a strong southerly flow. The beaches should have been safe from waste dumped by Johns-Manville.
But in 1987, Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) built the North Point Marina on the northern end of the park. This caused the beaches in the park to erode, and the state needed some way of replenishing the sand.
South of the Johns-Manville site sits a Midwest Generation Co. (formerly Commonwealth Edison) power plant, and just south of that the Waukegan Harbor.
In the ATSDR’s most recent report, it notes that 46,000 yards of sand was dredged from in front of the power plant between 1994 and 1995 and dumped on the north end of IBSP to replenish the park’s sands.

Then, from at least 2001 to 2005, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged sand from the approach channel to the Waukegan Harbor and dumped it just off shore from IBSP. The dredging, according to the ATSDR, was done, “through an arrangement between IDNR, IEPA, and U.S. Army Corp of Engineers Chicago District.”

But all five studies done on asbestos contamination at ISBP say the pollution was first discovered by a park official in 1997.
That year, former Chicago Sun-Times Senior Investigative Reporter Charles Nicodemus wrote that politicians and the public were outraged that the Illinois Department of Natural Resources had waited six months – until spring of 1998 – before alerting anyone to the asbestos.
But in April of 2000, Nicodemus dug up this Illinois EPA memo. The memo, made by Illinois EPA agent Chris Kallis, notes that an industrial hygienist for the Great Lakes Naval Training Center (GLNTC) “found pieces of friable asbestos scattered along the the shores of Lake Michigan.”
This asbestos was found in front of the power plant, where the sand was dredged and then dumped on the north end of the beach.
The memo also says, “It should be emphasized that this is a highly used recreation area.”
It also notes that a joint investigation by the power company and Johns-Manville was done before the hygienist’s report.
“Apparently quite a bit of asbestos was found,” in this investigation, the memo states.
A cleanup had been initiated afterward by Johns-Manville, but according to the report, “It apparently was not successful, since a lot of the material was visible around the shorelines.”
For several reasons, this proof of friable asbestos on the beach since 1990 is an important fact, the kind that should be found in the five reports done on ISBP. For one, it establishes that the agencies involved in allowing the power plant and the Army Corps of Engineers to dump dredged sand north of the beach should have known the sand was contaminated.
The fact that the problem was occurring one year before the EPA Superfund cleanup ended – and ongoing afterward – suggests the cleanup was inadequate.
It also shows the asbestos problem has been around for almost twice as long as the five official reports would lead one to believe. This would suggest that many more people have been exposed, for longer periods of time, and that, to keep washing up for nearly 20 years, there must be a quite large amount of asbestos in Lake Michigan.
But this memo did not find its way into reports on the beach, nor did it trigger any action by federal or state agencies at the time it was written.
According to the April 2000 story by Nicodemus, the Illinois EPA’s excuse for not acting on the memo was that it thought the U.S. EPA had responsibility for cleaning the asbestos. When interviewed by Nicodemus, U.S. EPA’s excuse was that they didn’t think the problem was in their jurisdiction.
Government agencies finally began investigating asbestos at the park after Nicodemus published his first story on it in 1998.
In March of 1998, Nicodemus writes about a closed-door meeting called by the Illinois State Attorney’s Office on the findings of the first study done on the park by Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR), in which s state official declared that the beach posed “no significant health risk.”
But Nicodemus spoke with Sen. Terry Link (D-Vernon Hills), who was allowed to attend the meeting. The same official who claimed there was no risk was asked, according to Link, what happens when the ACM washes ashore and dries out.
The official, according to Link, said “Then it can become friable and then it could become dangerous.”

(Story Continues)

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