by: cvllelaw
Democratic Central
Fri May 02, 2008 at 15:11:57 PM EDT

The Chicago Tribune has the story -- Mary Gade, head of EPA's Midwest office in Chicago, resigned. Gade told the Tribune that she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

www.chicagotribune.com/featur...3.story

Her sin? She has been trying to get Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin contamination in the Flint-Saginaw-Bay City, Michigan, area.
The battle over dioxin contamination had been raging for years when Gade began to turn up the heat on Dow Chemical to clean it up.

Gade has been locked in a heated dispute with Dow about long-delayed plans to clean up dioxin-saturated soil and sediment that extends 50 miles beyond its Midland, Mich., plant into Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron. The company dumped the highly toxic and persistent chemical into local rivers for most of the last century.

Many local residents see Dow as a lifeline in a region plagued by plant closings and layoffs. But all along the two wide streams that cut through this old industrial town, signs warn people to keep off dioxin-contaminated riverbanks and to avoid eating fish pulled from the fast-moving waters. Officials have taken the swings down in one riverside park to discourage kids from playing there. Men in rubber boots and thick gloves occasionally knock on doors, asking residents whether they can dig up a little soil in the yard.

Gade, appointed by President Bush as regional EPA administrator in September 2006, invoked emergency powers last summer to order the company to remove three hotspots of dioxin near its Midland headquarters.

She demanded more dredging in November, when it was revealed that dioxin levels along a park in Saginaw were 1.6 million parts per trillion, the highest amount ever found in the U.S.

Dow then sought to cut a deal on a more comprehensive cleanup. But Gade ended the negotiations in January, saying Dow was refusing to take action necessary to protect public health and wildlife. Dow responded by appealing to officials in Washington, according to heavily redacted letters the Tribune obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Gade sent contractors into a Saginaw neighborhood to take soil samples from residents' yards; they found levels in one Saginaw yard were nearly six times higher than the federal cleanup standard, and 65 times higher than what Michigan considers acceptable.
Dioxin is an extremely toxic manufacturing byproduct of the herbicide Agent Orange and other chlorinated chemicals. Company documents show that Dow knew by the mid-1960s that it could make people sick or even kill them. Years of independent studies have shown that dioxin causes cancer and disrupts the immune and reproductive systems, even at very low levels. Concerns about dioxin contamination were behind two of the most infamous environmental disasters in U.S. history: the evacuations of the Love Canal neighborhood in upstate New York and the entire town of Times Beach, Missouri. In the 1980's the EPA's head was forced to resign after he let Dow censor an EPA study documenting dioxin's dangers.

Gade came to her job from having been a corporate attorney representing big companies like Dow against environmental regulators. Her moves against Dow surprised the company, local activists and her Washington bosses. That's not what Republican administrators are supposed to do!