March 16, 2023

Dear friend of the parks,

We hope you saw our eblast on Monday about the lawsuit we filed with our co-plaintiffs, Alliance of the Southeast, with the help of public interest lawyers at Environmental Law and Policy Center, to close the Confined Disposal Facility (CDF) pollution dump and finally turn it into a long-promised park!

In case you haven’t kept up on this issue as we’ve worked on it over the last handful of years, we offer the below media pieces that have come out this week to help catch you up on the story.

Read on…

In solidarity,

Juanita Irizarry

Executive Director

"Friends of the Parks and the Alliance of the Southeast filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Chicago, aiming to stop construction that will expand what’s called a confined disposal facility that’s been filling up since the early 1980s.

The expanded site is set to be built on an existing 45-acre underwater dump of the dredged muck next to Calumet Park on the Southeast Side, not far from public swimming. The groups say the project is 'contrary to the public interest,' and they’d like to see the area converted to a park, which was originally promised when the Corps began using the area in 1984.

'We don’t need an expansion to add more toxic dredgings from the river next to Calumet Park, where families gather, do sports, have picnics and play in the water,' Alliance of the Southeast Executive Director Amalia NietoGomez said in a statement.

Read the complete article at the Chicago Sun-Times.

"The Corps only explored options for new facilities within the 10th Ward, home to the current dump. Residents balked at having a second waste site built in their community, but that left the Corps’ expansion plan as the only viable alternative.

Read the complete article at WTTW.

"The proposed waste site would rise 25 feet in the air. Sediment from the dredged material includes mercury, PCBs, arsenic, barium, cadmium, manganese, chromium, copper, lead and other contaminants, the lawsuit said.

The community groups are concerned it will pose health risks to the once heavily industrial Southeast Side that's "already overburdened with exposure to environmental pollutants." They ask for more environmentally friendly options to be explored."

Read the complete article at the Northwest Indiana Times.

"City and state officials signed off on the Army Corps plan to keep using the lakefront dump. But the new lawsuit, filed by the nonprofit Environmental Law and Policy Center, contends the project fails to comply with federal environmental laws and skips stringent monitoring to ensure PCBs and heavy metals aren’t leaching into the lake and river.

Past monitoring, later scaled back at the request of the Army Corps, revealed pollution concentrations exceeding federal and state regulations adopted after the dump was constructed with dikes intended to protect Lake Michigan from the dredged sediment, government documents show.

Howard Learner, the center’s executive director, accused the Army Corps of glossing over the environmental consequences and neglecting to explore other disposal options. Moreover, Learner said, plans to expand the dump run counter to the Biden administration’s pledges to focus all federal agencies on fighting climate change and working toward environmental justice in low-income, predominantly Black, Latino and Indigenous communities that are disproportionately exposed to industrial pollution."

Read the complete article at the Chicago Tribune.

"There are toxins in there that we know are already leaching into Lake Michigan and our water supply,” Irizarry said. “They’re dredging up toxins, dumping them into the dump, and they’re leaking into our water supply. It’s kind of silly to continue to do that right on the lakeshore.”

Read the complete article at audacity.com.

“'You can sit in Calumet Park, along the fence under a sign that says ‘DANGER KEEP OUT,’ said Irizarry. 'And then the dump is on the other side. It’s also real that swimmers in Calumet Beach are potentially being exposed to the toxins that are leaching out of this.'

The health impacts of exposure to all of the cumulative toxins on the Southeast Side have stacked up. Residents there are disproportionately diagnosed with coronary heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to a 2021 study. They have also reported struggling with autoimmune disorders and cancer they believe is linked to the toxins in the neighborhood."

Read the complete article at Grist.

"Because Lake Michigan levels are expected to vary between record lows and record highs due to climate change, the confined disposal facility is potentially vulnerable to stronger wave action that could wash accumulated tainted sentiment right back into the lake. The site is protected by only a dirt berm, not concrete.

That should be a major worry, but Friends of the Parks Executive Director Juanita Irizarry told us part of the problem might be that concerns about climate change and environmental justice got short shrift under the Trump administration, when some of the project planning was taking place.

Instead, the Army Corps explored a limited number of options to the existing site, all in the 10th Ward, said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center, which is handling the lawsuit. The Army Corps did not “rigorously explore and objectively evaluate all reasonable alternatives outside of the 10th Ward,” Learner wrote in an email. For its part, the Army Corps said it did an environmental impact statement of the plan."

Read the complete editorial at the Chicago Sun-Times.