Surfrider Chicago responded last Monday to U.S. Steel’s attempts to hold off the environmental advocates’ lawsuit, claiming that the consent decree reached between the Pittsburgh-based steel company and the U.S. Government will not address the violations that are still taking place at the company’s Portage facility. Namely, that chromium in the groundwater near the plant is still migrating towards the Burns Waterway, according to a July report with the IDEM only recently made public by U.S. Steel.
On August 3, U.S. Steel filed their response, claiming that Surfrider’s lawsuit “advanced similar or identical claims” to the government’s, so “the consent decree, in its current form, or as revised based on the comments submitted by [Surfrider] and others, will resolve and bar most, if not all, of the claims in [Surfrider’s] complaints.” U.S. Steel goes on to add that only four months after the stay, their situation is unchanged, and so there is no reason to reopen the lawsuit.
“When the hexavalent chromium spill happened last April, not all of the chromium went down the outfall pipe,” claims Weinstock, “We’ve learned that there’s hexavalent chromium in the groundwater beneath the facility. That is new information [since agreeing to the stay.] Ground impacts are not reflected at all in the consent decree. If there was chromium that spilled into the soil and got to the groundwater, that raises serious questions about the volumes of the spill that were used to notify the public and were used in calculating penalties.”
