Did you know that there are more than 350,000 pounds of PCB in the Kalamazoo River? Don`t you think it is amazing that there is that much polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) in a river? The location of the PCBs and the trash is 80 river miles long. So far, our progress is going amazingly well on cleaning up the river. Many people are helping. PCB has been causing many problems on the Kalamazoo River.

Most of the pollution is in the old paper mill impoundments in Kalamazoo, but the rest is spread throughout the 80 river mile stretch of Kalamazoo River and a portion of Portage Creek. When the animals come to the river to drink, they drink up the pollution, and get sick and sometimes die. Most of the people in the EPA think that if you eat an animal that has PCB in it, you might get cancer. Most of the new pollution is from a leak in the Bryant Mill Pound area by Brant Mill. At this time the cleanup area is divided into five projects: Unit #1 Allied Paper Property/Brant Mill Pound Area, Unit #2 Willow Boulevard site and A-Site, Unit #3: King Highway Landfill, Unit #4: 12th Street Landfill, and Unit #5 The Portage Creek and Kalamazoo River sediments.

Several kinds of animals have gotten PCBs by the food chain or by drinking it directly from the river. The most common effects are death or loss of reproduction. The two ways you can measure effects are by type and severity.

The trash is another problem. As I said in the beginning there are a great deal of people helping to clean the trash out of the river.

By Ben
February, 2002