Ice breakers, barges and cranes: What's happening in Lake Michigan off Jones Island?
Between ice breaking tug boats, massive cranes and large barges, there's a lot happening off Jones Island in Lake Michigan this winter.
Head south on the Hoan Bridge towards Milwaukee's Bay View neighborhood and you'll see perhaps the most striking activity, with barges floating 950 steel pipe piles — each measuring 85-feet-long — out into the lake, where they are placed by cranes. Eventually, the walls will create a waterproof border around a site the equivalent size of 13 football fields filled 50 feet deep.
It's more than a construction site, though.
"It's a once-in-a-generation opportunity to have a cleaner waterway," said Bridget Henk, a senior project manager with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District.
The site will become Milwaukee's new dredged materials management facility, and it will hold millions of cubic yards of polluted sediment removed from the city's waterways.
Here's what to know about the project and what work Milwaukeeans will continue to see off Jones Island.
More: River revival: Milwaukee's long-neglected Kinnickinnic River is on the verge of a revival
The Milwaukee estuary is one of dozens of "areas of concern" in the Great Lakes, a designation given the most polluted sites in the region. Milwaukee's site consists of 12 total miles of waterway that includes the lower reaches of the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinnic rivers, as well as nearshore areas of Lake Michigan.
Legacy industrial pollution is largely to blame for the impairments in the Milwaukee estuary, specifically from PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. PCBs are a class of hundreds of chemicals banned by the federal government in 1979 because they are hazardous to humans, fish and wildlife. The only way to get rid of these cancer-causing pollutants is to physically remove and store them permanently in a safe facility.
Along with getting rid of contaminated sediment, habitat restoration projects are also underway, like a fish passage built around the Kletzsch Park dam and a project to rehabilitate and move Bay View's South Shore beach.
The federal government, through the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, provides much of the funding for the area of concern cleanup effort, along with $450 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The Michels Corporation started construction of the new facility last winter. It will have a dual wall structure with a 50-foot space between that is filled with sand and rocks, similar to gravel material seen on roads. There will also be a two-and-a-half foot wide impermeable barrier so water and pollutants cannot pass through. That is what keeps the polluted sediment contained, Henk said.
The project is on schedule and the new facility should be operational by early 2027 at the latest, according to Henk.
The outer wall is mostly done. Now, the inner wall is being placed into the lake. The steel piles are so heavy they actually vibrate in place, Henk said, which is why the construction work is not noisy. In the coming months, Milwaukeeans also will see tub trucks bringing in sand that will go in between the dual walls.
The impermeable wall will be put this summer, Henk said.
Project partners on the facility include the Port of Milwaukee and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and We Energies. Some of the polluted sediment is associated with the operation of the former Third Ward Manufactured Gas Plant, operated by one of We Energies' corporate predecessors.
The new storage space will be located next to an existing sediment storage facility on Jones Island that is nearly full. The new facility will be 42 acres and will hold roughly 1.9 million cubic yards of polluted sediment.
According to Henk, it was designed with preventive measures to make sure pollutants do not seep into Lake Michigan. There also will be ongoing monitoring by the Port of Milwaukee and other project partners to make sure leaks are prevented.
Over time the sediment sinks and becomes compact. Then, the 42-acre site will be capped and become city property managed under the public trust doctrine to be preserved for public use. The Lake Express terminal also was built on a similar site storing dredged material.
It could take 40 to 50 years before this can happen, according to the sewerage district.
The city and sewerage district are also in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit against Monsanto, the chemical manufacturer now owned by the German company Bayer. Monsanto is more commonly known as the manufacturer that created the weedkiller Roundup, which has faced thousands of lawsuits as well.
The city and sewerage district allege that Monsanto promoted and sold PCBs throughout the 1950s to 1970s while concealing the health risks. It's one of several lawsuits across the country that have been filed against Monsanto, now Bayer, relating specifically to PCBs.
There are three other areas of concern in Wisconsin: the bay of Green Bay and Lower Fox River that flows into Lake Michigan; the Sheboygan River that also flows into Lake Michigan; and the St. Louis River that flows into Lake Superior. The EPA delisted a fifth area of concern, the Lower Menominee River, in 2020.
The Lower Fox River and the bay of Green Bay faced similar legacy PCB-contamination from wastewater discharged from paper mills along the river. The $1.3 million cleanup effort is considered the world's largest PCB cleanup effort, removing 6.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment − nearly 3.5 times more than Milwaukee's cleanup effort.
After decades of dredging, Gov. Tony Evers announced the end to the cleanup effort in 2020. A recent report by the EPA and Wisconsin DNR showed that the river is improving, but it will be upwards of three decades before fish consumption advisories for PCBs are removed.
More: Five years after the world's largest PCB cleanup ended, how's the Lower Fox River doing?
Caitlin Looby is a Report for America corps member who writes about the environment and the Great Lakes. Reach her at clooby@gannett.com, follow her on X @caitlooby and learn more about how she approaches her reporting.
Please consider supporting journalism that informs our democracy with a tax-deductible gift to this reporting effort at jsonline.com/RFA or by check made out to The GroundTruth Project with subject line Report for America Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Campaign. Address: The GroundTruth Project, Lockbox Services, 9450 SW Gemini Dr, PMB 46837, Beaverton, Oregon 97008-7105.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Construction of Jones Island, Lake Michigan sediment facility underway
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