State of Wisconsin Gives Sheboygan River New Lease on Life

By Sean Ryan

The last 14 miles of the Sheboygan River are practically useless.

The water is undrinkable, the fish are inedible, and the stretch of water is too shallow to hold much more than a model boat.

But the state is in the middle of a multiyear dredging project that will change all of that by removing PCB-contaminated soil from the riverbed. The dredging of 20,700 cubic yards of soil from the upper segment of the river was completed in October. Now, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is looking for a consultant to draft water-quality goals for the lower segment, which opens into Lake Michigan.

“It’s more or less been accepted that the river is impaired, and it’s basically an ignored resource,” said Peter Pittner, president of the Sheboygan River Basin Partnership and vice president of environmental consultant Miller Engineers and Scientists, Sheboygan. “The perception of it is that it’s bad. I don’t know how else to put that.

“Don’t touch the water. Don’t drink the water.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2000 found that the Tecumseh Products plant in Sheboygan Falls was responsible for PCBs in the river and ordered the company to pay for the roughly $41 million cleanup, which includes clearing the river and removing 50,000 cubic yards of bad soil from the Sheboygan harbor.

The DNR is cleaning the Sheboygan River in three segments, starting at the Sheboygan Falls Dam and working downstream to Lake Michigan, said Thomas Wentland, waste-management engineer at the Plymouth office of the DNR. With dredging on the uppermost segment between Sheboygan Falls and the Waelderhaus Dam in Kohler complete, the DNR is checking out the seven-mile middle segment to see where pockets of contaminated sediment have collected.

Wentland said dredging would start on that stretch around May.

The DNR will also close bidding on Jan. 3 on a request for proposals for a contractor to draft a step-by-step cleanup plan for the lower segment. That plan, Pittner said, depends on how clean the area’s residents want the river to be.

He said there’s a general consensus that it should be clean enough that people and animals can safely eat fish from the river.

“There are people out there who basically want all of the contaminants removed,” Pittner said, “whatever that means.”

He said recreational boaters want the river dredged so it’s deep enough for their vessels. The river hasn’t been dredged in decades because it costs more to put the contaminated soil in landfills. The Sheboygan harbor hasn’t been dredged since 1969 for the same reason, and there are places where the sand pokes out of the water.

That issue, Pittner said, has kept the idea of running tour boats down the river from becoming anything more than a point of discussion.

Wentland said Tecumseh, which made aluminum engine blocks for lawn mowers, added PCBs to the hydraulic oil in its machines to make the oil nonflammable.

“When the company would have breaks or the hoses would leak and the oil was cleaned up off the shop floor, it went into the river,” Wentland said. “It wasn’t like a blatant dumping of the stuff. It was basically accidental.”

Tecumseh made a deal with Pollution Risk Services, Cincinnati, to perform the dredging work on the river. Pollution Risk oversaw the cleaning of the upper segment in 2006 and 2007.

Originally published by Sean Ryan.

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