#arcelormittal

RENATIONALIZE CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAYS

TRAINWORKS

The history of the Liège steel industry goes back further than the birth of Belgium in 1830. In 1817, the Englishman John Cockerill founded his first steelworks in Seraing to produce the steel for his looms. In the following decades, the steel industry develops to its peak, until it takes its first hits in the early 1980s. The majority of the steel activity in Liège and Charleroi is then brought together in Cockerill Sambre. Several blast furnaces, coking plants, coal mines, hot and cold rolling mills, factories for processing blast furnace slag,... dominated the Walloon economy for almost 200 years.

For decades, the industrial facilities situated on the Northwest Indiana shores of Lake Michigan have been dumping crap into Lake Michigan or the rivers and canals in the area, and into the air. So here again, a steel company dumping toxic chemicals into the lake. And here we also go again......agencies of the State of Indiana being aware of the dump or spill, and not telling the public. The only reason we know: pleasure boaters noticed a lot of floating dead fish.

Excerpt from this Chicago Tribune story:

Three Lake Michigan beaches remain closed after a northwest Indiana steel mill dumped toxic chemicals into a tributary earlier this week, an incident that was not reported to the public until hundreds of dead fish began floating past boaters.

Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal notified Indiana officials on Monday that a plume of cyanide and ammonia from its Burns Harbor steel mill had spilled into a branch of the Little Calumet River. But the mayor of Portage, a lakefront city west of the plant, said the state’s environmental agency did not alert local officials or citizens until Thursday.

As a precaution, the National Park Service closed the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk beach area at Indiana Dunes National Park. The neighboring community of Ogden Dunes also closed its beach and restricted its Lake Michigan water intake.

Portage Mayor John Cannon said state officials and the region’s steel industry should be required to promptly notify local communities about chemical spills and other violations of environmental laws. The mayor “holds ArcelorMittal responsible,” Cannon said Friday in a statement.

Cyanide is used by the steel industry to electroplate and clean metals. ArcelorMittal legally discharged more than 61,000 pounds of the toxic chemical into the Little Calumet River during 2017, according to federal records. But in a statement Friday, the company acknowledged that it violated legal limits on the amount of cyanide and ammonia released during a single day.

The company said it already has fixed a malfunctioning system that circulates water through the plant’s blast furnaces. It also is collecting water samples daily from a pair of sewage outfalls and every quarter-mile of the Little Calumet downstream.

The spill — and the delayed public notification — raise new questions about state and federal regulation of the region’s steel industry.ArcelorMittal’s plant has violated the Clean Water Act during five of the past 12 quarters, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website that tracks enforcement and compliance.