By Claire Keenan-Kurgan
In northwest Indiana, there’s a stretch of Lake Michigan that’s super industrial. About 20 miles of coastline is taken up by industrial facilities, like oil and steel refineries.
When Steve Arnam first came to the beaches here as a teenager, it struck him as a “desolate, industrial wasteland.”
Arnam is a surfer. And the beaches in northwest Indiana are great for surfing. When the wind is blowing from the north, the shores there at the southern tip of the lake get some of the biggest waves you can find anywhere on the Great Lakes.
But because of all the industry nearby, the water in this region is also some of the most polluted in the Great Lakes. Some surfers here have gotten skin rashes, eye infections or stomach problems.
And about a decade ago, after a really big chemical spill, the surfers decided to do something about it.
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
On a freezing cold afternoon in February, Steve Arnam is driving his van through a massive B.P. oil refinery. Producer Claire Keenan-Kurgan is in the car with him.
CLAIRE KEENAN-KURGAN, BYLINE: Can you describe what we’re driving through now?
STEVE ARNAM: Right now, we’re driving through an industrial wasteland, I would say. We’re driving along the railroad tracks that supplies coal.
WANSCHURA: They’re in Whiting, Indiana, right on the shores of Lake Michigan, in between Chicago and Gary.
ARNAM: As you face the beach, it’s to your left is U.S. Steel, and to the right is BP.
WANSCHURA: This part of the lake is known for heavy industry. A ton of plants stretch on for around 20 miles along the shore. Everywhere you turn are smokestacks, railroad tracks, oil vats, flames… This B.P. refinery is the company’s largest in the world. And it’s so close they might as well be inside of it.
…
MILLER: There were a lot of stories about surfers who had experienced, you know, various problems upon coming out of the water. And I have to say, that was not reassuring.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Some of them had gotten weird skin rashes. Or eye infections, or stomach problems. They suspected it was the pollution, but it’s really hard to know for sure.
A group of South End surfers are part of this organization called Surfrider, which focuses on protecting water quality.
Judith and the Chicago Surfrider chapter decided to tap the environmental clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. See if they could figure out if the water was safe for surfing.
MILLER: We were so ignorant, you know, we just had no idea how complicated this was. What is it? You don’t know what you don’t know.
KEENAN-KURGAN: The clinic was made up of law students who wanted to figure this kind of thing out. And it turned out a lot of the information the surfers wanted was already public, kind of. Judith’s colleague Mark Templeton was leading the clinic.
TEMPLETON: Every major emitter into the air or discharger into the water has to register with the government, right, get a permit.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Permits to pollute, basically. Every permit is different, but they all set requirements for the companies to monitor and report what they’re putting into the waterways.
Mark and his team of students started going on a hunt to find out what each company was discharging, which meant finding all those permits on an Indiana state website that’s literally called the Virtual File Cabinet.
TEMPLETON: So we went to the Virtual File Cabinet and started pulling, essentially, the company’s raw filings.
KEENAN-KURGAN: I asked Mark to walk me through what he and his students did.
TEMPLETON: This is the Indiana permit number… Source ID, Indiana permit. If you want to see everything that’s licensed to discharge. You got to go pull the permit. And so I mean this, I’m not saying this is easy.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Then, they started looking for the times companies violated their permits.
And it’s not the state or federal government looking for the violations.
TEMPLETON: What’s interesting is that the company’s self disclosing that it’s actually violating the law.
KEENAN-KURGAN: They report the times that they go over the permit limits. And the violations show up on a website run by the Environmental Protection Agency.
At one facility near one of the surf spots in Indiana – a U.S. Steel facility – they found violations like discharges of nearly an extra hundred pounds of oil and grease, when the limit was around 750 pounds. Or discharges of extra copper or chromium.
These things happened multiple times a year at that spot. And other violations happened at most of the industrial plants they looked at.
Usually, the punishment for a permit violation is a fine from the state. The lowest fines are a couple thousand dollars, the highest are 25-thousand dollars, per violation per day. Which sounds like a lot, but to put it into context, U-S Steel is worth about 12 billion dollars. And BP is worth about 100 billion dollars. It’s hard to imagine these fines hurt them that much.
Mark and his students were pulling up all these permits and violations almost a decade ago, in 2017.
And in the middle of looking into what chemicals were getting into Lake Michigan, news reports started popping up of something really alarming.
What Mark and his students caught wind of was a big chemical spill. Much, much bigger than the ones they’d found before.