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WASHINGTON – Indiana came in for a verbal thrashing Tuesday as members of Congress lambasted the “stunning mistake,” the “crazy” decision and the “wrong-headed” ruling that would allow a Hoosier oil refinery to increase the pollution it dumps into Lake Michigan.
The Indiana Department of Environmental Management will allow BP’s plant in Lake County to increase its ammonia discharge by 66 percent and its suspended-solid discharge by 33 percent.
“This is crazy. This is nuts,” said Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich. “Instead of creating more stringent regulations, this permit marks a huge step backward in our effort to keep our Great Lakes clean.”
The state also came under fire Tuesday from Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who called the permit “a major setback.”
In a response last month to Hoosiers who complained about the permit, IDEM said the increase in the contaminants is justified because of “the additional jobs, the long-term viability of the existing jobs/business and the value to our nation’s overall security resulting from utilizing a new source of petroleum from a neighboring friendly country.”
“The state of Indiana needs to re-examine this,” said Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., one of several lawmakers who said the Hoosier environmental protection agency was off base. The House is expected to vote today on a resolution scolding Indiana for issuing the permit and asking the Environmental Protection Agency to overrule it.
Last month Indiana issued a permit to BP that would allow the energy company to increase the contaminants it discharges into Lake Michigan when it remodels a refinery in Whiting, near the Indiana-Illinois border. The $3.8 billion project is expected to create 80 jobs when it is completed in 2011 and would refit the plant so it could process crude oil from Canada.
Thomas Easterly, the department’s commissioner, issued a statement that the additional contaminants won’t hurt drinking water, fish or people who swim in the lake.
In an interview Tuesday, BP spokesman Scott Dean said he’d happily swim in the water BP discharges into Lake Michigan and would drink it after adding some chlorine – just like any water-treatment plant does before pumping drinking water to people’s homes.
Few members of Congress who made speeches about the House resolution chiding Indiana bought Easterly’s explanation or Dean’s enthusiasm.
IDEM “failed in their duty to protect the public and authorized the first new dumping in the lake in a decade,” said Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., who called BP a “pretend friend of the environment.”
Like Upton, many of the critics are traditional supporters of fellow Republicans such as Gov. Mitch Daniels. But Tuesday, they had nothing but brickbats.
“Last week I called Gov. Daniels,” Upton said, “and told him we have a hornets’ nest.”
Daniels’ spokeswoman did not respond to a request for Daniels’ reaction. When the plant remodeling was announced, Daniels called it a “landmark project” that “marks another huge step in Indiana’s economic comeback.” He said the project would employ “more construction workers … than to build the new Indiana Stadium and Convention Center.”
When BP announced the project last year, officials said reconfiguring the refinery could increase production of motor fuel by about 15 percent.
IDEM told Hoosiers who objected to the proposed permit that the agency “knows that the increase in the effluent limits for ammonia and TSS (total suspended solids) will result in some degradation of the water quality of Lake Michigan. However the increase has been limited to the amount shown by BP to be necessary and this action does support important social and economic development in the area of the discharge.”
Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-1st, who represents Lake County where the BP plant employs 6,500, said the oil-and-gas company has the legal authority to increase the material it dumps into Lake Michigan, but he hopes it will “refrain from doing so.”
sylviasmith@jg.net
