One of the biggest polluters of Lake Michigan agreed Monday to pay $3 million in fines after a previous owner dumped a plume of concentrated ammonia and cyanide into a northwest Indiana tributary and then failed to warn neighbors until thousands of dead fish floated past a marina days later.
A legal settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Hammond requires Cleveland Cliffs to prevent future violations of federal and state environmental laws by overhauling how pollution is treated and disposed of at its Burns Harbor steel mill. The company also agreed in writing to promptly inform nearby communities and Indiana Dunes National Park if the plant’s operators exceed limits on cyanide released into the East Branch of the Little Calumet River.
The August 2019 fish kill is another chapter in a long history of pollution problems at the sprawling Burns Harbor complex. Yet the administrations of President Donald Trump and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb initially refused to crack down on the steel mill’s former owner, Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal.
It took an independent lawsuit and a presidential election to get federal and state attorneys involved.
Four months after the cyanide and ammonia spill, the Chicago-based Environmental Law and Policy Center and another nonprofit group, the Hoosier Environmental Council, sued ArcelorMittal under provisions of the Clean Water Act, a landmark federal law that allows citizens to take action against polluters when government leaders fail to do so.
Cleveland Cliffs, which bought ArcelorMittal’s U.S. operations in 2020, tried unsuccessfully to block the lawsuit. Soon after President Joe Biden’s administration took office last year, the U.S. Department of Justice began negotiating a deal with the company, the nonprofit groups, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
“This sends a clear message to Cleveland Cliffs and other industrial polluters in northwest Indiana that they need to clean up their act,” Howard Learner, the Environmental Law and Policy Center’s executive director, said of the legal settlement, known as a consent decree.
One provision of the settlement appears to be related to an ongoing investigation of how ArcelorMittal and its contract laboratory handled water samples.
In January 2020, Indiana regulators accused the steel mill’s former owner of reanalyzing samples containing high levels of pollution and replacing the initial results with others that came back clean.
A summary of inspections, posted on IDEM’s website, detailed how ArcelorMittal and the lab botched the required documentation of when and where samples were taken, who handled them and which toxic chemicals were measured.
Only samples that revealed violations of the company’s Clean Water Act permit were reanalyzed, state inspectors noted.
Future sampling must be conducted under specific guidelines, according to the consent decree. Cleveland Cliffs also agreed to routine sampling downstream of the steel mill during the next two years.
“The company recognizes that all aspects of steelmaking must be accomplished in a responsible manner that minimizes impacts on the environment,” Cleveland Cliffs said in a statement. “Cliffs continues to focus on its environmental systems and performance across all its operations.”
In addition to paying $3 million in fines, split evenly between the federal government and Indiana, the company is donating 127 acres of land near the East Branch of the Little Calumet River that eventually will be added to the national park.
Federal records show the Burns Harbor mill repeatedly violated its water pollution permit before and after the 2019 fish kill. The facility has been on the U.S. EPA’s list of chronic Clean Water Act offenders for nine of the past 12 quarters.
Local officials welcomed improvements required under the legal settlement, noting several neighboring communities and the national park temporarily closed beaches and shut off drinking water intakes after the fish kill.
“There are also always human dimensions to these spills,” said Scott Kingan, president of the Ogden Dunes Town Council. “We hope that company employees will continue to implement safe and vigorous work plans, policies and environmental management systems to prevent future spills and exceedances that impact our residents, beaches and Lake Michigan drinking water.”
The Burns Harbor settlement is the latest in a long struggle to clean up the region’s steelmakers.
It took the U.S. EPA until 1977, five years after the Clean Water Act took effect, to win a court decision forcing U.S. Steel Gary Works to reduce the amount of industrial waste it dumped into Lake Michigan and the Grand Calumet River.
Gary Works is still the biggest polluter on Lake Michigan, and as recently as 2007 the EPA intervened to prevent Indiana from scrapping or relaxing limits in the facility’s water pollution permit.
In 2018, public interest lawyers found a pattern of violations at another U.S. Steel plant next door to the Cleveland Cliffs mill.
Attorneys from the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago threatened to sue U.S. Steel on behalf of the Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit that represents Lake Michigan surfers.
Federal and state regulators ended up negotiating a legal settlement similar to the one announced Monday.
