Overview:
- Environmental advocates claim BASF is delaying cleanup to cut costs, while Michigan taxpayers cover water testing and safety expenses.
- Regulators could order BASF to pump and treat more groundwater within months as a temporary fix, but a permanent solution won't start construction until 2027.
About 50 residents packed a Trenton town hall last month, pressing lawmakers and environmental officials for answers on the area’s contaminated sites. Their top concern: the BASF facility, where polluted groundwater continues to flow into the Detroit River—roughly 1,700 feet from Wyandotte’s drinking water intake.
Experts say BASF could be doing far more to stop the contamination, but regulators aren’t forcing the company to act. Brian O’Mara, a geological engineer and environmental remediation consultant, told Planet Detroit that a temporary fix could be implemented within months if regulators ordered BASF to pump and treat more groundwater. Instead, regulators say a permanent fix won’t begin construction until 2027.
“They have plenty of resources to do this,” he said. “They choose to drag it out and minimize their spending and they are wildly out of compliance.”
Environmental advocates argue that BASF, a multinational corporation with $1 billion set aside for environmental remediation, is deliberately dragging out the cleanup to minimize costs—while Michigan taxpayers foot the bill for water testing and safety measures.
Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy estimates that up to 60 gallons per minute flow from the highly polluted site into the Detroit River. The first consent decree between the company and the state of Michigan requiring BASF to stop pollution from leaving its property was signed 44 years ago. BASF entered into additional consent orders with EGLE and the EPA in 1986 and 1994, respectively
This groundwater carries toxic PFAS chemicals, mercury, arsenic, napthalene, benzene and other chemicals. Some of this water has had a pH as high as 13.22. The Environmental Protection Agency defines substances with a pH of 12.5 or above as hazardous waste.
“A concern for many of the people in the room that understand what’s going on is…BASF still has continued to discharge 3,000 gallons [per hour] continuously,” said Bob Burns, president of the Detroit Riverkeeper, a nonprofit citizen action group.
BASF removing just a fraction of groundwater pollution, records show
At the Trenton meeting, state and federal regulators said BASF is currently pumping contaminated groundwater and could start building a permanent barrier and extraction system by 2027.
Tracy Kecskemeti, assistant director of EGLE’s Materials Management Division, said the agency’s modeling shows the Wyandotte drinking water intake is safe.
She added that the state has been carrying out water sampling beyond the “typical parameters” in Wyandotte to ensure things like PFAS and certain metals found at the BASF site aren’t present in drinking water. She said that her department is also exploring additional treatment measures.
However, environmental advocates are disturbed at how little groundwater is being extracted now. They’re also concerned that the state is relying on drinking water testing to confirm its safety rather than preventing pollution from threatening the water intake in the first place.
Records from 2019 to 2023 show BASF is pumping out groundwater at a rate of about one gallon per minute, EGLE spokesperson Josef Greenberg told Planet Detroit. Based on the estimated 60 million gallons per minute coming from the site, that may be less than two percent of the total.
“It’s some incremental benefit, but it’s window dressing, in my opinion,” O’Mara said. “And it appears to be a diversion geared to placate the regulators [and] residents while they continue to delay implementation of a remedy that will comply with the existing orders to eliminate contaminated groundwater flow to the river.”
Greenberg said the EPA required BASF to install additional wells that began extracting groundwater in 2023. However, an EPA spokesperson did not answer questions about current groundwater extraction rates.
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Experts have expressed doubt about the effectiveness of the final remedy BASF is proposing, saying regulators could require BASF to use its substantial resources to address the problem more quickly by pumping out more contaminated groundwater and treating it with a temporary water treatment system.
“I’m frustrated at the pace of action out here and what they’re proposing, “O’Mara, who has previously done environmental consulting work for BASF, told Planet Detroit.
O’Mara reviewed the BASF’s plans for a physical barrier at the site and said it could still allow contaminated groundwater to flow into the river. He argues more pumping would be needed at the site to create an inward hydraulic gradient, reversing the flow of contaminated water so it’s no longer running off the property.
O’Mara said a temporary solution could be implemented in 60 to 90 days if regulators ordered the company to install more wells, trenches, and pumps to prevent runoff from entering the river.
BASF could order packaged water treatment systems to handle specific contaminants in the groundwater extracted at the site, he said. Then, it could send the treated water to a regional wastewater system or discharge it to the river, requiring a federal wastewater permit.
“In my mind, forcing them to do that would help incentivize them to move their final process along and get the remedy in place,” O’Mara said.
O’Mara said that pumps installed now could also continue to prevent groundwater from entering the river once the final remedy is completed.
EGLE directed questions about remedial measures to the EPA, the site’s lead agency. The EPA said it would “continue to evaluate additional ways to expedite the schedule while ensuring that the remedy proposal is protective of human health and the environment.”
BASF spokesperson Molly Birman didn’t answer why BASF wasn’t doing more to pump and treat groundwater now, saying only that “BASF operates groundwater extraction systems at the North Works site, designed to control groundwater, with oversight by EGLE.”
Taxpayers covering costs for BASF pollution
Public officials have reassured Downriver residents that Wyandotte’s drinking water is safe. But environmental advocates say drinking water testing shouldn’t be substituted for ensuring that pollution doesn’t move off the property in the first place.
Kecskemeti, with EGLE, said at the Trenton meeting that the power of the Detroit River is diluting BASF’s pollution.
“And then when you pull that water back out of the water plant, you can’t find it with your test,” she said.
Yet, Planet Detroit previously reported that the state and Wyandotte were not regularly testing for several contaminants found at the BASF site, including cyanide, arsenic and sulfate.
A 2022 EGLE review of groundwater venting at the site found that the location of Wyandotte’s drinking water intake meant that the venting groundwater would not “cause a public health impact that requires immediate attention.” However, it said the analysis “does have associated uncertainty” and that a “particle tracking model” or “plume model” could be used to understand the situation better.
Greenberg, with EGLE, said the agency was not currently planning to conduct such an analysis.
According to a 2022 letter from Kimberly M. Tyson, a hazardous waste section manager at EGLE, to the EPA’s Region 5 office, BASF’s groundwater vents into a Critical Assessment Zone, an area around a surface water intake that’s considered vulnerable to contamination, which constitutes “an ongoing violation” of Michigan law.
“These critical assessment zones are there to protect drinking water resources and the idea behind them is that within this type of area, you’ve got to be hypersensitive to the fact that a drinking water well intake is really close,” said Scott Troia, staff attorney at the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.
He said it was inappropriate to be spending taxpayer money on a safety net for Wyandotte’s drinking water system without requiring BASF to do more to mitigate the flow of pollution.
“Why put it at risk, even if you think it’s a small risk?” he asked. “Why not (demand) BASF, after 44 years, to do something in the short-term to mitigate the problem?”