For 60 years, the steamship Badger has chugged dutifully across Lake Michigan, delivering railroad cars and tourist traffic between Manitowoc, Wis., and Ludington, Mich.
For every day of the spring-to-fall sailing season, Badger has just as dutifully dumped a grimy, putrid mix of carcinogenic-laced engine ash into the lake. It’s still there, and will always be.
The 509 tons of coal ash dumped every year – that’s 46,000 tons since it began chugging - overwhelms the 89 tons of coal, limestone and iron waste the entire Great Lakes fleet discharges annually.
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Except for cost, there is nothing that prevents the Badger from conversion to diesel. Or if you thought bigger, what’s wrong with solar power?
The last coal-fired ferry seems the perfect test case for the Environmental Protection Agency’s presumed power to stop commercial befouling of the environment. There is nothing but profit motive and a corresponding indifference to pollution that has allowed the Badger to continue.
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For a decade, the ship’s owners have been more resilient and apparently more clever than EPA regulators. Every time the clock runs out of the Badger’s exception to spew gunk into the lake, they find a legal “however” that provides more time.
Now that time has run out, though their lawyers still fight the rear-guard effort. Even as the owners claim they are working diligently to clean up the ship, they also are working to seek exemptions and delays. They want the ship declared a quaint National Historic Landmark that would protect its foul chugging forever.
Sen. Dick Durbin is pressing the EPA for tougher fines when the Badger violates the agreements. Based on history, those violations seem guaranteed. By 2015, the guaranteed “final” agreement stipulates that Badger must go clean.
Frankly, we’ll believe it when we see it.
But unless Durbin and the EPA fight at every turn of the regulatory wheel, the Badger will survive to pollute again. As with coal plants, oil refineries, mines and steel mills, the Badger’s owners will never stop coating the bottom of Lake Michigan with mercury-laced sludge unless they are legally made to stop. They make too much money to invest in oil-fueled engines.
The price of quaint is far too high, and polluters can’t be trusted to stop on their own. This is why the EPA exists.
