From NWI:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking action to clean up a long-dormant Gary landfill that is leaking hazardous waste into a neighboring wetland near the Grand Calumet River.

On Tuesday, the EPA added the former Gary Development Landfill, at 479 Cline Ave., to a list of 15 properties nationwide that it wants to classify as Superfund sites.

The former landfill operated from 1975 until 1989, EPA officials said. It legally accepted solid waste, as well as hazardous materials such as volatile organics, metals and insecticides that it wasn’t permitted to handle, said Patrick Hamblin, who oversees the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List for the Great Lakes region. Read more.

IISG’s education team, Robin Goettel and Terri Hallesy, visited Laura Senteno’s 7th and 8th grade classroom at Niños Heroes Elementary School and Rosemary Reddice’s 7th grade classroom at George Pullman Elementary School on February 18. Angie Viands, Windy City Earth Force coordinator, asked Terri and Robin to visit these two classrooms to enrich students’ understanding of the pharmaceutical disposal issue and to help the teachers and students come to a decision regarding which Earth Force community issue they plan to tackle. This process is integral to the Earth Force-Sea Grant partnership in which students are led through a six-step process of community action and problem solving to address important community issues.

After talking to students about the problems posed by improperly disposed of medicines and good alternatives, they engaged the youth in a Jeopardy game, a vocabulary word scramble game, and a marble labyrinth game, Get Rid of Stuff Sensibly. Activities were selected from IISG’s Medicine Chest curriculum materials. Once the students select their issue, they will work on projects that will be exhibited at a culminating youth summit, coordinated by Earth Force.

Following this visit, Laura Senteno commented on the students’ response: “The information you presented helped very much, especially in terms of motivation. After you left, quite a large group of them really got busy with their personal care product assignment, and I overheard them discussing some of the information from your workshop.”

This effort is part of a larger project funded by the U.S. EPA Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

From Dredging Today:

Thomas Simon knows first hand what a terrible condition the Grand Calumet River has been in. When he first sampled it for fish in 1985, his findings were scary.

“The only fish we caught, it was a carp, it had no fins. It was completely bloody,” recalled Simon, then in his first year with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “There was no (Indiana Department of Environmental Management) at the time. It was the health department. All the guys started cheering. There was a fish and it was alive. That was the first fish we caught.”

Three years later, Simon went back. That’s when he found Blinky — a fish who got his name because he was so severely deformed that he had no eye on one side of his mouth.

Fish deformities are part of what led scientists to list the Grand Calumet River as impaired for all 14 possible uses in 1972, earning it the title of the most polluted river in the nation.

This summer, Simon hopes to start changing that by proving that the river is in much better condition than government data shows. Now a researcher for Indiana State University, Simon will be sampling a 10-mile stretch of the river and areas nearby. Read more.

Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant’s Kristin TePas recently began her new position at the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office (GLNPO) in Chicago. As of Feb. 1, she is IISG’s Great Lakes community decision-making specialist. In this position, Kristin will assist coastal communities and other clients in making informed decisions, strengthening policies, or implementing programs that improve the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem. She will be working with GLNPO scientists to use their monitoring and research data to make products and publications for community leaders.

Kristin previously worked as the program’s aquatic invasives extension associate for almost 10 years, conducting outreach focused on preventing the introduction and spread of invasive species.

“I’m very excited about this new opportunity,” Kristin said. “I’m looking forward to working with the Great Lakes communities and broadening my focus beyond aquatic invasive species.”

One project she is currently working on is acting as a liaison between EPA and Purdue University, which is developing indicators for land use change and agricultural lands. The project is being done in the hopes that EPA will adopt the indicators.

Kristin holds an M.E.M. in coastal environmental management from Duke University and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Notre Dame.

From Science Daily:

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have come up with a way to detect pathogenic Escherichia coli and Salmonella bacteria in waterways at lower levels than any previous method. Similar methods have been developed to detect pathogenic E. coli in meat products, but the approach by the scientists with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) represents a first for waterways. Read more.

From NBC Chicago:

From the day the first French explorers arrived in what would become Chicago, human beings have tried to mold Lake Michigan into a more user-friendly body of water.

Grant and Millennium Parks sit in what used to be open water, filled in a hundred years ago by city fathers anxious to give Chicago a magnificent front yard. And up and down the lakefront, repeated modifications have been made in an effort to corral the lake’s fury. Read more and watch the video.

Mike Allen’s interest in biology and nature flourished at a young age as a Boy Scout spending his time camping and exploring the woods of New York state. However, at the time he probably couldn’t have envisioned that his youthful fascination with the environment would lead him to play a role in the United States government’s response to one of the worst environmental crises in decades – the Gulf of Mexico oil spill of 2010.

Allen was in the third month of his Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant fellowship with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) when there was an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on April 20, 2010 that killed 11 workers and resulted in oil being pumped in the Gulf for almost three months.

“We won’t know the full effects and the real answers for years,” said Allen, who received his Ph.D. in ecology, evolution, and conservation biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. “It is very disheartening because the Gulf is already a stressed ecosystem, and (the spill) is one more major kick in the gut. It is going to be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years.”

The National Sea Grant College Program established the Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship in 1979. Graduate students accepted into the program travel to the Washington, D.C. area to work on marine policy in legislative and executive offices.

Soon Allen’s office, the Office of Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, located in Silver Spring, Md., was tasked to put together a group that would coordinate major components of the science and research response to the oil spill disaster.

“NOAA is the lead science agency for oil spills, so all aspects of the enterprise came into play,” Allen said, adding that they worked on researching seafood safety, dispersants, oil properties in the water, and more.

Allen worked with the federal agency’s leadership to track activities in the Gulf; develop and submit science proposals with the laboratories; and secure reimbursement and new funding for completed, ongoing and proposed activities.

While Allen was never sent to the actual site of the spill, he said the experience gave him a new perspective on how the government responds to a crisis of this magnitude.

“We were just one agency among many that had a mandate from Congress to respond to a spill like this,” he said. “Setting up the coordination mechanism across government agencies to make this happen was just incredible to see.”

During his fellowship, Allen also worked as the primary liaison between NOAA’s administrative headquarters and the three “wet labs” – the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.

Allen’s yearlong fellowship ran through the end of January 2011, when the program allowed him to transition to a contract position with 2020 Company, LLC, which has placed him in NOAA as a policy analyst.

“(The fellowship) has been an absolutely fabulous experience for me,” he said. “Being here in D.C. and seeing how the agency works and interacts with other agency offices has been very eye-opening for how the government functions and how people get things done.”

He also said the fellowship gave him the opportunity to travel to various offices and laboratories as well as develop valuable contacts.

“I encourage other people in Illinois and Indiana to consider applying for this fellowship because it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience policy in Washington, D.C.,” Allen said. “It will open your eyes to the way government works.”

Applications for the 2012 Knauss fellowships are due by Feb. 18. For more information, go to our Fellowship page.

IISG’s new environmental social scientist is Caitie McCoy. Caitie will focus on communities interested or involved with the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which provides resources to clean up U.S. EPA Areas of Concern. She will be working on outreach related to contaminant remediation and restoration (including economic and societal benefits), user needs assessments, communications plans, and case studies.

According to Caitie, she will work closely with local residents so that remediation projects are in line with community interests. She will bring together scientists, landowners, and other participants, including underserved audiences in the community, to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

She is located in the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago.

Caitie recently finished her M.S. in the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at Colorado State University. Her graduate work combined communication, collaborative conservation, and education to build the adaptive capacity and resilience of local communities. She has participated in a number of research projects focused on the connection of people and nature. She has some teaching experience and has worked for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

From the Environmental News Network:

Predicting future climates on planet Earth is an extremely hard task due to the myriad of factors involved. To make the necessary calculations requires computers with capacities far beyond the average home computer. However, climate models are become ever more reliable thanks not only to greater computing power, but also to more extensive observation efforts of the current climate, and an improved understanding of the climate system. Read more.