(Above: Sign about 1992-93 Starkweather Creek remediation near O.B. Sherry Park; photo by Maria Powell in 2018)
“After 50 years of neglect, Starkweather to get its due?”
Too bad this was almost thirty years ago–the headline of a story by Mike Ivey in The Capital Times on August 7, 1992, well before anyone knew about PFAS, though it was certainly in the creek and its sediments by then (along with mercury, lead and other heavy metals, PCBs, petroleum products, and who knows what else). This Starkweather dredging was done, in part, because Lake Monona was found to have higher mercury levels in sediments than any lake in the state. How much mercury is in the sediments now? Who knows. Nobody is measuring.
Did Starkweather “get its due?”
Well, sadly, no. Ironically, I also posted this story today along with a Wisconsin Watch story by Isaac Wasserman, titled “‘Something has to be done’ about Starkweather Creek, one of Wisconsin’s most polluted waterways.” The title says it all.
What happened to the Starkweather dredging in 1992-93? Here’s a small excerpt from my Starkweather Creek writing:
In August 1992, a Capital Times article by Mike Ivey announced that “After 50 years of neglect, Starkweather to get its due.” The first line read: “Poor old Starkweather Creek. The little east-side working class stream has been polluted, abused, and largely neglected over the past half-century.” In contrast, Black Earth Creek, to the west of Madison, had become “the glamour stream of Dane County” that trout fishermen and environmentalists had fought to keep clean and was on the cover of the spring 1992 L.L. Bean catalog.[i],[1]
Government officials, Ivey wrote, hoped the project would “immediately improve water quality” in the creek and lake, lower the levels of mercury in lake walleyes, and improve the fishery overall. Still, his prognosis wasn’t rosy. “Could there come a day when canoeists and anglers flock to Starkweather Creek?” he asked. “Perhaps not.” Still, he added “But if the project is successful, similar ones will likely be tried elsewhere in the state.”
The dredging, which finally began in November 1992 and was completed in January 1993, had been somewhat delayed while the city figured out where to dump 1,680 cubic yards of contaminated sediment, which the Capital Times reporter estimated was “enough to cover a football field 3 ½ feet deep.”[2] In the end, over ten times this amount—about 17,000 cubic yards, enough to cover ten football fields 3 ½ feet deep—was removed during the project. The $1 million project was led by DNR’s Sediment Management and Remediation Techniques (SMART) Program, with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It was the first sediment cleanup demonstration in the SMART program and aimed to 1) reduce nonpoint loading, 2) control the impacts of in-place contaminants (mercury, lead, zinc, cadmium, oil and grease), and 3) restore the recreational value and aquatic habitat of the creek.[ii],[3]
Pre-remediation monitoring data showed alarming levels of mercury (up to 3.5 ppm–that’s 3,500,000 ppt!) and lead (up to 320 ppm) in creek sediments, and predicted that 40 pounds of mercury, 2.4 tons of lead, and 51 tons of oil and grease—18,400 tons of sediment in total—would be dredged from the creek. The dredging increased the depth of the creek from an average of 1.5 to 4 feet (maximum 7 feet deep). Riprapping (about 14,000 tons), and in some places sheet pile, were used in many places to protect banks from erosion, and vegetation was planted in places where it was removed during the dredging.
To handle the contaminated sediment, a 2.8 acre “sediment retention and dewatering facility” was built at the county-owned local municipal landfill six miles southeast of the project area in January 1992 (Rodefeld Landfill). The facility was unlined and surrounded by seven-foot berms of clay. Sediments were dewatered at the facility and used as cover on the landfill.
Was the Starkweather dredging project successful? Well…
According to the final report, the SMART Starkweather dredging project was considered advanced and state of the art at the time—it brought together interdisciplinary government and university scientists with “expertise in environmental toxicology, aquatic habitat assessment, hydrographic surveying, sediment mapping, sediment engineering, and remedial technology” to develop “necessary assessment and remediation tools to restore affected waters of the state.”
Given this dream-team of experts, the project results were less than impressive. The final project paper, authored by William Fitzpatrick at DNR, concluded that “[t]here was no significant difference between the water quality parameters at the upstream reference sites and at the downstream end of the project.” The bar graph in the paper showed that total solids, lead, zinc, chromium, ammonia were actually higher 100 yards downstream of the dredging area than in the upstream reference on the West Branch of the creek (location unspecified). Nitrate and nitrite were about the same upstream and downstream. Dissolved oxygen was lower downstream of the dredging and biochemical and chemical oxygen demands were higher (both indications of worse water quality downstream). The silt curtains placed downstream of the dredging to control resuspended sediments from moving downstream “were not always effective in filtering solids from the streamflow” because they would “billow out” to the downstream, allowing the streamflow to pass beneath the curtains.”
These results seem to indicate that the dredging stirred up contamination in the sediments and released it into the water downstream—but unfortunately, so few details were reported in the final paper that it was hard to assess this. The paper said “post-remediation monitoring” would be done for the next two years “to assess the success or failure of the restoration work,” but no data from this followup monitoring was located.
My family rents an apartment next to Starkweather Creek
In January, 1998, when my family moved into an apartment next to the lower part of Starkweather Creek, we saw signs along the creek about the 1992 SMART program and wondered what it was about.
Had the SMART project cleaned up the creek sediments and water by the time we frolicked there with our growing daughter and her toddler friends for the next few years? Even without seeing any postmonitoring results from the 1992 project, it seems safe to assume that there were no significant improvements in creek water quality, because in March 1998 DNR announced that Starkweather would be added to the DNR’s 303(d) “impaired waters” list for total suspended solids, biological oxygen demand, and “unspecified metals.”[iii]
Just four years later (2002), DNR staff biologist David Marshall DNR staff posted this on the DNR’s website for the creek:
“The lower reach of Starkweather, below the confluence of the East and West branches, is very turbid and essentially a stormwater channel for the east side of Madison. The stream bottom and shoreline are choked with sediment and debris.” “Up to the 1960s and early ’70s, the West Branch of Starkweather Creek received intensive point source discharges of many different toxic substances. Some of these discharges remain in the sediment of the creek and continue to pose problems for fish and aquatic life. While the point source dischargers have been managed through various programs, some former industrial sites continue to pose problems for the creek’s water quality. WDNR and the city of Madison have, however, dredged a portion of the west branch of the creek to reduce problems.”
“The West Branch drains the area around the Dane County Regional Airport, a portion of the east side of Madison, and urbanizing areas north of U.S. Highway 151. Contaminants in the runoff include oil, grease, lead, cadmium, ethylene glycol and polyaromatic hydrocarbons from streets, parking lots, Truax Field and Dane County Regional Airport, roofs, and other impervious surfaces. Other known contaminants present in the river include lead, zinc, PCBs, and DDT metabolites. In 1990 major spills in runoff from the airport elevated levels of biochemical oxygen demand in the river. The source was found to be the de-icer ethylene glycol, which commonly ponded below storm sewer pipes draining the runways. Subsequently, the airport has constructed a $1 million ethylene glycol collection system for ultimate discharge to Starkweather Creek (Marshall, 1993).”
In the early 2000s, I co-founded the Friends of Starkweather Creek with some other Schenk-Atwood neighborhood residents….
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[1] Oscar Mayer, Kipp, and other polluters had been sending toxic wastes to Refuse Hideaway Landfill since the early 1970s—upstream of Black Earth Creek. PFAS was found in Black Earth Creek in 2020 testing.
[2] The dredged area didn’t include any sediments from the creek as it passed through the giant toxic Truax Field mess—the former landfill and sewage plant, the burn pits, the jet fuel storage areas–upstream of the dredged area.
[3] Oddly, one of the criteria on which Starkweather was selected for the project was that it had “upstream pollution source controls.”
[i] Mike Ivey. “After 50 years of neglect, Starkweather to get its due.” The Capital Times, August 7, 1992.
[ii] William Fitzpatrick, 1993 EPA SMART article.
[iii] Chris Murphy. “Area waters get targeted as polluted.” The Capital Times, March 21, 1998.
