In northwest Indiana, there’s a stretch of Lake Michigan that’s super industrial. About 20 miles of coastline is taken up by industrial facilities, like oil and steel refineries.
When Steve Arnam first came to the beaches here as a teenager, it struck him as a “desolate, industrial wasteland.”
Arnam is a surfer. And the beaches in northwest Indiana are great for surfing. When the wind is blowing from the north, the shores there at the southern tip of the lake get some of the biggest waves you can find anywhere on the Great Lakes.
But because of all the industry nearby, the water in this region is also some of the most polluted in the Great Lakes. Some surfers here have gotten skin rashes, eye infections or stomach problems.
And about a decade ago, after a really big chemical spill, the surfers decided to do something about it.
CREDITS:
Producer: Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editor: Morgan Springer
Additional Editing: Peter Payette, Ellie Katz, Dan Wanschura
Music: Blue Dot Sessions
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
On a freezing cold afternoon in February, Steve Arnam is driving his van through a massive B.P. oil refinery. Producer Claire Keenan-Kurgan is in the car with him.
CLAIRE KEENAN-KURGAN, BYLINE: Can you describe what we're driving through now?
STEVE ARNAM: Right now, we're driving through an industrial wasteland, I would say. We're driving along the railroad tracks that supplies coal.
WANSCHURA: They’re in Whiting, Indiana, right on the shores of Lake Michigan, in between Chicago and Gary.
ARNAM: As you face the beach, it’s to your left is U.S. Steel, and to the right is BP.
WANSCHURA: This part of the lake is known for heavy industry. A ton of plants stretch on for around 20 miles along the shore. Everywhere you turn are smokestacks, railroad tracks, oil vats, flames… This B.P. refinery is the company’s largest in the world. And it’s so close they might as well be inside of it.
KEENAN-KURGAN: So do you remember the first time you came here, what you made of it?
ARNAM: The same thing I think of it now, is freaking wasteland. It’s desolate, industrial wasteland. But it's got some good surf.
WANSCHURA: Some good surf. Steve is a surfer. There are actually two surfboards strapped to the top of his van.
And where he’s driving is one of the best surfing spots on Lake Michigan and really, in the whole Great Lakes region.
Because it’s at the very southern tip of the lake, it gets some of the biggest swells anywhere on the lakes. The longest path a wave could possibly travel winds up right here in northwest Indiana.
ARNAM: Smoking stacks of industry are our palm trees. (laughing)
WANSCHURA: Steve has been surfing this area, that the surfers call the South End, since he was a teenager in the 1970s. There’s a whole community of die-hard surfers who gather here to catch the best waves. But it’s not exactly the best water. The factories here are allowed to discharge some chemical waste into Lake Michigan. And they do. They get permits that let them.
ARNAM: This is a water purification area on our side. And again, you can smell–
KEENAN-KURGAN: It smells really bad.
ARNAM: It smells bad.
WANSCHURA: When the companies go over their allowed limits, meaning, they dump waste with more chemicals than is considered safe, they get fined. But all those chemicals still go in the water.
ARNAM: It's for the fun of the surf that we've endured some probably things we shouldn't have.
WANSCHURA: Near this surf spot, companies have emitted chlorine, nitrogen ammonia, copper, naphthalene, oil, mercury, cyanide, lead– the list goes on. Some of those chemicals are known to cause cancer or other health problems.
Surfers here had known about this for decades, but about eight years ago, more of them started talking about it. And they started wondering, what exactly is in this water? And is it actually safe to be surfing here?
Producer Claire Keenan-Kurgan takes it from here.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Judith Miller has spent a lot of time surfing the South End. She helped start up a kind of investigation into what was in the water.
Judith never really expected to be surfing the Great Lakes. She used to live in San Diego, California. When she was thinking of moving, someone told her, Chicago really is a beach town, too.
JUDITH MILLER: And at the time, living in San Diego, it just, it seemed like such an absurd claim. But it’s really true. Chicago is a beach town.
KEENAN-KURGAN: So she took a job at the University of Chicago Law School. A coworker took her surfing for the first time in early spring, near all the refineries.
MILLER: It was so cold to me. I think the air temperature may have been like, just above freezing.
KEENAN-KURGAN: But it didn’t matter.
MILLER: I loved it. You know, it was like I was off to the races.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Like lots of the surfers in northwest Indiana, she sometimes wondered about water pollution coming from those huge refineries, but she says she didn’t pay that much attention to it. That changed when Judith found out she was pregnant.
Suddenly, she was more worried about the pollution affecting her baby, than she had been about it affecting her.
MILLER: No one really was thinking about, well, what if you're out surfing and you're pregnant? … Obviously there's going to be something in the water. There's heavy industry there. But does it matter is really the question.
KEENAN-KURGAN: She started asking the other surfers there about the water quality.
MILLER: There were a lot of stories about surfers who had experienced, you know, various problems upon coming out of the water. And I have to say, that was not reassuring.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Some of them had gotten weird skin rashes. Or eye infections, or stomach problems. They suspected it was the pollution, but it’s really hard to know for sure.
A group of South End surfers are part of this organization called Surfrider, which focuses on protecting water quality.
Judith and the Chicago Surfrider chapter decided to tap the environmental clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. See if they could figure out if the water was safe for surfing.
MILLER: We were so ignorant, you know, we just had no idea how complicated this was. What is it? You don't know what you don't know.
KEENAN-KURGAN: The clinic was made up of law students who wanted to figure this kind of thing out. And it turned out a lot of the information the surfers wanted was already public, kind of. Judith’s colleague Mark Templeton was leading the clinic.
TEMPLETON: Every major emitter into the air or discharger into the water has to register with the government, right, get a permit.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Permits to pollute, basically. Every permit is different, but they all set requirements for the companies to monitor and report what they’re putting into the waterways.
Mark and his team of students started going on a hunt to find out what each company was discharging, which meant finding all those permits on an Indiana state website that’s literally called the Virtual File Cabinet.
TEMPLETON: So we went to the Virtual File Cabinet and started pulling, essentially, the company's raw filings.
KEENAN-KURGAN: I asked Mark to walk me through what he and his students did.
TEMPLETON: This is the Indiana permit number… Source ID, Indiana permit. If you want to see everything that’s licensed to discharge. You got to go pull the permit. And so I mean this, I'm not saying this is easy.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Then, they started looking for the times companies violated their permits.
And it’s not the state or federal government looking for the violations.
TEMPLETON: What's interesting is that the company's self disclosing that it's actually violating the law.
KEENAN-KURGAN: They report the times that they go over the permit limits. And the violations show up on a website run by the Environmental Protection Agency.
At one facility near one of the surf spots in Indiana – a U.S. Steel facility – they found violations like discharges of nearly an extra hundred pounds of oil and grease, when the limit was around 750 pounds. Or discharges of extra copper or chromium.
These things happened multiple times a year at that spot. And other violations happened at most of the industrial plants they looked at.
Usually, the punishment for a permit violation is a fine from the state. The lowest fines are a couple thousand dollars, the highest are 25-thousand dollars, per violation per day. Which sounds like a lot, but to put it into context, U-S Steel is worth about 12 billion dollars. And BP is worth about 100 billion dollars. It’s hard to imagine these fines hurt them that much.
Mark and his students were pulling up all these permits and violations almost a decade ago, in 2017.
And in the middle of looking into what chemicals were getting into Lake Michigan, news reports started popping up of something really alarming.
What Mark and his students caught wind of was a big chemical spill. Much, much bigger than the ones they’d found before. That’s after the break.
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KEENAN-KURGAN: The chemical spill came from a U.S. Steel facility. What happened was an accident. A pipe burst and a chemical called hexavalent chromium poured into a waterway that fed a popular surf break.
TEMPLETON: It was a lot. I mean, it's 600 times the limit. Hexavalent chromium is the chemical from Erin Brockovich, very carcinogenic.
KEENAN-KURGAN: It’s been linked to lung cancer, it can cause birth defects in both humans and animals. And it doesn’t biodegrade easily. If it’s not cleaned up, it can stick around in water for a long time. And by the way, Judith had stopped surfing by this point.
News reports of the spill shut down public beaches. U.S. Steel reported it to the state. But neither the state of Indiana or the EPA, had done anything yet. So, the law clinic decided to step in instead.
TEMPLETON: Congress wisely created these called citizen suit provisions.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Those are a kind of lawsuit designed to let regular people sue companies or regulators, under the Clean Water Act.
TEMPLETON: People who are affected by pollution or significantly threatened by the risk of pollution are able to bring these cases if the state or federal government are not enforcing these laws.
KEENAN-KURGAN: The clinic decided to sue on behalf of Surfrider.
They wanted U.S. Steel to pay a price for all the pollution. They also wanted fewer permit violations, upgrades to the facility and more public information about what was in the water.
There are a couple key ingredients you need to file a citizens’ lawsuit against a company like U.S. Steel. First, a pattern of violations. They had that. Second, people who are affected. And they had that too: the surfers.
Five surfers submitted affidavits in the case.
One said the water at the beach by U.S. Steel was brown and dirty and her husband came home smelling like chemicals after surfing there.
Another compared the smell and taste of the water to a used ashtray that someone poured water on four days ago and said he’d looked at the water and thought “there’s something that’s probably killing me right now.”
And one surfer had a friend say “you can go in there if you want to get cancer.”
After they filed their citizen suit, the state and federal governments started working on an agreement. First they said U.S. Steel would pay $600,000 dollars in fines and agree to upgrade its infrastructure. But Mark, and the surfers, wanted more.
TEMPLETON: We wanted more penalties. We wanted, you know, even more done on the operations and maintenance and things like that.
KEENAN-KURGAN: In a press release at the time, Surfrider wrote that U.S. Steel generates about $600,000 in revenue every half-hour.
Plus, the maximum penalty the feds could fine U.S. Steel was 10 million dollars. So, yeah, a $600,000 fine? A member of Surfrider told me they’d been aiming for closer to $5 million. Beyond the fine, they wanted the company to pay for more environmental monitoring and protection.
And they wanted a way for surfers to know what exactly was in the water, when they were surfing. That would mean regular testing for the public with data that was available in time for people to feel safe.
U.S. Steel did concede a bit more. The fines stayed at $600,000 dollars. But the company agreed to pay an additional $1.2 million for cleanup and to test water quality at nearby public beaches. They’d test and post the results on a website. But just for three years.
For many of the surfers, this all still felt like a soft blow for such a huge company.
But the government’s agreement, called a consent decree, was finalized.
Judith Miller had already had her baby by this point. The same day she got the go-ahead from her doctor to exercise, her husband drove her to the beach to surf.
MILLER: He drove with me and our son to the, like, to one of the surf spots, and I went surfing like it was, you know, just later that day, I went surfing.
KEENAN-KURGAN: She was glad to see that there was an actual consequence for polluting the lake. And that U.S. Steel had been forced to take steps to fix things.
MILLER: I found that very reassuring, you know, that something pretty serious had happened, and we did know about it.
KEENAN-KURGAN: But Mark and his team thought they could push their citizen’s suit further.
TEMPLETON: We argued that we had additional grounds that the consent decree had not gone far enough, and U-S Steel opposed that.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Ultimately, it was up to the court.
TEMPLETON: And the court basically said that the consent decree addressed all of our concerns.
KEENAN-KURGAN: So, that was it. And those three years, where U.S. Steel was required to do more testing and reporting to the public? They went by quickly. The extra reporting ended in 2022.
Things are basically back to how they were before, apart from the facility upgrades. The companies still sample and report it to the EPA, but violations are not posted in real-time.
TEMPLETON: If you said to me, like, ‘Today, can I go surf safely, because I can see what the actual pollution coming out of these plants is?’ You can't do that.
KEENAN-KURGAN: In an email, U.S. Steel referenced those facility upgrades after the spill, and said that their compliance rate for discharge limits is over 99.99%.
A spokesperson wrote that all the wastewater is treated, and discharges are regularly monitored by independent third parties and those tests are quote “based on the best available technology and water quality standards.” End quote.
The testing that does happen is because of rules from the EPA. But under the Trump administration, the EPA has been leaning towards de-regulation, the agency recently proposed narrowing what counts as a “federal waterway” that it keeps track of.
The EPA didn’t make anyone available for an interview for this story. In an email, a spokesperson referred most of my questions about how the regular monitoring works to the Indiana regulators.
Those regulators, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, known as IDEM, also did not make anyone available to talk about their monitoring. So, we didn’t get any clear answers about how often they test the water near those refineries.
And the process of how regulators act? It’s the same now as it was before. To know the violations, you have to know how to use the EPA’s website. Which is not easy. And spills still happen, companies pay the fines, and people keep surfing. And they have to decide if they’re comfortable with all that.
Back on that popular surf spot in Whiting, by the BP facility, Steve Arnam walks me to a boathouse where the group of people who surf the South End all hang out. In the corner of the boathouse, there’s a surfboard leaning up against a wall. And in the center of the board: there’s a drawing. It’s a map of Lake Michigan. And just at the Indiana-Michigan border, there’s a big silhouette of a surfer, surfing right on top of a huge power plant.
KEENAN-KURGAN: It seems like you embrace the the industrial side of things
ARNAM: Well, because that's where we surf. We surf in the industrial wasteland of the bottom of Lake Michigan.
PETER MATUCHEK: I grew up right next to the steel mills.
KEENAN-KURGAN: That’s Peter Matushek, a surfer and one of the plaintiffs in the case.
MATUSHEK: When you go into water, I don't know, it's not part of our psyche, I guess, to think about it too much.
KEENAN-KURGAN: Thousands of people work at the refineries. And there’s a lot of pride in it. Peter does say he still worries about pollution while he’s surfing.
MATUSHEK: We're at the beach, and we see, like a plume of brown smoke go up and and we go, we comment that it's like, oh, that's like, messed up, that it's happening. But it doesn't stop us from breathing the air or doing anything, you know?
KEENAN-KURGAN: It’s easy to get used to the idea of swimming, going to the beach, surfing as this pristine and natural thing. But sometimes, you just go to the beach that you have. Pollution, or no pollution. Especially if you’re a surfer trying to catch the best wave.
