Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed federal, state, and local efforts to clean up Michigan's Rouge River, focusing on: (1) the overall quality of the river's waters; (2) pollutant sources; (3) the status of cleanup planning efforts; and (4) costs of remedial cleanup efforts.
GAO found that: (1) Michigan's Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) was responsible for managing the river's cleanup; and (2) the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was responsible for ensuring that cleanup activities met legislative requirements. GAO also found that: (1) the river's water quality, which ranged from fair to very poor, severely impaired its uses for fishing and swimming and constituted a threat to public health; (2) discharges of pollutants from overflowing combined sewers, estimated at 473 million pounds annually, were the major pollution sources; (3) planning for the river's cleanup intensified in 1986 when MDNR made it a priority and jointly developed with EPA and local communities a plan to eliminate untreated discharges and overflows and to finance remedial measures; (4) costs to fully implement the plan were unknown, although estimates for partial implementation totalled $1.8 billion; (5) MDNR plans to more effectively use the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System to reduce the amount of discharged pollutants and ensure permittees' compliance with permit requirements; and (6) EPA worked with MDNR to resolve problems it identified in the computerized system MDNR used to assess permit compliance.
