![]() "So, let me talk about the scientific one first. "It had to either come out of the water or be contained in it somehow," Campbell says.Īllen says there were two kinds of complexity at play - administrative and scientific. One thing was clear, the PCB situation had to be addressed. We were coming out of the times where people could see and smell and taste pollution in the water and in the air and here was this invisible contaminant that people were trying to figure out," says Campbell. "You know all the acronyms, RIFS, PCBs, what the heck was all this? I was pretty overwhelmed," but says the case was also fascinating, "because I was sitting ringside to the evolving science about PCBs. And so they actually resurrected the environment beat (and) asked me if I would take over, which I was very excited about because I've been trying to angle toward science and health reporting before I had come to Green Bay," Campbell says.Ĭampbell says at first it was a lot to take in. Journalist Susan Campbell came on the scene as a new reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette. to help Wisconsin build an overall Superfund case would include both the clean up and all of their natural resources and together we would figure out how to do this," says Allen. Fish and Wildlife Service sent Allen to Green Bay to help facilitate a clean up. ![]() to do what's called a natural resource damage assessment," says Allen. But it also can be used to clean up very big sites like rivers, and in the the early 1990s, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided they would partner with Wisconsin. "It’s the law that lots of people have heard of, where you clean up landfills and things like that. It accumulated in the sediments for decades and they were still in there all the way to the 90s," Allen says.Īllen and others thought a federal law called the Superfund Law could help solve the problem. "It resulted in uncontrolled discharges of PCBs into the river. The practice resulted in PCBs being discharged into the Fox River, both by the NCR's manufacturer and by the people who recycled the material. The trimmings of this paper and the rejected sheets got recycled and the mills on the Fox River learned to practice that recycling," Allen says. The problem with this invention was the stuff they used to transfer the ink between the different layers, it had PCBs in it. "NCR paper company invented a new kind of paper called NCR Paper, like carbon copy paper but without carbon. But the effort was ultimately a success.Īllen and Campbell new book Paper Valley - The Fight For The Fox River Cleanupchronicles the story.Īllen says the problem started with what seemed like a great new product back in the 1950s. It took years of negotiations, followed by a 17-year clean up that cost over a billion dollars. Journalist Susan Campbell was also in Green Bay covering the complex story. In 1992 wildlife biologist David Allen came to Green Bay to help orchestrate the removal of chemicals from the Fox River.
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