Fish Stories and Empty Offices

Michigan and California firms feel pressure over pollution sites

It was a disturbing revelation. In testimony last month before a House subcommittee investigating mismanagement at the Environmental Protection Agency, Midwest Regional Director Valdas Adamkus accused John Hernandez, EPA's acting administrator until he resigned last month, of allowing Dow Chemical Co. to censor the agency's 1981 draft report on dioxin contamination in Michigan, including two rivers and a bay near Dow's Midland plant. Particularly alarming to Adamkus was the deletion of one of the draft's conclusions that "Dow's discharge represented the major source, if not the only source, of [dioxin] contamination" in the...

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