By Jim Sack

The last committee I considered when setting up Germanfest in 1981 was clean up. Just hadn’t occurred to me. Perhaps mom was not strong enough in her punishment of training when I was a kid and occasionally heard that threat: clean up your from or else. The impetus can during a surprise meeting called by board of works chair Betty Collins who asked me a serious of questions while in the company of most of the department heads of the Moses Administration for whom, at the time, I worked.

“Garbage…?” Hmmm. “I’ll get right on that.”

Same goes for many many of our businesses, churches, homes, etc. You name it. Clean up is the last thought, the least enjoyable aspect of a party or enterprise to consider. I had envisioned thousands of good local folk renewing the spirit of the German heritage with a beer (or two), some good German sauerkraut, folk music and decorations. I had not envisioned dumping tons of trash into dumpsters, sweeping floors, washing the place down, and positioning the dumpsters so that the garbage boys could easily get to it. Uuurgh. Last thing on my mind.

Same with the rest of us, but some are much worse than others, and for a hundred years or so around here nobody really bothered to worry about clean up. It just wasn’t an issue. People tossed things in the river and it floated away. People pushed debris down the side of a ditch and drove away, people poured their oil down the drain, chemicals drained on the ground. What the hell. Nobody cared, everybody did it. The impulse linger despite remarkable bodies of information that tell us clearly that we are poisoning ourselves.

In the mid 1960s I remember a local kid, Frank Smetana, I think, who won second place in a national science fair for his analysis of the chemicals coming out of the Harvester ditch on the city’s east side. The muddy bottom downstream in the Maumee was laden with carcinogens and the cocktail of chemicals was producing hybrid carcinogens. The story was on page 15 or so, buried toward the back of the Journal-Gazette and headed as a local boy who has potential, rather than an alarm about what we were doing to ourselves.

Recently, I mentioned this to a friend. He said his sister, a then recently minted biologist, was interning at the local GE plant when she was given the assignment of disposing of drums and drums of chemicals. She did what she had been taught. She brought in a hazardous disposal team and started the process. She, according to my friend, was quickly reassigned and the chemicals were poured down the drain. GE did the same on the Hudson, probably about the same wherever they were bringing “good things to life.”

And, they were not the only ones. Filling stations just poured used radiator fluid down the drain. Same with tranny fluid, oil, stale gas, whatever.

I&M still does it. They spew tons and tons of dirt and dust in the air every second for you and I to breath. They would like for you to think that the environment can filter the crap they spew and we will all be just fine. Up here, far away from their plants, that seems the case. We don’t see the huge plumes of smoky soot and chemicals. We just get the downwind, “purified” crap. Residents in Kentucky and West Virginia wipe the soot off their cars every day, off their inside window sills every day and die everyday from the cancers produced by the by-products of my energy production.

Remember acid rain. That has been diminished because most of us got pissed that the power companies were just tossing their trash in the air for us to clean up. Lakes in Pennsylvania and New York are less acid now because those states sued power produces, mostly in the Midwest, to clean up after themselves.

So, now we are refocused on air pollution and again I&M and their proxies, their hired dissemblers, have a re-treated argument: cleaning up the air will raise your energy bill. Probably will. Cleaning up after I&M and the rest is costing you plenty already in health care costs, among a few. An, in 2007 AEP was settled a pollution law suit buy paying a $15 million fine and promising to spend over $4 billion to clean up their emissions. We, you and I, our kids, and their kids, will pay higher rates because over the years AEP didn’t bother to install existing technology that would have cost much less in the long run.

Oh, and just remember, eating fish higher up the food chain is a bit more dangerous. They accumulate mercury in their fatty tissue and pass it on to you, your wife and the next generation. Pregnant women should take care, especially.

If you get angry when the guy next door or down the street has a garbage dump in his back yard -unsightly and a rat breeding sanctuary- you should also be steamed that I&M, NIPSCO, Steel Dynamics and others are tossing their garbage in the air that you and your family breathes.

Remember what mom said about cleaning up your room. In some cases people and companies do not bother to clean up until mom gets the paddle.

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