EPA's Big Win

In its constant skirmishing with companies, the Environmental Protection Agency last week won its biggest victory yet in a water-pollution case. After five years of litigation, U.S. Steel Corp. agreed to stop dumping cyanide, ammonia and phenols--all toxic pollutants--into Lake Michigan and the Grand Calumet River from its huge works at Gary, Ind. It has been pumping out 16,700 Ibs. a day of solids, part of them toxic.

In a negotiated truce with the EPA, the company also consented to pay $3.45 million in fines for violating federal and state water-and air-pollution standards.

Further, U.S. Steel pledged to spend $70 million to equip the Gary works with new water-pollution-control equipment, and $1 million to pay for research on water-treatment systems and the impact of dissolved solids on Lake Michigan.

EPA Midwest Enforcement Director James McDonald calls the consent decree a "monumental first" that will help the agency in bargaining with other companies and communities (including the city of Detroit) that resist its decrees. Says McDonald: "We are going to be very ties." firm One and seek indication of the substantial penal agency's hard line: before the consent decree, it had begun proceedings to make U.S.

Steel ineligible to win federal contracts.

By contrast, the stiff cost of the consent decree was a small price to pay.

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