The Big Clean-up

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And that’s why, more than seventy years after the gas works closed, this prime property sits vacant. But now that’s changing. This month, DTE expects to submit a “response activity plan” to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to clean up hot spots and pollution near the riverbank.

It’s just one step in what promises to be a long and expensive journey. But with U.S. Representative John Dingell and DTE chairman Gerry Anderson taking a personal interest, the prospects for bringing this bend in the river back to life have never been better.

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It was Dingell who got the ball rolling, says Laura Rubin, executive director of the Huron River Watershed Council. Dingell and the Wolfpack.

The Wolfpack is a group of sixty business and community leaders organized by the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Office in Ann Arbor and the Michigan League of Conservation Voters. Andy Buchsbaum, NWF’s regional executive director, says that “one beautiful fall afternoon,” Dingell invited the Wolfpack down to the Detroit International Wildlife Refuge on the Detroit River. It includes a number of rehabilitated industrial sites, and Dingell wanted the Wolfpack to join him in doing something similarly transformative for the Huron. “He challenged us,” Buchsbaum says.