Dow is facing a lawsuit from residents who have charged that the river contamination has depreciated their home values, said John Musser, a spokesman for the company.

Since MSU has one of the top programs in the world, Dow gave the center a five-year, $5 million grant Zwiernik said. The allotted timespan allows Zwiernik and his student researchers to collect data and observe the lifespans of individual animals, telling them more about the overall health of the species. The project’s findings show that although the contaminants are much higher in the tissues of downstream wildlife, the reproductive behavior is similar in both, he said. The project, which began in the fall of 2003, is in its final year.

“We’re looking out for wildlife and making sure their exposure is not impacting their productivity, or ability to reproduce or survive, living in these areas, because of the contamination,” Fredricks said.

Discovering a threat

Dow first started to realize the contaminants were in sediment in the river in the 1980s, Fredricks said.

After identifying the contaminants as furans in 2003, pressure from the public of Midland and state and federal governments led Dow to make environmental investigations, Zwiernik said. The contamination has spread downstream of the Dow plant and is measureable until the river intersects with the Shiawassee River, he said.

“Odds are this will be part of a litigation at the end of the day,” Fredricks said. “So everything has to be documented.”

The river’s contamination level downstream is much higher than the state’s standard for the contaminants, he said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the area an environmental emergency in the fall, prompting Dow to replace soil and cut down trees at four locations, said Mick Hans, an EPA spokesman. Terry Miller, chairman of the Lone Tree Council, a Midland-based nonprofit environmental organization, said river contamination can lead to health effects such as soft tissue carcinoma.

Musser said Dow had proof the furans would not be harmful to Midland residents.

“We provided an unrestricted grant to the University of Michigan to determine whether people living on contaminated soils were taking up more furans in their bodies,” he said. “The researchers determined that people living in the area have the same blood levels (of furans) as people living anywhere in the U.S.”

Before World War I, Dow was unknowingly releasing small amounts of furans into the river as the byproduct of a process for making chlorine, Musser said. Although the process was stopped just before the war, the chemical had already contaminated the river’s sediments.

“Furans weren’t known to exist until probably 30 or 40 years after that process was taken out of service,” Musser said. “We need to address off-site (contamination). Part of that obligation is to look at not only the human health risk but also the ecological risk.”

“It takes a special breed”

During the project, students have studied species ranging from great blue heron to American robins.

For MSU students, the project represents a chance to get job experience.

Up to 20 students live in a field house at a time. Every day, crews of two, equipped with traps and tents, leave the field house to gather data.

“We pretty much look at their diet and see what they were exposed to,” Fredricks said. “And then we also look at the tissues.”

Killing about 30 birds a year is necessary to obtain complete tissue samples, he said. But with research showing no observable short-term effects on breeding, the researchers’ attention has since turned to the animals’ long-term survival.

“We’re looking at survival for adults and nestlings,” Fredricks said. “Are these birds dying in migration? Or as soon as the nestlings leave the box, do they all die?”

Clayton Manntz, a fisheries and wildlife senior, who started working on the project this summer, said the hands-on experience gained in the field is irreplaceable when compared to taking classes.

“It takes a special breed that really loves the outdoors,” he said.

Miller said that Dow is delaying environmental cleanup.

“We’re in the sixth year of the discovery of the contamination and they’re still in the process of surveying the extent of the contamination,” Miller said.