Excerpt and photo from Bangor Daily News. Read the full story here.
By Judy Harrison, October 5, 2021.
David Dietrich grew up in Orrington, along the Penobscot River, in the 1950s and ’60s.
“My brother and I were drawn to that river like filings to a magnet,” he said Tuesday. “But the river was not much more than a very polluted open sewer. The Clean Water Act changed that.”
Dietrich, who now lives in Blue Hill, said that he wants as much mercury as possible — which was deposited in the river by the defunct HoltraChem Manufacturing plant in his home town — to be removed.
“I want the Penobscot River to be as good as it possibly can be,” Dietrich said.
He was one of nearly two dozen people who appeared before U.S. District Judge John Woodcock on Tuesday to express support for a proposal to clean up mercury deposits in the Penobscot River estuary contaminated by the shuttered chemical plant.
The settlement, agreed to in March, calls for onetime plant owner Mallinckrodt US LLC to spend between $187 million and $267 million for the cleanup. The work would include removing contaminated sediment from the river, capping some contaminated sediments with clean sediments, other beneficial environmental projects and long-term monitoring.