Public pressure continues to ramp up on getting rid of the massive black piles of petroleum coke on Detroit’s riverfront as residents across the border staged an overnight vigil and then Monday morning blocked trucks from the entrance to the site east of the Ambassador Bridge where oil byproduct has been stockpiled for months.
“They have committed an environmental poisoning,” one of the group’s leaders Stephen Boyle told the Detroit Free Press.
Another cross-border protest against petcoke is scheduled for Windsor on Tuesday starting at 7 p.m.
Windsor on Watch, a local group of activists, is leading the “pots and pans” event on the riverfront at the foot of Cameron Avenue where those in attendance will be asked to bang on them in protest. The group will be simultaneously joined directly across the river by the Detroit Sierra Club doing the same thing.
“We are going to show our solidarity between Detroiters and Windsorites,” said Rhonda Anderson, environmental justice co-ordinator for the Detroit Sierra Club. “The coke piles need to be removed. They are having a detrimental impact on the people. The fear is the health impact, but also contamination of the river.”
Anderson described the petcoke as an “additional burden” for residents on the Detroit side already suffering from living in one of the most polluted neighbourhoods in Michigan thanks to a bevy of nearby industry that includes the U.S. steel plant on Zug Island, Detroit Sewage treatment plant and Marathon Petroleum Corp. refinery, the producer of the petcoke following a $2-billion upgrade last fall.
“They simply can not take anything else,” Anderson said. “Why have someone add to the burden that’s already there – that’s the bottom line.”
A spokesman for Windsor on Watch said it was important to keep the pressure on in the bid to have the petcoke piles removed from the riverfront.
“We hope everyone comes out and joins us,” said Randy Emerson. “We are in this for the long haul. We know it might not happen overnight.”
He called the petcoke just the “tip of the iceberg” since Marathon where it’s being produced is known as a major regional polluter and when the product is burned as fuel at energy plants it also releases toxins into the atmosphere.
“We are going to keep pushing on this,” he said.
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