Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 114

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48083 Use visa. Mailer Charge or call loll trae 1-M0-MS-2S48. Send or call lot brochure. 1 StiffelO light was never so lovely! StifTel Lamps are distinctive in design, flawless in There are no finer lamps made! Lranata 1 ii SAVE 'jf 20 9 Verna Mlze led a 1 3-year battle to end the dumping in the lake and earned the title of "First Lady of Lake Superior." "It's a national treasure," she says. "It's the purest, most beautiful body of water In the world.

It's regal It has moods like a person. It's majestic and pure and Immense. To me It's like a mirror held to God." flowed counter-clockwise, down past Duluth, around Wisconsin and the Apostle Islands, up around the (Keweenaw) peninsula. It had to be." It took years of badgering newspapers, congressmen and federal agencies, but Mrs. Mize's crusade eventually forced the government to take notice.

Researchers discovered that the tailings were responsible for asbestos fibers showing up in the drinking water of several communities, and a court order forced Reserve to end the dumping. Last June 24, the city of Houghton dedicated Verna Mize Park, on the shore across the street from the house where she was born. A copper plaque in the park hails her as the "First Lady of Lake Superior." Why would someone spend 13 years of her life to battle for a lake she only sees for a few weeks every year? "It's a national treasure," Mrs. Mize says. "It's the purest, most beautiful body of water in the world.

It's regal. It's beautiful. It has moods like a person. It's majestic and pure and immense. To me it's like a mirror held to God." The International Joint Commission, the official Canadian-American watch Til -i-i -iMmafii tailings in Minnesota's Silver Bay when she began.

"I didn't have to see it," she said. "I had seen the pictures and I knew just from them and from verbal reports that it was a horrible situation. I couldn't sleep thinking about it. I had to get help for that lake." Mize was born in Houghton, and though she has not lived in Michigan for decades, she came back every summer to the lake. "I loved Lake Superior from the first time I saw it as a little girl," she said.

"When 1 was growing up we'd go down to the lake for picnics and marsh-mallow roasts. But it was more than childhood memories. The lake was a sort of living presence. Whenever I went away from home I carried a bottle of Lake Superior water with me." When she went up to Houghton in 1967, Mize said, "I could see that the lake was not as clear as it used to be. I thought it was just because of some bad weather.

When I heard (about the dumping) 1 thought, 'Could something like that come this far across the I knew which way the currents ran. I tracked everything down, because I had to be factual. I had to fight with facts, not fantasy, not emotion. The currents dog agency for the lakes, lists several other problem areas on the lake, almost all of them in some stage of being remedied. They include: the industrial and sewage runoff from the two largest urban areas, Duluth-Superior in the U.S.

and Thunder Bay in Canada; the odorous paper mill discharges into Canada's Jackfish Bay and Nipigon Bay, and mercury in fish in the harbor at Marathon Bay in Canada. But the biggest threat to Lake Superior no longer comes out of sewer pipes and industrial conveyors. It comes in on the wind and the rain and the snow. More than half of all contaminants and nearly 95 percent of the persistent toxic contaminants in Lake Superior are now carried there on the air and deposited on the surface. As far as we know which is not very far at all the contaminants are not yet present in quantities that present an imminent threat to the life and health of human beings.

But they are a signal that Superior is more vulnerable than many people thought. Many of the toxic compounds are from pesticides or herbicides sprayed on the cotton fields of Arkansas, the sunflowers of the Dakotas, or the forests of the North. ECOLOGY CONTINUED one with few nutrients or suspended solids, which accounts for its startling clarity. For its size, Lake Superior drains a relatively small land area, and the rivers and streams that pour into it tumble mostly over rocky beds, bringing down little sediment or dissolved pollutants into the lake. The exception is at the western end, near Duluth-Superior, where the rivers bring down a heavy load of soil from the red clay bluffs of Minnesota, turning the inshore water a strange tea-color.

The classic polluter on the lake has been the Reserve Mining which until 17 months ago was pouring 67,000 tons of taconite tailings a day into the western end, creating a spreading delta of milky green water. The tailings are pulverized rock left over after the extraction of iron from taconite, a flintlike rock. In 1967 a government secretary named Verna Mize launched what appeared to be a quixotic campaign to halt the dumping. She had not even seen the 331 MAIN. PLYMOUTH.

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