SAUGATUCK, Mich. —
In this digital age, people have to be extra careful before believing what they see on social media.
In one case, a Facebook page is posting drone visuals, making claims about pollution from the Kalamazoo river dumping into the big lake. These posts are gaining attention -- being shared, in some cases, thousands of times.
Our team visited the GVSU Annis Water Resources Institute to find out whether discharge you see is truly harmful.
Recently, the person behind this Facebook page posted a drone video showing what they said is “Kalamazoo River pollution.”
“We see these kinds of videos and posts and images all the time," said Alan Steinman, the Allen and Helen Hunting Director at the Annis Water Resources Institute. "After big rain events, we get a lot of sediment that erodes off the land, gets into the waterway, and you have this brown discharge coming off the land, and enters into this turquoise blue, beautiful Lake Michigan.”
Steinman said the movement of sediment into the big lake is a natural phenomenon after rainy weather.
“Even though it looks terrible, it's really not having much ecological impact," Steinman said. "Every once in a while with runoff, we’ll get beach pathogens, we’ll get nutrients that can cause some nearshore effects that are going to be deleterious. But just to look at these visuals, see the sediment running off, that's a perfectly natural phenomenon.”
The page claims plants upstream are largely responsible for pollution in the Kalamazoo River. But, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy said it searched its database of the two companies highlighted in the social media postings.
EGLE sent in a statement: “Both have up-to-date National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits as required by the Clean Water Act allowing them to discharge to the river. EGLE has not received any reports or complaints that resulted in the issuance of a violation notice related to these permits."
Steinman said he can’t speak to the exact discharge documented on the page because he didn’t sample the water, but we can VERIFY, in general, the discharge you see is not a major problem.
“I think there's value in having this kind of vigilant citizen science involved in this, but we really need to make sure that the data are robust, and they've been evaluated and assessed by the scientific community as well before we start crying wolf,” Steinman said.
Our VERIFY team messaged the page for a comment, and have not yet heard back.
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