INDIANAPOLIS — Three of Indiana's environmental groups urged the federal government Friday to move quickly to approve proposed regulations intended to cut industrial mercury emissions and said the rules would reduce Indiana residents' exposure to the toxic metal.
The groups made their plea hours before the Republican-controlled U.S. House passed a bill that's now before the Senate, which would delay or scrap proposed rules that would reduce mercury and other harmful air emissions. Republicans want the Obama administration to study the impact that the rules would have on jobs, electricity, gasoline prices and buy time for the economy to recover.
But members of the Sierra Club's Hoosier chapter, the Hoosier Environmental Council and Improving Kids' Environment said the proposed federal rules would help safeguard Indiana residents from mercury, a heavy metal that can harm young children.
Indiana gets about 95 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants that release about 6,000 pounds of mercury into the air each year, said Bowden Quinn, the Sierra Club Hoosier chapter's conservation coordinator.
A U.S. Geological Survey study released last year of Indiana's rivers and streams for five years showed high mercury levels in those waters.
During a Friday news conference, Quinn said testing on hair samples the Sierra Club collected from 38 people in Indianapolis in April showed traces of mercury in every sample, with three samples testing above the E.P.A.'s health guideline for mercury.
"These results clearly show that mercury emissions from power plants are affecting people here in Indianapolis," Quinn said.
Airborne mercury falls in precipitation and enters waterways, where it accumulates in the food chain, posing a risk to people who eat tainted fish. Women who eat fish tainted with mercury can unwittingly harm the brains and nervous systems of their developing fetuses or breast-fed babies.
Jodi Perras, executive director of Improving Kids' Environment, said mercury poses a serious health threat to infants and can harm the brain, spinal cord, kidneys and liver.
"It is especially dangerous to unborn babies and young children, whose brains and nervous system are still developing," she said.
Gabriel Filippelli, Ph.D, a professor of earth sciences at IUPUI, said tests he recently conducted in Indianapolis that showed that mercury from local power plants is deposited on the ground and enters the White River's sediments.
Marion County Health Department director Virginia Caine said her department has posted signs at fishing spots on the White River and other waterways that warn of the risk from eating locally caught fish.
Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, said Indiana needs to lessen its reliance on coal and generate more of its electricity from renewable energy sources such as wind power to catch up with more aggressive efforts in adjoining Illinois and Ohio.
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