Mrs. Shirley Salas is an elderly woman that has lived on the Tittabawassee River for more than 45 years.  The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has identified her property as being a "Priority 1" site with an assumed dioxin contamination level of more than 1000 ppt-TEQ.  Mrs. Salas believes that dioxin exposure is not harmful to human health based on her health experience and that of her family.  

Mr. Salas has a "blog-site" to promote her viewpoint.  Mrs. Salas tends to be  somewhat abusive towards those that have opinions different than hers.  While her name-calling may be "colorful", it does detract from her message which has value on occasion.  Mrs.. Salas may have begun her blog-site in opposition to her property being labeled a dioxin "facility" by the Michigan Legislature.  However, with time, she has expanded her comments to include any environmental activity which she considers to be "extreme".  Her definition of "extreme" is uncertain.

Some would advise just ignoring her.  However, a number of her opinions are incorrect based on currently available information.  If unchallenged, her opinions may be misinterpreted by some as being factual and would have more validity than deserved.  The following are examples of Mrs. Salas's misunderstanding of the dioxin issues, plus a few other observations.

MDN-Rejected.com's comments on "Shirley Says" seem to be appropriate since it is doubtful if the MDN would publish criticism of one of their guest editorial contributors.

Monday October 31, 2005 Observations

Mrs. Salas has gleefully reported the progress being made in removing the "facility" designation from properties along the heavily contaminated Tittabawassee River.

This one of the few times in which I agree with Ms. Shirley – it was rather naive of the DEQ to try to establish the regulatory concept that residential property located miles and miles away from Dow's Midland plant is part of the "Dow facility" merely because both properties are contaminated with dioxins.  Even the various township boards and county commissioners, not noted from their environmental brilliance, were wise enough to reject this association.

What the DEQ should have done was to use a designation other than "facility".  My suggestions for alternative designations that would have been less controversial:

DCA ("Dee-ka") - Dioxin Contamination Area

DDDOW ("Dee-dee-dow") - Dow Deposited Dioxin Organic Waste

SHIP ("Shee-hip') - Suspected Hazardous Industrial Pollution

CRAP ("Cee-wrap") - Constantly Renewed Area Pollution

Once the State of Michigan and the various local governments get playing word games out of their systems, perhaps they can return to more serious matters... such as the elimination of high levels of dioxin exposure to their citizens.