July 27, 2006

The Department of Environmental Quality and The Dow Chemical Company will be holding the next quarterly Midland/Saginaw/Bay City (Tri-Cities) Dioxin Community Meeting on Wednesday, August 9, at the Horizons Conference Center, 6200 State Street, Saginaw. The meeting is open to the public and will run from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Staff from the DEQ, Department of Community Health, and Dow, with their consultants, will be available one-half hour before and one-half hour after the meeting for individual discussion with the public.

Agenda items for the August 9 meeting will include a status update on the Upper Tittabawassee River/Floodplain GeoMorph review and approval, the status of Dow’s Remedial Investigation Work Plan Notice of Deficiency responses, and updates on interim response activities. There will also be discussions of the preliminary findings from the 2005/2006 Fish Consumption Survey and the Tittabawassee River Fish and Wild Game Consumption Advisory, the release of the National Academy of Sciences' review of EPA's Exposure and Human Health Reassessment of TCDD and Related Compounds, the World Health Organization’s re-evaluation of toxic equivalency factors for dioxins, along with the purpose of the University of Michigan’s Dioxin Exposure Study.

The meeting agenda and related documents will be posted to the DEQ Web site prior to the community meeting at http://www.michigan.gov/deqdioxin and may be accessed by clicking on the “DEQ/Dow Community Involvement” and “Dow Off-site Corrective Action” Quick Links. An additional quarterly community meeting is scheduled to be held on November 8.

Editor’s note: DEQ news releases are available on the department’s Internet home page at www.michigan.gov/deq.

“Protecting Michigan’s Environment, Ensuring Michigan’s Future”

Revised July 27, 2006 by Pat Watson