PLAINFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) — Belmont neighbors fearing contamination of their wells complained about Wolverine Worldwide’s House Street NE landfill nearly 60 years ago, but the company continued dumping sludge there, a former Kent County health official told Target 8.
Now, the long-closed dump is the center of a growing plume of contamination that has spread a likely carcinogen into wells more than a mile away.
“If he was alive, he’d say, ‘I told you so back in 1959.’ That’s what he would have said: ‘I told you this would happen,'” the former health official said of the neighbor who filed that complaint.
Interviews with former Wolverine Worldwide employees and the health official who said he investigated the company’s former dump in 1959 or 1960 are raising serious questions: What did Wolverine know about the chemicals it was dumping and when?
As the chief sanitarian for the Kent County Health Department, Robert Aman vividly remembers the first complaint.
“He (the neighbor) was just livid. They were just furious over what Wolverine was doing,” said Aman, now 87.
Back then, Wolverine had just started dumping on the north side of House Street in Plainfield Township. It was long before US-131 was built.
“It was really rural, very rural,” Aman said of the area at the time.
The few neighbors wanted it to stop.
“They were complaining because of what it might do to the water supply,” Aman said. “That’s what they were concerned about back then. I know that’s what they were concerned about, no question about that.”