Listen to Richard Micka speak.
For Richard Micka, Monroe, Michigan is home sweet home.
Micka attended Monroe Catholic Central High School and went on to graduate from the University of Detroit. He's always lived in the area and has always enjoyed nature close to home. As a child, Micka was always outside.
“Going through high school and college, I had opportunities to get out in the woods. This is what people miss today, they don’t get outside very much,” he says. "There are things happening outdoors that we need to pay attention to.”
But many things have changed along the River Raisin since Micka's youth.
“In fact, I went back the other day to catch fish in a place where I used to catch them 60 years ago. But instead of a Johnny Darter, I caught a Round Goby (an invasive species),” he says.
Micka, 78, has only left the Monroe area once to serve in the United States Air Force for seven years. Upon his return home, he began working at La-Z-Boy's Monroe Headquarters, where he worked his way through a variety of positions. After 36 years, he retired from La-Z-Boy as the company’s vice president of administration.
These days, Micka is a representative on the River Raisin Public Advisory Council, a group formed in 2003 designed to assist the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality in developing a Remedial Action Plan (RAP) to restore the watershed’s health.
The River Raisin is one of 43 Areas of Concern (AOC) throughout the Great Lakes. The AOC program was formed by both the American and Canadian governments in 1987 under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, and that same year, the River Raisin was designated an AOC.
The River Raisin AOC is defined as a 2.6 mile stretch of the river, which includes a part of Lake Erie and a federal navigation channel.
Micka says the Public Advisory Council has recently been focused on trying to fix the damage caused by chemicals in the sediments at the bottom of the river.
He says the mouth of the river where it drains into Lake Erie has received “a lot of deposits from industry from World War II.”
A crucial step in restoring the Raisin River is dredging up an acre of dense "non-aqueous phase liquid" or DNAPL, which are harmful contaminants in the groundwater beneath the river. Micka says the group is planning to work on that this year once the fish-spawning season comes to an end. The project will dredge out about 40,000 cubic yards of sediment contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB’s).
Micka says approximately $150 million has gone into improving the health of the River Raisin, and says funding from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has been a vital resource for improving the habitat for fish and wildlife.
He says a big part of his group’s environmental efforts have focused on six dams in the river, several of which had sewer lines attached to them and could not be removed. While two of the dams have been removed, the others have been transformed by placing rocks and creating rapids. In this way, fish are able get over the dams and can move now from Lake Erie to Dundee; a total of about 21 miles.
The city of Monroe has established waterfront activity on the river and also on Lake Erie, so residents can see these improvements first-hand, especially at Sterling State Park.
“It’s a very active state park, not only for people but also for fish and wildlife, and we spent a lot of GLRI money there to make it more habitable for fish and wildlife,” he says.
By the end of 2016, Micka expects the dredging project along the navigation channel should be “pretty well cleaned up.” After that, there will likely be a five-year period of monitoring the river’s water quality before the area can be delisted as an Area of Concern.
When it comes to the Raisin, Micka says all of the funding and time that’s gone into correcting history’s mistakes shows that “we've done things to [the environment] that we don't even understand.”
But after getting the river’s health to where it needs to be, he hopes those past mistakes won’t be repeated.
This series about restoration in Michigan's Areas of Concern is made possible through support from the Michigan Office of Great Lakes through Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.
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