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Speak out against toxic dredge dump in Lake Erie.

(Plain Dealer File Photo)

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers -- apparently bored with the bureaucratic inertia that threatens the destruction of the Great Lakes by silver and bighead carp -- has set its sights on new ecological mayhem.

The target: Cleveland harbor and the intake valves that supply drinking water to hundreds of thousands of consumers.

In a public notice last December, the Corps announced its intention to place dredged, contaminated river sediment aboard scows and tow it out to dump sites in Lake Erie. The Corps wants to begin operations April 1.

Granted, this latest challenge to common sense is not on as epic a level as the Corps' endless delays in shutting down the Chicago H2O highway to prevent the potential extinction of the largest freshwater ecosystem on the continent by invasive Asian carp. But it features a similar lame-brained logic that demands a quick, no-nonsense, "No."

And that is where you come in.

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On Thursday, March 6, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency will host a public meeting to solicit comments on the Corps' application to dispose of contaminated dredge from the Cuyahoga River federal shipping canal in Lake Erie.

That's right: open-lake discharge of muck soiled with contaminants such as PCBs just west of the intakes for the municipal drinking water treatment plants that serve Greater Cleveland.

The hearing will begin at 4:30 p.m. in the Martin Luther King Jr. branch of the Cleveland Public Library, 1962 Stokes Blvd, on the western edge of University Circle.

The more people who attend and speak out against open-lake dumping, the greater the odds that it will sink without a ripple. If the Ohio EPA denies approval, the Corps will have no choice but to continue the current practice of using confined disposal facilities