The Watershed Approach - Urban Watersheds: Geology, Contamination, and Sustainable Development - page 12

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Buffered contaminated sites Stream network

Moraine

Sand

To the
Detroit
River; on to
Lake Erie

Directly
impacted
stream
segment
Watershed
boundary

0 10 20 30 km

FIGURE 1.5
Contaminant pathways via groundwater discharging to local surface streams. (With kind permission from
Springer Science+Business Media: Environ. Geol ., Using soil and contaminant properties to assess the potential
for groundwater contamination to the lower Great Lakes, USA, 56, 2009, p. 1019, Kaufman, M.M. et al., Figure 5,
© Springer-Verlag 2008.)

vehicles in the U.S.—have captured significant market share from the Big Three automak-
ers. Transplant production also largely takes place in the South. The statistics of this shift
are staggering: from 2000 through July, 2005 year-to-date, Michigan lost 42% of its auto
assembly jobs versus a 14% loss in the United States located outside of the three Midwest
auto-intensive states (Ohio and Indiana are the other two). Auto parts tell an even larger
part of the story, since there are four times as many jobs in parts as assembly operations.
Parts makers tend to be located near the assembly plants for historical reasons and, more
recently, because “just-in-time” production requires proximity for many parts such as seats
and subassemblies. Michigan's parts employment is down 34% since year 2000, versus 19%
in the rest of the United States (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago 2005). On the ground, the
results are clear: auto plants have closed, suppliers have gone bankrupt, and many man-
ufacturing and warehouse facilities lie vacant. This sequence of industrial-commercial