# Research Note — 2026-05-29 ## Confirmed facts - EPA’s Program Contacts page for Northwest Indiana lists Victoria Wittig, Ph.D. as the Northwest Indiana Urban Waters Ambassador at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond and was last updated January 30, 2026. [^1] - EPA’s 2025 Northwest Indiana Urban Waters Federal Partnership Work Plan says the NWI UWFP is supported through a shared agreement with Purdue University Northwest and includes more than 80 local, state, and federal partners. [^2] - The same work plan identifies the West Branch of the Little Calumet River Collaborative as including NIPSCO, and it explicitly names a NIPSCO right-of-way at Hobart Marsh Conservation Area. [^2] - EPA’s Grand Calumet River AOC remediation page says Junction Reaches construction is scheduled to begin in Fall 2026 and Lake George Canal monitoring continues through 2027 with possible additional remediation in 2028. [^3] - EPA’s Grand Calumet River AOC page says the river is in one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the United States and that EPA and partners identified 12 sediment remediation and five habitat restoration projects for delisting. [^4] - NIOSH’s EMF manual is a workplace exposure-assessment guide that treats spot, walkthrough, area, source, and personal monitoring as distinct measurement families. [^5] - NIOSH hazard-surveillance material frames walkthrough surveys as a screening step for ambient magnetic fields, with additional measurement methods needed when the goal is individual exposure characterization. [^6] - NIOSH HHE examples show that nearby infrastructure can produce elevated readings that are not occupational exposure when workers are not normally present at that location. [^7] ## Added this hour - NIOSH hazard surveillance on industrial magnetic fields uses a walkthrough survey to screen ambient fields and rank facilities for follow-up personal monitoring, which is a cleaner model for this pilot than trying to treat every route stop as the same kind of sample. [^8] - In that study, facility ambient magnetic fields varied widely; the geometric mean range was 0.04–1.61 microtesla and the Hi-5 range was 1.0–530 microtesla, while industrial category alone was a poor predictor of ambient field level. [^8] - The CDC/NIOSH EMF manual also treats walkthroughs as a separate exposure-assessment family for preliminarily ranging and locating sources, which supports keeping route-level screens distinct from spot and personal measurements. [^9] - A NIOSH study of spot measurements used a stand-mounted probe near workstation locations and then measured at the same spot with a second device, which reinforces the existing protocol rule to log probe support, orientation, and sampling interval explicitly rather than relying on memory later. [^10] - A second NIOSH magnetic-field paper found that waveform measurements near worker locations revealed static-field, harmonic, and non-sinusoidal features that ordinary ELF magnitude readings can miss, so a tiny waveform-capable follow-up on repeated hotspots is the right kind of upgrade: targeted, not bloated. [^11] ## Working hypotheses - The pilot will stay more defensible if Hobart Marsh ROW activity is treated as corridor context, not as signal by itself. - The Grand Calumet / East Chicago cleanup window should remain a separate context layer so remediation timing does not get mistaken for EMF mechanism. - If the study grows, method-family separation will matter more than a bigger map. - Walkthrough-style screening should be used to rank sites and decide where to spend limited spot-measurement time, not pooled into the same bucket as stationary spot samples. - Waveform-characterization checks should stay rare and hotspot-driven; they are a diagnostic flashlight, not a new exposure universe. ## Practical pilot implications - Keep the NIPSCO ROW at Hobart Marsh in the route metadata and exclude it from exposure summaries unless a measurable source-state change is observed. - Keep the Grand Calumet cleanup-window tag on East Chicago / Hammond / Whiting stops so remediation timing is not mixed into utility state or corridor comparisons. - Add a route-screen layer if it helps choose follow-up points, but keep its summary metrics separate from the final exposure tables. - No broader protocol rewrite is needed beyond the method and metadata clarifications already added to the field and analysis docs. - Add one optional waveform-characterization pass at repeated hotspots or source-adjacent stops, but keep it separate from ordinary ELF spot readings and do not pool it into the main corridor-vs-control tables. ## Update — 2026-05-29 19:25 CT ### Confirmed facts - EPA’s Northwest Indiana Urban Waters Partnership page is still live, was last updated March 31, 2026, and says the partnership includes more than 70 partners with NIPSCO and Purdue University Northwest among named partners. [^12] - EPA’s program-contacts page for Northwest Indiana still lists Victoria Wittig, Ph.D. as the Northwest Indiana Urban Waters Ambassador at Purdue University Northwest and was last updated January 30, 2026. [^1] - EPA’s Grand Calumet River AOC remediation page says Junction Reaches construction is scheduled to begin in Fall 2026 and Lake George Canal monitoring continues through 2027 with possible additional remediation in 2028. [^3] - NIOSH’s walkthrough survey paper says ambient magnetic fields in industrial facilities can vary widely and that walkthrough surveys are practical screening tools that should be followed by personal measurements when needed. [^8] - NIOSH’s waveform-measurement paper says ordinary ELF magnitude readings can miss static-field, harmonic, and non-sinusoidal features near worker locations. [^11] ### Working hypothesis - The best next upgrade is a small, optional waveform-characterization follow-up on repeated hotspots, not a broader redesign of the pilot. ### Practical implication - The field protocol, analysis plan, and printable checklist now make waveform follow-up explicit while keeping it separate from the normal exposure series. ### Sources used - [^12]: https://www.epa.gov/urbanwaterspartners/northwest-indiana-urban-waters-partnership - [^1]: https://www.epa.gov/urbanwaterspartners/program-contacts-northwest-indiana-indiana - [^3]: https://www.epa.gov/great-lakes-aocs/remediation-and-restoration-projects-grand-calumet-river-aoc - [^8]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/198423 - [^11]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/198316 - [^2]: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-05/2025-nwi-uwfp-work-plan.pdf - [^4]: https://www.epa.gov/great-lakes-aocs/grand-calumet-river-aoc - [^5]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/5254/cdc_5254_DS1.pdf - [^6]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/198423 - [^7]: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/1993-1038-2432.pdf - [^9]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/5254/cdc_5254_DS1.pdf - [^10]: https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/198316/cdc_198316_DS1.pdf