| Last year, I reported that the White House had had sewage sludge applied to its grounds during previous administrations, resulting in elevated lead levels in the soil where the garden was planned. Then I retracted that report. Well, now the story is changing again, and this time it's based on my own reporting - not reports from other blogs or newspapers. Yes, the White House was sludged. Many times, and over many years. And yes, the lead was elevated. It wasn't high enough to be dangerous but it was high enough to show that something had probably contaminated it. But here's the thing: lead is one of 10 hazardous substances or organisms that the EPA actually regulates in sludge. So if you're planting a garden in a place where sludge was applied, lead is the least of your problems. (To the Obamas' credit, they took action to reduce the lead and make it unavailable to the plants in their garden.)
Last year when this story initially came out, it was politicized. The story first came from Mother Jones, where it was reported by Josh Harkinson. Then it was picked up in an Andrew Kimbrell piece on Huffington Post that made a simple, unintentional mistake. He pinned the sludging of the White House on the Clintons. That made it look like it was just the Democrats doing the sludging - and now gardening in the previously sludged area. In fact, sludge applications at the White House began under Reagan.
Ultimately, the New York Times picked up the story, asking Irvin Williams, the lead gardener at the White House for nearly six decades, if sludge was applied. He said yes, once, in 1985. Harkinson (of Mother Jones) replied with evidence of sludge applications through at least the late 1990s. And a DC Water and Sewer Authority report [PDF] from July 2009 says (on p. 4) that sludge applications at the White House continued until 2004.
While writing this piece, I contacted the National Park Service myself. They didn't have any records of sludge application at the White House after 1987. However, the EPA requires no record-keeping when you apply sludge that meets their rather low bar to qualify as "Class A Biosolids," so if the National Park Service has no records of sludge applications, that doesn't necessarily mean that it didn't happen. Either way, it's a silly point to argue since they do have records of sludge applications at the White House in 1987, so there's no disagreement that sludge was applied at the White House.
Given the politicized history of this story and a three decade-long PR campaign to improve sewage sludge's image, I expect to be attacked for my reporting. About the dates of sludge applications at the White House, I chose to believe my source from the EPA who was helping me with the story, one that was supported by Josh Harkinson's reporting and other documents that can be easily found online like the one I've linked to. However, I wanted to lay out the facts here so that folks know that there were conflicting facts going into this story and that I am not doing sloppy reporting. |
