| Andy McElmurray was a dairy farmer in Georgia. The City of Augusta "invited him" to apply their sewage sludge on his fields, where he grew forage crops to feed his cows, and assured him it was safe. He applied sewage sludge to his fields from 1979 until 1990. So did Bill Boyce, the dairy farmer next door to McElmurray. So far so good.
What the two farmers didn't know was that the City of Augusta never enforced what little laws there are around the contents of sewage sludge. Specifically, the EPA regulates 9 heavy metals and fecal coliform. That's it. Out of thousands of possible chemicals that find their way into sewage sludge (often from industrial waste), the government only regulates 10, and Augusta couldn't even manage to do that.
In theory, using human waste as fertilizer could be a good idea. The Chinese did it for centuries. But sewage sludge contains a lot more than human waste. It also contains industrial waste. In McElmurray's case, there was a Nutrasweet plant nearby dumping high quantities of thallium, a rat poison toxic to humans in very small doses, down the drain, and the thallium was present in the sludge. Thallium, by the way, is NOT one of the chemicals regulated by the EPA in sewage sludge.
Over the years, both the McElmurray family and the Boyce family noticed their soil became more and more acidic. Perhaps that was because
The pH of the City's "fertilizer" was so low that it dissolved metal fences and parts of the building where lab tests were performed.
As any farmer or gardener knows, soil pH is important; most crops like soil that is very slightly acidic (but not too acidic). To raise the pH back up to a level suitable for growing crops, both the Boyces and the McElmurrays applied lime to their land. As soon as they did this, they noticed their cows "developed an odd reddish tinge to their fading coats, a symptom of molybdenum poisoning." The molybdenum had accumulated in the soil for years, and the lime made it bioavailable to the forage crops - and to the cows. Here's what happened next:
Milk production from both of our dairies plummeted. Within months, many cows looked emaciated and, on our farm, developed Salmonella infections. Many of the cattle on both farms developed various infections and looked as if they were suffering through the last stages of AIDS.
Molybdenum, which attacks the liver and kidneys, happens to be one of the handful of chemicals that the EPA actually regulates in sludge. Yet, their regulations are so lax that even if the City of Augusta had followed them to the letter of the law, the cows still would have been poisoned. And molybdenum wasn't the only toxin present in the sludge. There were plenty others there too, including many that are NOT regulated by EPA.
Veterinarians and other experts tested soil and forage samples as well as liver and kidney tissue samples. They found high levels of cadmium and other sludge-related contaminants. When the experts finally figured out what was happening, they fed one of the herds forage not grown with sewage sludge. Those animals slowly recovered over a period of two years. In the end, both of our family-owned dairy businesses were destroyed.
The victims of this incident were not just cows and farmers. Recall that the cows were not just pets - they were dairy cows that produced milk that consumers bought and drank.
Milk samples collected from one of our farms still using forage grown on lands which received sewage sludge contained high levels of heavy metals and other sludge contaminants. Additional samples of milk pulled from shelves in grocery stores in Georgia and surrounding states also contained some of the same heavy metals at levels exceeding EPA's safe drinking water standards. Unsafe levels of heavy metals in various samples included thallium, a rat poison toxic to humans in very small doses [and not regulated in sludge by the EPA].
The sludge turned out to be the gift the kept on giving. It wasn't just the cows who ate the forage grown in sludge who got sick. A scientist named Dr. David Lewis found that people living near where sewage sludge is applied often breath sewage sludge dusts blowing from the fields and "suffered from chemical irritation of the skin, eyes, and respiratory tract... [which] lead to a variety of infections." While the cows were getting sick, McElmurray and his father also found that they too were suffering from "the same symptoms described in Dr. Lewis' research articles." McElmurray's father nearly died and "still suffers serious medical problems from having worked in the sludge-amended fields and from getting steroid treatments [to treat his sludge-induced infections]."
What happened next is truly shocking. Officials from City of Augusta, who had screwed up in a criminal way, should have gone to jail for this. But they did not. According to McElmurray, here's why:
Test results from soil and forage samples collected from our farm and the Boyce farm indicated that the dairy cows could have died from ingesting levels of molybdenum that are PERMISSIBLE under EPA's 503 sludge rule. In other words, what happened on our dairy farms suggested that EPA's sludge rule may have a major loophole - one that allows toxic heavy metals and other pollutants to contaminate food chain crops and milk supplies.
Instead of strengthening the regulations, EPA decided to cover its own ass. EPA decided to come up with a "scientifically reliable" version of the facts, proving that the sludge was safe. To make their fudged facts "peer-reviewed" they planned for EPA sludge guru Robert Brobst to work with University of Georgia land application specialist Julie Gaskin to publish a research study based on Augusta's fabricated data. They would then submit the article to the National Academy of Sciences and they would use it all in McElmurray's court case to prove that sludge was not to blame.
All went well for the EPA until a U.S. District Court judge actually checked all of the data. He called it "incomplete," "unreliable," "fudged," "fabricated," and "invented." Which it was.
Still, neither the Boyces nor the McElmurrays found justice. A jury awarded the Boyces $550,000 and McElmurray settled out of court for $1.5 million. Those are big numbers but not big enough to even pay the experts involved in the case, let alone "make a dent" in the tens of millions of dollars that each family lost when their dairy farms went under.
And the story does not even end here. In 2003, McElmurray filed for "economic relief" with the USDA because his land was "too polluted by PCBs, chlordane, heavy metals, and other hazardous wastes" to grow food chain crops. USDA used the information from the Gaskin study (based on phony data) and rejected McElmurray's claim. Fortunately, the same wonderful judge did not agree with the USDA.
As you can see, the use of sewage sludge to grow crops is problematic and dangerous. However, the EPA's cover-up of this danger is even worse because it will result in more people and animals losing their lives and their livelihoods because they were told that using sludge as a fertilizer is safe. |
