Date: Sun, 7 Jun 2009 14:38:44 -0700 (PDT)
From: tim keim
Subject: Perpetual Sludge?
This post was published in the Chapel Hill Herald Sun on June 6, 2009.
PERPETUAL SLUDGE?by Tim Keim
It was last August that I first took up the issue of sludge dumping in Chatham, surrounding counties, and yea the nation. I knew then that the subject and the damage done to our rivers and lands would not go away or be properly addressed by county, state or federal authorities.
To review, the Harper-Collins Dictionary of Environmental Science describes sewage
sludge as “a viscous, semisolid mixture of bacteria and virus-laden
organic matter, toxic metals, synthetic organic chemicals, and
settled solids removed from domestic and industrial waste water at
sewage treatment plants.”
Once upon a time American municipalities disposed of sludge in the ocean
until it was deemed too toxic a mess with which to trash the great
deep. Decades ago some group of greedy morons figured that because of
its high nitrogen content it could be used for fertilizer. Without
telling farmers about the “other” ingredients, our Chatham
County agriculturalists were deceived into accepting 19,982,500
gallons of sludge deposited on 2,877acres—and that’s just 2007
(NC-DENR-DWQ January 2009).
Not only does sludge contain the above mentioned toxic materials, there
is ample proof that, incubating within this vile brew, are antibiotic
resistant bacteria. Vancomycin
resistant enterococci (VRE)
have been found in sewage sludge. Researchers writing in Acta
Veterinaria Scandinavica point
out the danger of antibiotic resistance (sic) genes passing into the
human food chain. Leena
Sahlström, from the Finnish Food Safety Authority, said,
“Antimicrobial resistance is a serious threat in veterinary
medicine and human health care. Resistance genes can spread from
animals, through the food-chain, and back to humans. Sewage sludge
may act as one link in this chain”. The researchers collected
sludge from the plant every week for four months, for a total of 77
samples. Of these, 79% tested positive for the drug resistant super
bugs.
Next door in Alamance County Brenda Clemmer lives on the old Murray Plantation
where Alex Haley’s people were enslaved and where Roots was filmed.
Elevated above the surrounding land, it is drained by Stag Creek and
Quaker Creek which feed Quaker Lake, the water supply for Mebane and
Graham. In 2006-2008 Synagro applied sludge adjacent to Ms. Clemmer’s
home. “The field was brown and oozy, the flies were horrible and
the smell was worse than a pig farm. You can smell it inside your
home. We would leave when they spread it it was so bad”. Brenda
Clemmer has asked the NC Dept. of Water Quality (DWQ) for assurances
that they will obey the law in the future. She has received
“absolutely nothin” from DWQ on this matter.
To be fair to DWQ, they are chronically understaffed and under- funded. I know good
people who work at DWQ. They care deeply about what they do, but are
hamstrung by their near starvation lack of funding.
It is a crime to apply sludge in a critical watershed, yet NC DWQ wasn’t aware of
Synagro’s crime because they count on the municipality of sludge
origin to notify the state of critical watershed locations. As I
write (June 3), it is raining cats and dogs in Alamance Co. That rain
carries toxic sludge runoff into Quaker Lake. The question is: Has
North Carolina’s ignorance of such occurrences led to illegal dumping
like this all over the state? Without the Brenda Clemmers of the
world we’ll never know.
Sludge activist Nancy Holt who helped Ms. Clemmer navigate her situation says, “This is a state permit problem. They are abdicating their responsibility. They didn’t look at the water shed overlay when they granted this permit”.
Lastly, a lawsuit that will hopefully help block future sludge spreading is in the courts. The McElmurray and Boyce family dairy farmers of Georgia has sued the City of Augusta in the wrongful deaths of the farmers’ dairy cattle and loss of productive farmland as a result of sewage sludge containing hazardous waste.
They spoke in Orange County NC Thursday night at a community forum joined by other local anti-sludge activists.
This isn’t the change we voted for last year. This is corporate corruption run amok, or business as usual. President Obama, Governor Perdue, Chatham County Board of Commissioners halt this criminal pollution of our land and water at once!
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