Sludge Watch ==> Big Apple Sludge - the smelly core of New York's sewers

[Maureen Reilly]

http://www.al.com/news/huntsvilletimes/lroop.ssf?/base/news/119218072983270.xml&coll=1


Thanks, Big Apple, for your smelly core
Friday, October 12, 2007
Huntsville Times


GOOD SPRINGS - Good Springs stinks. For real. This beautiful piece of 
northwest Limestone County, with its rolling hills, tidy farms and sweet 
name, smells in places like a toilet.

Thanks for that, New York.

A Texas company, Synagro Technologies Inc., struck a deal to turn New York's 
human sewage into farm fertilizer. Free farm fertilizer.


The company gets paid to take the poop from New York. After it's "treated," 
they give it to farmers.

Do they give it to the potato farmers of Long Island? The ranchers of Texas? 
Don't be silly. They spread it in rural Alabama, long the dump for the 
nation.

Farmers in this part of the woods know a deal when they see one. The sludge 
is appearing on field after field. They're not hard to find.

Yet the smell isn't everywhere. You can still drive these country lanes with 
your windows down and smell only a North Alabama fall: fresh-cut hay, cattle 
and sweet grass.

But around any bend, it can hit - strong and unmistakable - that special 
smell. Like a big toilet. A really big toilet. No mistaking it for cow 
patties.

"I know we're just a bunch of rednecks out here, but it's not right," says 
Tina Harrison, clerk at the Good Springs Grocery on Alabama 99. "They should 
spread it up there."

Harrison's is a view you hear a lot here, but she's rare in being willing to 
say it out loud with her name attached. It may be true that just as the 
Civil War divided neighbor from neighbor in these hollows, so does the 
Smelly War divide them today. But the South's Prime Directive - be 
neighborly - still reigns supreme.

"They're my good neighbors," one woman said of the farms spreading sludge on 
both sides of her house on Flanagan Road. Another woman who spoke out early 
in the press has disconnected her phone.

"My husband is thinking about it for our land," said the woman flanked by 
stereo poop fields, "So far, I've said un-unh."

Some say the odor fades within days. Others disagree. A woman who lives 
beside a sludge field says it's like the mailman, back day after day.

"When the dew falls, it's bad," she says. "Of a mornin' and of an evenin', 
you can sure smell it. It's God-awful."

So meet the new mountain dew, brought to you by New York.

People here are simple, friendly farm folk who honor the old ways. They 
still lift a hand or a finger from the steering wheel to acknowledge you as 
they pass on the road. They stop readily to give directions and are glad to 
step outside and chat.

Simple isn't stupid. They get the symbolism of New York dumping on Alabama, 
and many don't like it.

So strong is the opposition, the Limestone County Commission decided 
Wednesday to ask a judge to ban the poop. The commission will seek an 
injunction. At issue will be where one farm's rights end and another's 
begin.

In the meantime, Good Springs gets by with a laugh and a grimace.

"The smell does fade," agrees the woman boxed on both sides.

Pause.

"Then they bring some more."