Sludge Watch ==> Ontario ordered to pay farm family $1.7M after farm contaminated with waste

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

This is a signal court victory for this farm family...who bought a farm that 
had been dumped with roadway construction wastes.  In assessing this award 
to the family and requiring the Province of Ontario to pay the family $1.7M 
the courts have sent a shot across the bow.

Ontario has recently allowed farms to take off-farm waste into farm 
digesters - opening to the door to untold contamination as farms are used as 
unlicenced waste sites.  Similarly the huge mountains of papermill sludge 
that sit decomposing and leaching into groundwater on dozens of farm fields 
while the Province looks the other way are lawsuits waiting to happen.

At a government forum called 'Building Trust', Larry Schill, a custom farmer 
(who farms lands belonging to other people) and who uses sewage sludge on 
those farms, told the workshop attendees that farmers need to be indemnified 
against environmental and health problems that may result from the use of 
sewage sludge.

Farmland is limited and precious.  We should not sacrifice our farmfields so 
that industry and muncipalities get cheap waste disposal.  The Ontario gov't 
might think that kicking urban waste out into farm country will make some 
urbanite nimbies happy and allow smug officials in Los Angeles and Toronto 
to think themselves green at the expense of rural hinterland.  Using 
farmfields to stack and stash and smear urban waste will come back to haunt 
us in litigation and at the dinner table.

The Province cannot evade its responsibility for facilitating the most 
modern, cleanest, least polluting waste mangement technologies and policies 
possible.  We need a moratorium on the land application of sewage sludge and 
paper sludge immediately.

(Read today's stories about how the huge Abitibi paper sludge berm has been 
found to be leaching contaminants into surface water and is now being 
totally removed from a Pelham Ontario farmfield)



..........................................


JUSTICE

Ontario ordered to pay family $1.7-million after farm was contaminated
ALLISON JONES

The Canadian Press

January 25, 2008

TORONTO -- An Ontario judge has ordered the provincial government to pay 
more than $1.7-million to a family whose dairy farm was contaminated by 
concrete and asphalt, writing in her decision that officials took a 
"cavalier and careless attitude" to "what was obviously a serious problem."

The decision was made after a 14-year court battle between the Ontario 
government and the family, who had to go all the way to the Supreme Court of 
Canada to have the case brought to trial.

When Ben and Maria Berendsen bought their farm in Teviotdale, northwest of 
Kitchener, in 1981, they were unaware that surface waste from highway 
reconstruction had been buried there in the 1960s.

Within a year of taking possession of the property, an unusual number of the 
Berendsens' cows fell sick and died. Some were deemed unfit for human 
consumption, and eventually dead-stock haulers refused to accept the 
Berendsens' dead animals.

"The cows sensed there was something wrong with the water," the Berendsens' 
lawyer, Richard Lindgren, said Wednesday. "The cows would drink just enough 
water to stay alive, but not enough to really thrive and produce sufficient 
quantities of milk."

By the late 1980s, the family began experiencing health problems, such as 
hair loss and stomach aches, and they stopped drinking the farm's well 
water.

The Berendsens were first made aware of the buried waste in 1989, and in 
1994 brought their case before the courts. The government claimed it was not 
liable for the acts of an independent contractor who buried the asphalt on 
the farm with the permission of the property's owner at the time.

Madam Justice Silja Seppi of Ontario Superior Court disagreed, saying there 
was no evidence an independent contractor performed the work, and last 
Friday awarded the Berendsens $1,732,400.

"They're thrilled, of course," Mr. Lindgren said. "This has been a long time 
coming."

The family tried several "extraordinary measures" to make their farm viable, 
Mr. Lindgren said, including constantly buying new cows to replace the ones 
that got sick or died, having veterinarians visit the farm and hauling in 
water from offsite.

In 1990, the government installed an underground water storage tank and paid 
for clean water to be delivered to the farm every other day. But after 
nearly three years, the government stopped paying for the shipments, forcing 
the Berendsens to pick up the tab of between $2,500 and $3,000 a month.

The Berendsens gave up on the farm in 1994 and moved to a farm in Chepstow, 
Ont., near Walkerton.

They still own the contaminated property - now abandoned - because nobody 
wants to buy it, Mr. Lindgren said.

"By all accounts, the current condition of the Teviotdale property renders 
it ... inoperable as a working farm," the judge wrote in her decision.

Judge Seppi also dismissed government suggestions that the farm's problems 
could be blamed on mismanagement by the Berendsens.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080125.FARMS25/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/