Sludge Watch ==> Judge orders Compensation of Farmer Ruined by Sewage Sludge Fertilizer

[Maureen Reilly]

Sludgewatch Admin:

The case showed that contaminated milk hit store shelves, and other farms 
took this contaminated sludge.  So is this contaminated milk still finding 
its way to the marketplace?

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

US Judge Orders Compensation of Farmer Ruined by Sludge Used as Fertilizer

Benjamin H. Grumbles, EPA's assistant administrator for water programs, said 
Thursday that the judge's order underscored the significance of what he 
called strong national standards on sludge rather than undercutting the 
giveaway program.


"This unfortunate instance of poor recordkeeping and biosolids sampling 
techniques on the part of one plant reiterates the importance of our 
national biosolids program," Grumbles said in a written response to AP 
questions about the ruling.

About 7 million tons of biosolids — the term that waste producers came up 
with for sludge in 1991 — are produced each year as a byproduct from 1,650 
waste water treatment plants around the nation.

Slightly more than half is used on land as fertilizer; the rest is 
incinerated or burned in landfills. Giving it away to farmers is cheaper 
than burning or burying it, and the government's policy has been to 
encourage the former.

Alaimo's decision was a bittersweet victory for McElmurray, whose silos and 
dairy barns sit mostly empty since his herd was wiped out. He contends the 
cows were done in by grazing on sludge-treated hay for more than a decade, 
beginning in 1979.

Interviewed before the ruling, McElmurray crossed his arms, scowling at the 
empty pastures and idle equipment where his prize-winning herds once grazed 
here in eastern Georgia. "This farm never would have looked like this if we 
hadn't used the city's sludge," he said angrily.

The city of Augusta recently settled a lawsuit with him over the dead cows 
for $1.5 million. Another nearby dairy farmer, Bill Boyce, won a $550,000 
court judgment against the city on his claim that sludge was responsible for 
the deaths of more than 300 of his cows.

The deaths of McElmurray's and Boyce's cows in the 1990s and their suits 
against Augusta raised a red flag with officials at EPA, which since 1978 
had been promoting the use of sludge as a fertilizer.

In 1999, the agency awarded a $12,274 grant to the University of Georgia to 
study the problem. That research would result in a study published in 2003 
in the Journal of Environmental Quality finding that the city's sludge was 
safe and that EPA's regulations were working.

Cities' sewage and industrial pollution had spewed untreated into lakes, 
rivers and oceans until 1972, when Congress passed the landmark Clean Water 
Act.

Back then, cleaning up waterways was the first target of the newly created 
EPA. The agency oversaw a multibillion-dollar grant program that Congress 
set up to help cities and counties build wastewater treatment plants that 
would filter out pollutants.

Alaimo, citing data from an environmental engineer hired by McElmurray, 
found that the Augusta plant was sending out hundreds of truckloads of 
sludge daily with dangerously high levels of cadmium, molybdenum and 
chlordane.

The engineer, William Hall of Atlanta, had been a project manager at seven 
Superfund cleanup sites and had extensive experience with toxic chemicals 
and heavy metals. His tests found polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs in the 
Augusta sludge at levels 2,500 times higher than the EPA standard, thallium 
levels 25 times the legal limit, and arsenic levels twice the government's 
health standard.

Boyce told the AP that in January 1999 he informed Georgia dairy regulators 
and EPA that tests he had ordered on the milk from his cows had come back 
showing high levels of thallium, molybdenum and cadmium.

A top state official alerted the Food and Drug Administration, but Boyce 
said no one ever told him to stop selling his milk or mentioned a possible 
threat to public health.

"We were a little startled," Boyce recalled. "They concluded that our permit 
was good, and we could continue to sell milk. So we did."

EPA lists thallium as a toxic heavy metal that can cause gastrointestinal 
irritation and nerve damage, but the agency has no standard on the metal's 
presence in milk. Neither does the Agriculture Department, even though it 
regards thallium as one of the most dangerous agents of potential 
bioterrorism against the nation's food supply.

State and EPA officials followed up by testing Boyce's milk, but he said 
they wouldn't share all their results with him or McElmurray. There is no 
evidence that those officials took any further action. Boyce said he decided 
finally to reveal the milk contamination to the AP to illuminate a broader 
issue.

"The real problem was the state and federal regulatory agencies did not do 
their jobs," he said, adding that EPA and Augusta officials "tried to say we 
were just a disease-infested herd. Well, that's just a bunch of bullhockey."

Charles Murphy, then head of Georgia's dairy program, said he notified FDA's 
Administration's office in Atlanta of Boyce's contaminated samples. "I know 
I talked to them some, shared some of that information with them," he 
recalled. "I don't think they sent anybody out."

Murphy said he was persuaded by evidence provided to him by Boyce and 
McElmurray to seek broader state testing of dairy cows, but there wasn't 
enough money.

FDA officials in Atlanta and Washington said they had no record of Murphy's 
account.

But over the Super Bowl weekend in 1999, two senior EPA officials, Robert 
Bastian and Bob Brobst, huddled with the two dairy farmers and their lawyer, 
Ed Hallman, to talk about sludge.

"They showed us some data," Bastian recalled. "I don't ever remember seeing 
any milk data."

Boyce and McElmurray insist they shared all of their data with the two EPA 
officials, including separate tests they ran on milk pulled from store 
shelves in Charleston, S.C. That milk, which came from other farms in the 
Southeast, suggested more widespread contamination, they said. It had heavy 
metals similar to those found in Boyce's milk.

There are no records that anyone became ill because of milk tainted with 
heavy metals or other contaminants that could have come from sludge.

Source-Medindia
http://www.medindia.net/news/US-Judge-Orders-Compensation-of-Farmer-Ruined-by-Sludge-Used-as-Fertilizer-33915-2.htm