The Big Necessity (25 page)

Peot has regular olfactometry panels to test the palatability of his biosolids. He says that if there's something wrong with them, he wants to know about it. He speaks the language of cooperation. He sits on a panel with Ellen Harrison, director of the Waste Management Institute at Cornell University and a known skeptic about biosolids. He is funding research by Dr. Rob Hale, a microbiologist at the University of Virginia who discovered that organic chemicals found in flame retardants persist in sludge despite treatment and end up in the food chain.

Peot regularly attends public meetings where the safety of biosolids
is debated, usually ferociously. He thinks it's important to show the friendly face of biosolids. “If it's Synagro [in attendance] or some other big public behemoth, people aren't going to believe it.” He is more believable, he says, because he has less at stake. “I'm a public servant. I'm doing this because I think it's helping to save the planet in my little corner of the world.”

 

In another little corner of the world, Peot's routine would persuade no one. In this corner, a brown field covered with Class B biosolids sits a hundred feet or so from Nancy Holt's white bungalow. The field is a six-hour drive from Washington, through Virginia and into North Carolina, through an invisible border where all the radio stations turn into country music ones, off Route 85 to a quiet hamlet near the town of Mebane.

I arrive sweaty and dazed by jingles and guitar jangling to be greeted by a warm woman who gives me a hug and a wet rag for my forehead. Her accent—treacly southern—soothes, too. Nancy lives here with her husband, Bruce, who wears his white hair long and Willie Nelson–like, and blue topaz on his fingers. Family photos of pretty granddaughters and handsome sons are placed around the tidy household. On a car outside, there are antiwar stickers. This is picture-postcard rural America. Except some things aren't visible in the picture, such as the effects of the farmer's fertilizer over the road, and what Nancy thinks it has done to her and her neighbors, which is nothing good and possibly lethal.

Nancy has lived in this hamlet all her life, and her family has farmed land in these parts for 250 years. She wasn't interested in farming the land, though she still lives on it. Instead, she became a nurse, then moved into medical equipment sales. She serves iced tea, and then some more, then sits me down at the kitchen table and prepares the weapons of the grassroots protester: piles of files, dossiers, reports, and a scientific vocabulary she has accumulated along with frustration and disbelief. She begins by saying that the year before, sludge was applied for thirty-three days straight to the field in question. “Based on the number of 6,000-gallon tankers that came to apply it, we came up with the best guess that 9.75 million gallons [were] spread on 160 acres. They were
doing it twelve hours a day and a truck would arrive every ten minutes.” That was when she went blind.

She wasn't a well woman to begin with. When I'd called to make the appointment, she'd apologized for misunderstanding something by saying, “I have holes in my head.” I took it as a joke, but she does have holes in her head, after surgery for an ailment that she doesn't describe but which left her with metal clamps in her brain. One time when the sludge was applied—it's been arriving twice a year, spring and summer, for thirteen years—the arteries in her brain swelled, pressed on her optic nerve, and temporarily took away her sight. The diagnosis was giant cell arteritis, but no cause was proven. Nancy is sure the cause was sludge, and she now spends much of her life trying to prove it.

The stuff on the field over the road is not the fancy Class A EQ pasteurized and digested stuff coming out of Alexandria's expensive treatment processes. Class A may be biosolids' public face, but most of the three million dry tons of sludge applied to American farmland is Class B, whose face is uglier. Under the Part 503 rules, Class B has to be stabilized somehow (adding lime is common) and that's it. Though an EPA study in 1989 found twenty-five groups of pathogens in sludge—E. coli, salmonella, worms, and fungus—it decided to regulate only nine heavy metals. The power of soil, sun, and general degradation, it was thought, would take care of the rest. Soil is a complex and delicate ecosystem, and there is much about it that is still unknown. But by other countries' standards, the EPA's were lax.

When Cornell University scientists Ellen Harrison and Murray McBride appraised the Part 503 rules in a 1999 paper, they compared the U.S. regulations to a more precautionary policy prevalent in many European countries. There, farmers shouldn't add to the levels of heavy metals already in soil. The United States, by contrast, uses a risk-based approach. It calculates what soil—and people who live near and work on the soil—can handle. In practice, according to Harrison, farmers can apply sludge until their crop yield is reduced by 50 percent. In other words, they can proceed until harm is shown to have been done. Harrison attributes this philosophical difference to land and time. The United States is bigger. “We're used to being able to screw it up and just find a new piece of
land. Europe is more densely developed. There's no outback. They have to take a precautionary view.” And Europeans know that lead used by Romans two thousand years ago is still in their hills. They can't afford to calculate that soil can handle risk; they prefer not to risk that it can't.

The EPA has stated that its Part 503 rules make the application of biosolids “an appropriate choice for communities” as long as certain limitations are followed. These regulations include buffer zones and other “management practices” that are supposed to determine how, when, and what quantity of sludge can be applied to soils. In North Carolina, land which is used to grow crops that touch the top of the soil—cucumbers, melons, tomatoes—must not be planted for 14 months after sludge application. For crops that grow beneath the soil it's 38 months. At best, says Nancy, these regulations are unrealistic. “I'm from a farming family. Everyone around here knows about farming. And I don't know a single farmer who'd let his land lie fallow for thirty months. They can't afford to. Most are on the edge.” Biosolids promoters also emphasize the financial attraction of their product. Chris Peot calculated that using sludge can save farmers $40,000 a year, because they don't have to spend money on artificial fertilizers, and because crops supposedly yield better and more (though sludge critics maintain that any improvement in yield is always temporary).

Nancy tells me that she and Bruce traveled around North Carolina asking farmers whether they followed the rules. The responses were shocking. “Of the ones we talked to who were growing food crops—sweet potatoes, peanuts, melons, squash, cucumbers—not a single one had waited.” They were taken aback when she showed them her copy of the state's permit for applying biosolids, with its quotas and limits. Even if she conceded the Part 503 rules were safe, the safety is confined to paper when the rules are not followed.

“There are so many variables,” says Maureen Reilly of Sludge-Watch. “In practice haulers don't follow the regulations. The sludge comes out with contaminants at illegal levels. There's overapplication. Animals graze it when they're not allowed to. It's an unassessable situation.” The environmental activist Abby Rockefeller, a firm believer in nutrient recycling in principle, calls biosolids “unmonitorable, unregulatable and irremediable.”

Such views were given credence by a hard-hitting report issued by the EPA's Office of the Inspector General, a self-policing body that is mandated to investigate agency practice. Its investigation found that “EPA regional staff in charge of overseeing the Part 503 rules numbered seven in 1998, and were down to four in 2000.” The Inspector General understood from this that the EPA considered biosolids to be a low-risk program and devoted resources to it accordingly. But it also quoted an anonymous EPA official responsible for biosolids monitoring who classified his job as “impossible.”

 

Nancy Holt thinks the Part 503 rules have more holes than her brain. They require that Class B be applied 10 meters (11 yards) from watercourses, but take no account of possible contamination of creeks or streams by agricultural runoff. They don't address groundwater contamination. For the purposes of EPA regulation, the two creeks running behind the Holt house are irrelevant. But that's where trouble began, in 2001, when Nancy's grandson and great-nephew were diagnosed with
Staphylococcus aureus
(staph), a bacterial infection usually associated with dirty hospitals, and most famous for its antibiotic-resistant superbug strain MRSA. She noticed that they fell sick after playing in the creeks. Then a local dog got flesh-eating bacteria. Then someone organized a fund-raiser for a couple who both had cancer, and people started taking a tally of incidents. The Cook family: three daughters with breast cancer. The Hoffmans: a mother with colon cancer, a father with prostate cancer, and a thirteen-year-old son with cancer in his testicles. Five cases of brain cancer in a community of thirty-eight families. People got talking, and then they started phoning the Holt house, because Nancy had been a nurse, so she must know about disease.

Nancy started to keep records, some of which appeared in a 2004 document she wrote titled “Testimony to EPA, CDC, WEF, WERF in Alexandria, Virginia.” The list of “health problems reported in our community associated with sludge application/exposure” includes increased respiratory distress or breathing difficulties; diarrhea (chronic during sludge applications, all ages); chronic and acute headaches (persistent after exposure to odors, relieved by leaving residence); staph
infections (children covered by staph sores after playing in creeks or streams after significant rains); presumed neurotoxin sensitivity (seizures, nausea, elevated blood pressure, and rash).

Also, she sought out comrades. Helane Shields, an activist in New Hampshire, had been keeping copies of newspaper articles that reported health problems related to sludge applications. Her file was 500 pages thick. The Waste Management Institute at Cornell has gathered 350 sludge-related health complaints and lists characteristic symptoms as: asthma, flu-like symptoms, eye irritations, lesions, immunodeficiency, nosebleeds, burning eyes, throat, or nose. In 2002, EPA microbiologist Dr. David Lewis led a University of Georgia study that analyzed fifty-three incidents where health issues had been reported near sludge sites, and found a puzzlingly high incidence of staph infections. Lewis thought chemical irritants in sludge may be causing lesions that allowed staph easy access to the bloodstream.

Doctors whom Lewis interviewed thought the cause was sludge, but they couldn't prove it. Caroline Snyder, who runs the Sierra Club Sludge Task Force, says, “The problem is that sludge is so complex. It's a mixture of things so it's a very difficult argument. It's much easier if you can say, oh, it's benzene or some other chemical. Even three or four chemicals are difficult to analyze and in sludge there are tens of thousands. And it changes: a treatment plant will have different sludge from week to week.”

When Nancy phoned her local health department to ask them to investigate why her asthmatic neighbors were forced to wear face masks outside when sludge was being applied, she was told they could do nothing. When she noticed that she was having seizures every spring and summer, during the same periods sludge was being applied, and when she was hospitalized with neurotoxicity, she was told she could do nothing. Nothing could be proven. Everything was anecdotal.

In 2002, a panel at the National Research Council at the National Academy of Sciences released a follow-up report on sludge that is still the most authoritative document on the issue. Its conclusions were many, but the biosolids industry usually quotes this sentence from the report's “Overarching Findings”: “There is no documented scientific evidence that the Part 503 rules have failed to protect public
health.” Opponents quote the following sentence instead because it reads: “However, additional scientific work is needed to reduce persistent uncertainty about the potential for adverse human health effects from exposure to biosolids.” These sentences are quoted endlessly because, in Ellen Harrison's view, “There is a dearth of investigation in this area.” Those two sentences are the scraps that each side fights the other over.

“They say it's all anecdotal,” says Nancy, “but they don't keep records of people's complaints. If you don't track cases or investigate them, you can honestly say there's no record.” There have been three much-reported cases involving deaths allegedly linked to sludge. In 1994, eleven-year-old Tony Behun rode his dirt bike through sludge-applied land in Pennsylvania and died a few days afterward of a staph infection. Behun's father said, “We figured [the sludge] was safe. The government monitored it. Nobody ever said anything about it being hazardous. The joke was that the stuff smelled bad and grew big tomatoes.” Shayne Conner, an apparently healthy twenty-six-year-old, died less than a month after Class B biosolids were applied near his house in 1995. The third death was that of seventeen-year-old Daniel Pennock, who walked across a sludge-covered field and also died of a staph infection. His father told CBS news that he knew sludge was behind it and he would be certain of that “until the day I die.” But nothing has reached court. The Conner family filed a wrongful death suit against Synagro, but settled. Part of the settlement, Synagro admitted, required the family to read a statement declaring that biosolids had nothing to do with their son's death. As to why Synagro chose to settle a case when it maintains that biosolids are safe, the company has yet to answer. Maureen Reilly of SludgeWatch has an opinion about this. “It's the duct-tape solution. It's expensive, but it keeps everything out of the public record.”

 

Nancy begins to hand me documents. There are studies on the effect of lead on children's IQ levels, and on the environmental and occupational causes of cancer. There are news stories about the work of Dr. Tyrone Hayes, who found that frogs were being deformed by mixtures of pesticides, even when individual pesticides were well within
legal limits. There is also a transcript of a CBS story about the death of Daniel Pennock, in which EPA deputy administrator Paul Gilman says something he has probably regretted ever since. When he is asked if biosolids are safe, he replies with “I can't answer it's perfectly safe. I can't answer it's not safe.”