Lin Eyer, of Havre de Grace, didn?t know she was riding her horse through a field of freshly spread sewage sludge last summer in Susquehanna State Park along the Susquehanna River in Harford County ? one of more than 300 sites around the state where the treated waste is spread.
A week later she was confined to her bed, shaking with chills, worn down by migraines. A dentist pulled out all her teeth in an effort to stop infections, all while she was on antibiotics.
Eyer, 51, already had a compromised immune system. But she insists she had never experienced weakness and chills as severe as the ones in the days after her contact with sludge. Still, doctors could not pinpoint the cause of her illness.
Texas-based Synagro Technologies Inc., which has regional offices in Baltimore City and is the country?s largest sludge-spreading company, had gained a lease from the state Department of Natural Resources to farm hay on the parkland, but the state permit to spread sludge requires people to stay off the land for a year.
For Eyer and her neighbors, restricting them from using public land was too much to ask, and the more they researched sludge, the more it stank.
Jeff Lawson?s family lives less than a quarter-mile from the park. Initially, nobody living near the park even knew what sludge was, and they got no answers from state officials or Synagro, they say.
“In the beginning it came into our neighborhood like an invasion,” Lawson said.
“It?s been an education, and our kids have learned a lot, too,” Katharine Lawson, Jeff?s wife, said of their children, 13-year-old Troy and 11-year-old Elizabeth. “But if it?s in your community, you want to know.”
Maryland has seven sludge-site inspectors and 314 sludge permits, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Last year, those inspectors performed 511 inspections and spot checks at 217 sludge sites during and after sludge spreading. The state?s sludge fund generates about $750,000 each year through permit and generator fees, said Robert Ballinger, a department spokesman.
In their fight against sludge, the Susquehanna neighbors won the support of state and county lawmakers.
Harford County Councilman James McMahan publicly questioned how safe the fertilizer could be if people were barred from the land for a year, as state regulations require. And Sen. Barry Glassman, R-Harford, introduced bills in the General Assembly that would have banned companies from leasing parkland to spread sludge.
“Susquehanna State Park is being used as a pawn,” McMahan wrote in an Aug. 6, 2007, letter to the Department of Natural Resources. “We are taking public land, putting an arbitrary label of agricultural on it … and denying the public use of the land for hiking, trailing and horseback riding for 12 months from the day the sludge is spread.”
In an interview about state regulation of sewage sludge, McMahan added: “One of the things I noticed right up front was sewage sludge will be treated to reduce disease-causing organisms. Reduce. I would be much more secure with the word ?eliminate.?”
Glassman?s bills failed, but his concerns about sludge led to DNR?s agreement to conduct an internal investigation to review what companies lease state land and how they use it.
TAKING ON THE EPA
From suburban neighborhoods to the labs of top Environmental Protection Agency scientists and university researchers, sludge has started to come under close scrutiny. Even Congress has jumped on board ? after Tony Behun?s death (Story on Page 13) ? by holding hearings in 2000 on sludge?s health effects.
Initially, spreading sludge looked like an environmentally friendly and profitable answer to where to put more and more sewage with a decades-old ban on ocean dumping and the high costs of landfilling. Treat it at wastewater plants, and offer it to farmers as free fertilizer.
Today, local governments say they?ve saved untold millions of dollars by recycling the human waste. In the private sector, the bottom line is much more tangible: Synagro makes more than $300 million in revenue each year, helping to spread about 440,000 tons of sludge yearly in Maryland.
That?s a lot of sludge, but government and industry officials are quick to say that researchers have yet to prove that sludge causes illness.
David Lewis, a former top EPA microbiologist who linked sludge to Behun?s death, claims in a lawsuit against the EPA and the University of Georgia that top government and university officials forced him out of the agency because his research criticized sludge.
At the time, Lewis claims he made a deal with the EPA?s acting administrator for research and development, Henry Longest, to leave the agency and work at the university without government interference. But, Lewis says, the EPA paid the school to cover up the dangers he was investigating.
“I refused to resign after Longest failed to keep his end of the bargain, but employees working for Longest terminated me anyway,” Lewis said. “I could call it something else besides firing, but I?m not sure hoodwinking is officially recognized as a personnel action in the federal government.”
The EPA denies retaliating against Lewis, but officials declined to elaborate because of the pending lawsuit.
THE NEED FOR STANDARDS
A federal judge, in a February ruling, supported Lewis? claim while chastising the EPA in a case involving hundreds of dead cattle in Augusta, Ga., where soil teststurned up highly elevated levels of toxic metals in sludge. U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo devoted four pages to Lewis, even though the scientist was not a party in the case.
“The administrative record contains evidence that senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent and any questioning of the EPA?s biosolids program,” Alaimo wrote in his 45-page ruling.
(Biosolids is the term that the supporters coined to phase out the phrase “sewage sludge.”)
Alaimo ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to compensate Andy McElmurray for crops and cattle destroyed by the sludge after he spread it on his farm for 11 years.
Land samples taken eight years after the last sludge dumping showed that levels of cadmium, which can lead to flu-like symptoms and, at worst, cancer in humans; and molybdenum, which can irritate people?s eyes and skin, were 37 percent to 1,400 percent higher than permitted, according to the ruling.
Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for water at the EPA, said the ruling shows the need for the federal government?s oversight.
“The recent court ruling underscores the significance of strong national standards,” Grumbles said. “This unfortunate instance of poor record-keeping and biosolids sampling techniques on the part of oneplant reiterates the importance of our national biosolids program.”
Alaimo wrote that two to 2,500 times the level of heavy metals considered toxic to humans had been found in sludge spread on the farm in Augusta, Ga..
THE FIGHT CONTINUES
The EPA and sludge industry have criticized Lewis, who worked at the agency for 31 years, saying he was driven by a personal, anti-sludge agenda.
“I?m not going to publish data that support a certain viewpoint,” Lewis said. “I think the EPA should encourage its scientists to publicly express a diversity of scientific opinions. It?s the best way to build public trust and eventually get the science right.”
Lewis has been unemployed for the past five years and has funded his own research over the past 10 years, said his attorney, Edwin Hallman.
The EPA and sludge industry have continued to reject his research.
“The facts made available by EPA and Dr. Lewis indicate inconsistencies between Dr. Lewis? biosolids pursuits and his obligations to the agency,” Synagro Chief Executive Officer Ross Patten wrote to EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman in February 2002. “This appears to be improper and unfair to Dr. Lewis? targets, such as Synagro, and to the thousands of professionals at EPA who work to support the agency?s mission rather than their personal agendas.”
The agency?s stated mission has been promoting the spreading of sludge since the early 1990s. That?s when the EPA launched its “National Biosolids Public Acceptance Campaign,” which encouraged sludge to be called “biosolids” and pledged to resolve any controversy about spreading sludge by 2000.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection also disputes Lewis? report on Behun?s death and said in its own report that there was no medical or scientific evidence linking Behun?s death to contact with sludge.
But Lewis? report on Behun?s death, conducted with four other researchers, studied 48 people at several other sludge sites throughout the country. Published in 2002 in the peer-reviewed journal BioMed Central, it found that Staphylococcus aureus infections were about 25 times more common among those people than among hospitalized patients, a known risk group for the virus.
About half the neighbors in Lewis? study had contracted viral or fungal infections within a month of when sludge was spread, and similar symptoms continually ravaged people at each site. More than half experienced coughing, burning throats and irritated eyes within an hour of spreading, according to the report.
In response to questions from The Examiner, Grumbles said the agency continues to study sludge but believes it is safe under current regulations. In Maryland, animals are barred from grazing on land coated with Class B sludge ? which is treated to reduce, not eradicate, pathogens ? for 30 days, and people are restricted from setting foot on the land for a year.
“EPA believes the current regulations for biosolids are protective of public health and the environment,” Grumbles said. “Weare continuing to advance the science related to biosolids with the goal of further strengthening the biosolids? use and disposal program. We are also committed to learning more about emerging contaminants such as pharmaceuticals and are conducting a national survey on their possible presence in biosolids.”
Researchers at the University of Toledo supported Lewis? reports in 2007, when they concluded that people who live within a mile of farms permitted to receive sludge are nearly twice as likely to contract bronchitis, pneumonia and respiratory infections.
“Of course, it?s been hard on me and my family,” Lewis said, “but I would make the same decision today.”
