The NAACP still has questions about how a study was conducted in which treated human waste was tilled into poor, black families? yards to reduce high lead levels in Baltimore City.
“From a layman?s point of view, there are enough questions and enough answers we?re not getting to substantiate us staying in this area,” Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the Baltimore City chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said at an NAACP meeting this weekend.
Baltimore City NAACP officials met in May with officials from Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which helped select the study?s participants, but said basic questions weren?t answered.
For instance, if the study was successful, Cheatham asked why the sewage sludge compost ? human waste treated to eliminate pathogens and mixed with wood chips ? has not been publicized more as a way to reduce lead levels.
Johns Hopkins and Krieger have said the compost used in the 2000 study reduced lead levels, grew grass and made the yards safer at nine Baltimore houses. They said they would continue to try to communicate better with the NAACP.
The compost also is commercially sold at hardware stores.
Carl Snowden, director of the civil rights division in the attorney general?s office, said racial accusations seemed unsubstantiated, but the black leaders did have “legitimate concerns.”
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, had planned to call hearings on the land application of sewage sludge before news broke about the Baltimore City study, and has said the committee would investigate that study.
Snowden said Congress, not his office, would investigate the study.
Meanwhile, Edwin Hallman, a Georgia lawyer who this year won a case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture and proved that sludge in Georgia killed hundreds of head of cattle, sent a letter to Boxer questioning parts of the study.
Hallman also represents a former top Environmental Protection Agency microbiologist, David Lewis, who is suing the EPA and University of Georgia officials for intentionally spreading false information to support the federal sludge program.
Hallman and Lewis met recently with the Baltimore NAACP and Snowden, saying the Baltimore study was merely a way to begin dumping sludge in poor urban areas as residents drive it out of rural areas.
