Posted - May 5, 2008

Harrisburg Feasts on $12.7 Billion in Pork

Our friends in Harrisburg are at it again. Our governor, state senators and state representatives claim that there is no money to repair the bridges and highways, that there is no money for property tax reform and that there is nothing that they can do about the price of gasoline. Oh really!

Our illustrious leaders in the Senate have approved a proposed budget for 2008-2009 and the House is expected to vote on it soon. The proposed budget contains $12.7 billion, that is, billion with a "B," for pork-barrel projects. Here are some examples of the proposed spending projects by our elected officials.

.$5 million for the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium

. $1.5 million for the now-closed Laurel Mountain ski area, in a state park in Westmoreland County

. $250 million for a cargo airport near Hazelton in Luzerne County

. $12.5 million for a 200-room lodge in Tioga County

. $10 million for an athletic and recreation complex in Philadelphia

. $35 million for a baseball stadium in Lackawanna County

. $4.5 million to renovate the new Pittsburgh Opera headquarters complex in Pittsburgh's Strip District

. $12 million for a retail and entertainment complex in Harborcreek Township, Erie County

. $45 million for a new soccer stadium in Chester

. $37.5 million for a regional convention center in the Poconos

. $8.2 million for the Route 219 Visitor/Discovery Center in McKean County

. $15 million for a performing arts center in Lancaster County

. $25 million for a Centre County biofuels plant

. $20 million for an art center, parking lot, bookstore and inn in Union County

. $19 million for the Montgomery County Expo Center

. $15 million for a film/TV studio in Chester Township

. $3.6 million for a soccer complex in Trafford, Westmoreland County.

And so on and so on, with hundreds more projects.

The governor has to sign off on any project before it actually gets the money. However, it is expected that Governor Spendell will sign off on most, if not all, projects.

The money for these projects is borrowed through the sale of bonds and has to be repaid, with interest, over a 20- or 30-year period, further burdening taxpayers into the future.

This so-called "capital budget" forces taxpayers to subsidize the bottom lines of professional sports teams, politically connected corporations and business ventures that can't find private financial support.

The state tax on gasoline is 32.3 cents per gallon. $12.7 billion would go a long way towards repairing our bridges and highways, eliminating property taxes and reducing the state tax on gasoline.

If you feel that repair of our highways and bridges is more important than the renovation of the Pittsburgh Opera headquarters, you have a chance to correct these injustices in November. Vote out all incumbents.

If you continue to vote for State Senator Jim Rhoades or Ray Musto or State Representative Dave Argall, Todd Eachus, Neal Goodman, Keith McCall or Tim Seip, you are voting your approval for spending $12.7 billion of taxpayer money for politically connected corporations and organizations. The choice is yours.

Posted - May 8, 2008

by Jo Hartley
May 5, 2008
See all articles by this author www.naturalnews.com

Polycythemia Vera Cluster Map

In many states, citizens and scientists are accusing the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) of failing to make the connection between public health problems and industrial sources of pollution -- even in the face of scientific evidence.

National coverage of the toxic trailers housing situation in New Orleans and also the suppression of a study on environmental hazards in the Great Lakes has put attention on the agency. There are many groups across the nation that are saying that these are just two examples of cases that illuminate an agency pattern of interference in the health data released to the public.

In many cases, evidence shows that the agency covered up important public health information.

Recently, the nonprofit investigative journalism group, The Center for Public Integrity, published a suppressed study by the ATSDR called "Public Health Implications of Hazardous Substances in the Twenty-Six U.S. Great Lakes Areas of Concern." The report concludes that over 9 million people living in 26 "areas of concern" have elevated health risks associated with exposure to dioxins, pesticides, lead, mercury, PCBs and six other poisonous chemicals. These areas include the major metropolitan areas of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and Milwaukee.

In many areas, scientists discovered low birth weights, high infant mortality rates, high rates of premature births as well as high rates of death from breast cancer, colon cancer and lung cancer.

The study was scheduled for release in July 2007. A few days before its scheduled publication, however, the agency withdrew the study.

Similar events occurred last year in Pennsylvania. A study was conducted to analyze the high rates of a very rare form of blood cancer called Polycythemia Vera (PV).

The agency released an abstract in December 2007. It detailed the rate of PV in three counties surrounding the Tamaqua borough. They are at least 4.5 times higher than the national average. The national PV rate is 0.9 in 100,000. The rate of confirmed cases in the three Pennsylvania counties is more than 4 in 100,000. That number is just a representation of patients who are registered with the National Cancer Registry. They were tested for a genetic mutation associated with PV for the study. When data from patients who self-reported being diagnosed with PV is included, the rate increases to approximately 15 times the national average.

The study connects the high PV rates to environmental influences. The study shows that 18 of the 38 patients confirmed to have PV lived within 13 miles of the McAdoo Associates Superfund Site. They lived in this area for more than five years between the years of 1975 and 1979 when large quantities of toxic chemicals were dumped straight into old mine shafts. Included in those chemicals were heavy metals and low levels of volatile organic compounds that were determined to be contaminating the soil. A clean-up of the site has been underwritten by the EPA.

McAdoo Associates 1982

Officials later stated that the results "were based on an ATSDR analysis that was later determined to be inappropriate." They offered no definition of "inappropriate." The statement negates a link between any environmental factors and PV cases, contrary to the data that eliminated other causes. It also stated that more analysis was needed to "understand whether there is any linkage between PV cases and where patients lived in the past." That almost suggests coincidence for the PV patients all living in the same vicinity.

The agency says it retracted the study because the authors used analysis that was determined to be inadequate. The authors of the PV study are now preparing to submit their work to scientific journals for review.

The ATSDR's handling of public health studies of environmental situations has proven negligent in every case investigated. It would almost appear that the agency's purpose is to make sure no health problem is detected.

About the author

Jo Hartley
Wife, Mother of 8, and Grandmother of 2
Jo is a 40 year old home educator who has always gravitated toward a natural approach to life.
She enjoys learning as much as possible about just about anything!
http://www.loftymatters.com

Posted - May 12, 2008

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty are at it again. This time they want to try to store waste carbon dioxide underground on state-owned forestlands. The waste carbon dioxide will come from private coal-burning power plants and other private industrial sources. Carbon dioxide is believed to be a major cause of global warming.

As previously reported, Pennsylvania has no money for bridge and road repair or property tax reform and yet Rendell and McGinty are proposing to be the first in the nation to fund and build Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) "demonstration" projects. McGinty said the state will OFFER PUBLIC LANDS and ASSUME ALL LIABILITIES: health, property, insurance and funding, for this totally unproven technology! CCS is technology that Wall Street, venture capitalists and bankers won't fund and scientists are not certain will work.

Many concerned citizens and groups, including the Sierra Club, are reporting that they do not believe that public lands should be used as dumping grounds for industrial wastes from utility companies. They also question why the state should provide another subsidy to the coal and utility industries.

Why would Rendell and McGinty be in favor of subsidizing the unproven technology for the coal and utility industries? It is our opinion that both are seeking appointments in the next administration should the Democrats take back the White House in November.

It is our belief that Rendell would like to be Secretary of Energy and McGinty would like to be the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Both positions would require confirmation by the U.S. Senate and Rendell and McGinty are hoping to use our tax money on unproven technology in order to gain industry support for any confirmation hearings.

We can do something to stop this abuse of power and taxpayer money. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has issued a one-sided report on the CCS technology www.dcnr.state.pa.us and will accept public comments on the report until June 15, 2008. We will be sending a copy of this story to the DCNR. Please send your comments on this unproven technology to:

DCNR
Office of Legislation and Strategic Initiatives
Rachel Carson State Office Building
400 Market Street
P.O. Box 8767
Harrisburg, PA 17105-8767

Posted - May 19, 2008

Old Butch Heading to a Political Meeting

John the farmer was in the fertilized-egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called "pullets", and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks).

The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn't perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so the farmer bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.

The farmer's favorite rooster was Old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on one particular morning John noticed Old Butch's bell hadn't rung at all! John went to investigate.

The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover.

But to Farmer John's amazement, Old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn't ring. He would sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one.

John was so proud of Old Butch, he entered him in the County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.

The result... The judges not only awarded Old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pullet Surprise as well.

Clearly Old Butch was a politician in the making: Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren't paying attention?

Posted - May 21, 2008

The following excerpts are from an article entitled "Coal Combustion Waste" by Aaron Labaree that was published on March 27, 2008 on WorldPress.com. CCW is an abbreviation for coal combustion waste or fly ash. The entire article can be found at: http://unscientific.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/coal-combustion-waste/.

Part III.

An increasingly popular kind of beneficial use of CCWs is as filler to reclaim abandoned mines. Pennsylvania leads the nation in this type of use. Most of the state's vast coal resources were mined out decades ago, but the land remains scarred with huge strip mines and piles of waste coal. The old strip pits, filled with mine spoils, acidify water as it passes through – called acid mine drainage – and also leach iron and manganese. According to the PA Department of Environmental Protection's website, there are an estimated 2,500 miles of streams polluted by acid mine drainage and 250,000 acres of unreclaimed surface mine land. The state has found a neat solution to the problems of waste coal piles and empty strip pits: waste coal is burnt for power in specialized plants using a process called fluidized bed combustion (FBC) and the resulting fly ash is used to fill up the empty mines.

On July 21 of 2005, an article appeared in the Shamokin News Item, a local paper in Eastern Pennsylvania, about one such project. PPL Electric Utilities, one of Pennsylvania's largest power companies, had announced that it would begin a new mine reclamation project in Schuylkill County: over the next eight years, the company planned to deposit 500,000 cubic yards of fly ash from its Montour and Brunner Island power plants in the abandoned Locust Summit strip mine. "The beneficial use of PPL's fly ash," the article said, "would keep surface water from entering the contaminated mine pool, help reduce acid mine drainage at the site and eliminate a potential safety hazard associated with the high walls surrounding the pit and mine subsidences." The Chairman of Coal Township, where the project would be located, praised PPL: "It's a company that gives back to the community."

Bob Gadinski read the article and thought otherwise. Gadinski is a hydrogeologist who worked for fifteen years as a supervisor for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Locust Summit stands just behind his house; water flowing through the abandoned strip pits discharges into the valley a few hundred yards away. When I visited him, he showed me the streams at the base of the summit that bear the telltale orange color that indicates acid mine drainage, from the iron and manganese that leach from mine spoils and are carried down by the underground flow of water. With such obvious evidence of acid mine drainage nearby, you might think Gadinski would be pleased at the proposed project, which would ostensibly improve water quality in the area, but he was not. He did not want that much fly ash near his house. "They're trying to tell me this stuff is harmless," he told me. "I worked with this stuff, I know what it is."

Gadinski's family, along with the others that live on his street, get their water from wells that are fed from an aquifer at the base of the hill, beneath the Locust Summit site. Concerned about the water at his home, Gadinski got a meeting with PPL representatives. He met them at Locust Pit and pointed out a man-made tunnel used to discharge water at the old mine workings which he believed flowed into the aquifer that fed his own well. When he was given access to mine maps of the area, Gadinski saw that indeed not just this tunnel but two others provided a direct pathway from the old mine workings – soon to be filled with fly ash – to his own water supply

At the meeting with PPL, Gadinski was given leach test results from the fly ash at the Montour Generating Station. The tests showed concentrations of more than a dozen metals and minerals at well over state norms. Arsenic was over twenty times what is now the maximum allowable level. In addition, he learned that there was only one monitoring well to test the water downgradient of Locust pit, despite the complex geology of the site. Gadinski was not reassured at the meeting, and he let them know it. "They said no matter what you say, this project is not gonna be stopped" Gadinski told me. "I said we'll see about that."

Since then, he has been working on the issue full time. In 2005, when the Locust Pit project was proposed, Gadinski had just retired from the DEP. "All I wanted to do was fish," he said. If you've ever met Gadinski, it's difficult to picture him fishing for even one afternoon, let alone the rest of his life: before he was a hydrologist, he used to be a high-school football coach, and he has a coach's pugnacious manner and relentless energy. While I visited him, he scrambled ahead of me up hills to show me waste sites and rattled off reams of information from his research into minefilling in this area. Gadinski has pursued a citizen's complaint against PPL, aiming to stop the Locust Pit project, but he has also become an activist for stricter minefilling regulations since he discovered the scale of Pennsylvania's minefilling projects and the way in which they were being carried out. In his words, "I saw they were proposing filling up every strip pit in anthracite region with fly ash."

This is just barely an exaggeration. For more than twenty years, PA DEP has overseen placement of CCWs in active and abandoned mines; every year, more than six million tons of fly ash are deposited in mines in Pennsylvania, most of that from the burning of waste coal. Jeff Stant, who was the principal author of a study of minefilling in Pennsylvania, told me that, at conferences about minefilling that he's been attending during that time, "the main presenters have been PA DEP staff, presenting success story after success story." A 2003 PA DEP fact sheet sums up what has been the Department's consistent claim: "All of the Department's monitoring at the numerous ash reclamation sites demonstrates no harmful components leaching into the groundwater due to ash."

Much of the PA DEP's reassuring data regarding fly ash minefilling comes from a study done on a reclamation project at Bark Camp, an abandoned mining complex in Clearfied County. This project involved filling the abandoned mine with Delaware river dredge mixed with fly ash. It was deemed a success; a DEP report on it concluded, "The use of dredged materials, amended with alkaline activated coal ash, is found to be feasible, safe, and beneficial for use in abandoned mine reclamation." Gadinski, as he tried to find monitoring data for minefills, did a file review at the DEP's Williamsport office and came across the report himself. The study, he says, was "a total joke." Not one monitoring well in the study was installed downgradient (in the direction of water flow) from the buried waste. The study, like many of those relied on by the PA DEP, was in fact conducted by the generator of the waste itself. According to Pennsylvania law, any geological report provided to DEP has to be signed by a licensed geologist; to date, no such geologist has signed off on the Bark Camp study.

Other studies of minefilling paint a less rosy picture. A report in 2006 by the National Academy of Sciences, "Managing Coal Combustion Residues in Mines", found that, "the presence of high contaminant levels in many CCR leachates may create human health and ecological concerns at or near some mine sites over the long term." The report goes on to say that "much still remains unknown about the long-term behavior of combustion residues and their potential impacts in the mine setting," and recommends further research into environmental behavior of "CCRs" as well as their effects on human health and on the improvement of current leaching tests; it also recommends that national guidelines for minefilling be established. Or, as Gadinski put it, "This stuff can be used for mine reclamation, but it isn't cotton candy."

Stant's report, conducted for the Clean Air Task Force and released this August, is more damning. The report explicitly used the claim on PA DEP's 2003 fact sheet as the hypothesis it set out to test; it found, Stant said, "no shred of data" to support that claim or the corollary claim that water contamination near minefills is due not to coal ash but to mine drainage. The report used DEP data collected from fifteen sites where coal combustion waste had been used to reclaim mines. It found that at ten of the fifteen sites, both surface and groundwater quality had been degraded. The litany of water contamination at the sites is familiar: at Ernest Mine, which holds 1.4 million tons of ash, lead levels were eleven times federal drinking water standards, cadmium sixteen times, arsenic fifty-three times. At the Ellengowan Knickerbocker site, lead was up to thirty-nine times higher and cadmium up to thirty-two times higher. At the Silverbrook site, sulfate, aluminum, iron, and manganese exceeded drinking water standards by multiple times.

The waste coal plants which produce most of the ash applied to "beneficial use" in Pennsylvania are themselves a somewhat dubious business. The piles of "gob" as it's called in the West, or "colm" in the East, contain only about fifty percent coal, the rest being mine spoils and carbonaceous rock. This fuel has fewer BTUs — less energy — than actual coal. It was left as trash because at the time it was mined, it was not economical to burn for power. It still isn't. A Time Magazine article from 2005 detailed how waste coal plants typically lose millions of dollars a year, but the industry survives — thrives, in fact — thanks to a nine-billion dollar tax credit left over from the energy crisis of the seventies that was intended to develop high-tech synthetic fuels as an alternative to foreign oil. Because waste coal must be sprayed with chemicals before it can be burned, it qualifies as "synfuel." The provision has remained in the law thanks to millions of dollars in industry lobbying. The power plants that dot both Eastern and Western Pennsylvania exist because of this little-known law and were created in order to exploit it.

One of these plants, the soon-to-be-built Robinson Power Plant, provides an example of the extent to which, in Pennsylvania, the power of state agencies is lent to energy companies and mine owners and not those unlucky enough to be in their way. At 300 MW, Robinson Power is a small power plant. It will burn waste coal from the Champion gob pile, a massive accumulation of coal refuse in Western Pennsylvania estimated at thirty-seven million tons, as well as other refuse piles nearby. On DEP's website, Southwest Regional Director Ken Bowman promotes the project with the department's standard claim. "This project will...enable the reclamation of lands scarred by past mining practices," and enable a reduction of "753,000 pounds of acid mine drainage – the most pressing environmental problem affecting water quality in southwestern Pennsylvania."

Gob (for "garbage of bituminous") is not good, but some people living near the site fear that what would replace it – what is expected to be the nation's largest fly ash landfill, in addition to air emissions from the plant – would be worse. The black gob pile, half hidden in the woods, does indeed cause acid drainage. But this drainage, like much of that in Schuylkill County, is currently being successfully treated, and the streams where the treated water runs into are healthy. In its place would be deposited between sixty and eighty million tons of fly ash into unlined landfills near the power plant, creating one of the biggest CCW landfills in the country.

Cat Lodge, a resident who lives within sight of the proposed power plant, filed a lawsuit in 2004 CAT to challenge Robinson Power's air quality permit. The case never came to court, but in the discovery process she found documents that showed PA DEP head Kathleen McGinty – along with almost every other major Pennsylvania politician – eager to rush the new power plant's permit through in advance of an EPA deadline that would have required it to meet stricter emissions standards. In an email to McGinty, Regional Director Bowman wrote, "I called [state senator] Stout at home as you directed and briefed him on the status of the Beech Hollow AQ [air quality] review...Our goal is to get a PSD/NSR permit out by April 5 before the change in the particulate attainment designation becomes effective. Senator Stout was pleased with the Department's efforts to move the permit review through so expeditiously." The plant's owner, FirstEnergy, got its permit on April 4. Six weeks after the permit was issued, FirstEnergy still hadn't turned in a complete application or worked out much of the planning for the new plant.

In addition to speedy permitting, Robinson Power Plant received $400 million in bond financing from the Pennsylvania Energy Development Agency (PEDA), a state entity reactivated by Governor Ed Rendell to promote economic development through the energy sector. PA DEP head McGinty is a member of PEDA's board of directors – as is Ray Bologna, the president of Robinson Power Company. Bologna is already known among Pennsylvania environmentalists for his role in one of the largest dumping schemes in state history, when 4,500 barrels of toxic waste, including benzene and formaldehyde, were dumped into a mine he owned, with the assistance of employees of his company. Between 2001 and 2006, Bologna contributed at least $20,000 to Senator Stout's campaigns, and $21,000 to Governor Ed Rendell's. McGinty herself has come under fire for possible conflicts of interest before: while she was Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under Clinton, she also consulted for Troutman Sanders, a lobbying firm that had power companies as its clients. And since 2003, about 2.5 million in DEP grants have to gone to the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, where Ms. McGinty's husband, Karl Hausker, has worked as a consultant. The state ethics commission ruled this spring that she could not sign off on grants like this in the future.

Many opponents of Pennsylvania's "mine reclamation" program think it is merely a cover for cheap dumping – another favor to well-connected power companies. And in fact a PA DEP report on coal ash from 2004 states, "Converting polluting waste coal into an energy resource could not economically occur if the FBC ash was landfilled." Filling in old mines not only provides a cheap way for power plants to dispose of CCWs, but can be a lucrative business for the owners of abandoned mines, turning what were once liabilities into valuable assets. Besides fly ash, there are proposals to fill old strip pits with harbor sludge, cement kiln dust, lime kiln dust, and sewage sludge – most of it coming from out of state, just as much of the power produced in Pennslyvania is sold out of state. Gadinski told me, echoing the sentiments of other activists in Pennsylvania's former coal regions, "This area is becoming the dumping grounds of the United States."

National regulations for minefilling are set to be determined soon, by the Office of Surface Mining. Stant and others are advocating for OSM to adopt enforceable regulations as opposed to a voluntary plan. In this, as in their campaign for EPA to change its non-hazardous determination, they face an uphill battle. The main reason places like Town of Pines exist is that we depend on coal, and, as Lisa Evans put it, "With air pollution, obviously everybody breathes the air; but with solid waste, most of it is out of the way." "Out of the way" refers to more than geography. Waste flows downwards: companies seeking to get rid of it cheaply have always sought the path of least resistance. In the ‘80s, studies showed that an area's racial composition was the single most reliable factor in predicting the location of hazardous waste disposal sites. And similarly today, the poverty rate of people living within one mile of power plant waste facilities is twice as high as the national average, and the percentage of non-white populations within one mile is 30 percent higher. Similar poverty rates were found in counties where minefilling with CCWs is taking place.

The entire article can be found at: http://unscientific.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/coal-combustion-waste/.

Posted - May 23, 2008

The following story is an excellent summary of our national sewage sludge problem.

www.inthesetimes.com May 21, 2008

Piling it High

The sewage sludge industry meets the light of day

By Joel Bleifuss

Nancy Holt, a retired nurse from Mebane, N.C., is beset by mysterious neurological problems. She blames the cause of her illness on the multiple unknown toxicities of the sewage sludge that has been spread since 1991 on the fields across from her house as "fertilizer."

And Holt says she isn't alone. People in her neighborhood have a high incidence of cancer and thyroid problems. Local creeks are no longer safe for kids to play in — the danger of staph infection is too great.

In 2001, Holt began chronicling the health problems in her area of rural Alamance County — 12 miles north of Chapel Hill. Soon she was tracking reports of sludge-related illnesses and deaths across the country.

"I put together the symptoms, the illnesses, the high cancer rates, the thyroid disorders in this community," she says. "It is non-scientific, of course."

"And we have precocious puberty, little girls developing breasts at 5 or 6 years old, little boys developing armpit hair. And that is something that people don't want to talk about," Holt says. "They will talk about their thyroid glands, their cancers, but they will not talk about early puberty. We are on a true toxic tilt."

For the first time since she became involved in the sludge issue, Holt is guardedly hopeful that her concerns will finally be addressed, and that the sulphurous alliance between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), municipal sewer authorities and Synagro Technologies (the nation's largest sludge disposal firm, which was recently bought by the Carlyle Group) — will be exposed for the blight it is.

In April, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, announced that her committee will hold hearings on the issue this summer. The catalyst is a confluence of recent news reports about sludge-related scandals.

In the Potomac River, 60 miles upstream from Washington, D.C., scientists have discovered many small-mouth male bass with eggs inside their sex organs. The cause of these "intersexed" fish is almost certainly endocrine disruptors — also known as estrogen mimickers — in the water, chemical pollutants that disrupt an animal's natural hormonal system.

In February, the Washington Post reported that the concentration of intersexed fish is greatest near towns or near heavily farmed land. One major source of these endocrine disruptors is thought to be the post-treatment "cleaned" water from municipal sewage treatment centers that is discharged directly into the Potomac River system and runoff from fields "fertilized" with sludge.

In 2006, U.S. Geological Survey scientists surveyed chemical contaminants found in sludge "destined for land application" and concluded, "Potential concerns about the environmental presence of OWCs [Organic Wastewater Contaminants] include adverse physiological effects, increased rates of cancer, and reproductive impairment in humans and other animals, as well as antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria."

In 2004 when the intersexed fish were first discovered in the Potomac, Gina Solomon, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) told the Associated Press, "It is not good news that there's something that feminizes fish in your water." Particularly when the Potomac is the source of drinking water for Washington, D.C.

Egg-bearing male fish had first been found in 2003 in the South Branch, a Potomac tributary in Hardy County, W.V., from which some locals get their water. A 2004 survey found that women in Hardy County have higher-than-normal rates of cancer of the ovaries and uterus.

This news of male fish bearing eggs was followed with an April report by the Associated Press that in 2000, nine Baltimore families — all black residents of the city's east side — received food coupons in exchange for permission to allow researchers to spread "Class A" Baltimore sewage sludge (brand name, Orgro High Organic Compost) on their yards, till it into the soil and then plant grass seed.

The rationale for this experiment was to find out whether municipal sewage sludge could lower the amount of lead that children who played in the nine experimental yards would absorb. Veolia Water, the corporation that markets Baltimore municipal sludge as Orgro, claims its "beneficial biosolids" are so safe they are even used on the White House lawn.

"Beneficial biosolids" is the term that Powell Tate, a D.C.-based public relations firm, invented in the early '90s, in an attempt to linguistically detoxify the 7 million tons of sludge — industrial waste, hospital waste, pharmaceuticals in addition to feces — that the nation's 16,000 municipal sewer systems produce each year.

At the time, the EPA, working hand in hand with the Water Environment Federation and the corporate waste disposal industry, reclassified sewage sludge from a toxic waste to a fertilizer. As a USDA approved fertilizer, sludge was thus exempt from environmental regulations.

Today, waste disposal firms spread more than half of the 7 million tons of organic and inorganic toxins on American farms as "fertilizer."

Andy McElmurray, a farmer in Hephzibah, Ga., fed his dairy cows silage that had been fertilized with sewage sludge laced with heavy metals. More than 300 of them died.

In February, a federal judge ordered the Department of Agriculture to compensate McElmurray for losses incurred when his land was poisoned between 1979 and 1990 by applications of Augusta, Ga., sewage sludge. That sludge contained levels of arsenic that were two times higher than EPA standards allow; of thallium (a heavy metal used as rat poison) that were 25 times higher; and of PCBs that were 2,500 times higher.

What's more, milk from his neighbor's dairy farm was sent to market with thallium levels 120 times higher than those allowed by the EPA in public drinking water.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Anthony Alaimo was particularly critical of the EPA and the University of Georgia for having endorsed "unreliable, incomplete and, in some cases, fudged" data about the Augusta sludge. That corrupt data was presented to the National Academy of Sciences, which then cited it in their July 2002 assertion that sewage sludge does not pose a risk to public health.

Alaimo wrote, "Senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of EPA's biosolids program."

For example, in May 2003, the EPA fired David Lewis, one of the nation's leading sludge researchers, for publicly criticizing the agency's pro-sludge policy. In February 2004, at a hearing of the U.S. House Mineral and Resources subcommittee, Lewis testified:

The EPA has completely politicized the scientific peer-review process, both inside and outside the agency... This whole process, of course, is nothing more than a scam... It is a scam run by program office managers who are not qualified as research scientists and whose official position descriptions require that they defend EPA policies. In this case, the same EPA officials who developed the agency's sludge policy are using the vast resources of the federal government to cover up adverse health effects and environmental damage resulting from the scientifically flawed policy they created.

The Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems www.riles.org has been a leader in the sludge fight since the early '90s. The Boston nonprofit was founded in 1990 by Abby Rockefeller, an ecologist involved with sewage-related issues since the '70s. (Disclosure: Rockefeller is a member of the In These Times Publishing Consortium.)

Laura Orlando, the group's executive director, sums up the current state of America's sewer systems this way:

It's a public works program for corporations to dump their waste into publicly owned treatment facilities. We taxpayers pay for it not only in the infrastructure costs but also with our health from exposure to its toxic products — toxic wastewater and toxic sewage sludge — that are released into the environment. We are giving corporations a free ride. They have no liability. They dump their toxic waste down the drain and it is out of their hands.

Orlando, like Holt, is encouraged by the prospect of congressional hearings.

"There are thousands of people known to be sickened from the land application of sewage sludge," she says, "people whose health is degraded, whose livestock have died or whose farms have been ruined. The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing will be the first time these people will get a chance to tell their stories."

Taking the long view, Rockefeller puts it this way: "We human beings, the world over, so concerned about the growing shortage of clean water, must reconsider our cavalier use of water as the transportation medium for all our waste — industrial and personal."

What better way to mark the 45th anniversary of environmentalist Rachel Carson's June 4, 1963, testimony before the U.S. Senate Government Operations Subcommittee hearings on environmental hazards?

Joel Bleifuss is the editor of In These Times, where he has worked as an investigative reporter, columnist and editor since 1986. Bleifuss has had more stories on Project Censored's annual list of the "10 Most Censored Stories" than any other journalist.

More information about Joel Bleifuss