Health Ills Abound as Farm Runoff Fouls Wells

By Charles Duhigg, The New York Times

MORRISON, Wis. — All it took was an early thaw for the drinking water here to become unsafe.

There are 41,000 dairy cows in Brown County, which includes Morrison, and they produce more than 260 million gallons of manure each year, much of which is spread on nearby grain fields. Other farmers receive fees to cover their land with slaughterhouse waste and treated sewage.

In measured amounts, that waste acts as fertilizer. But if the amounts are excessive, bacteria and chemicals can flow into the ground and contaminate residents’ tap water.

In Morrison, more than 100 wells were polluted by agricultural runoff within a few months, according to local officials. As parasites and bacteria seeped into drinking water, residents suffered from chronic diarrhea, stomach illnesses and severe ear infections.

“Sometimes it smells like a barn coming out of the faucet,” said Lisa Barnard, who lives a few towns over, and just 15 miles from the city of Green Bay.

Tests of her water showed it contained E. coli, coliform bacteria and other contaminants found in manure. Last year, her 5-year-old son developed ear infections that eventually required an operation. Her doctor told her they were most likely caused by bathing in polluted water, she said.

Yet runoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources. The Clean Water Act of 1972 largely regulates only chemicals or contaminants that move through pipes or ditches, which means it does not typically apply to waste that is sprayed on a field and seeps into groundwater.

As a result, many of the agricultural pollutants that contaminate drinking water sources are often subject only to state or county regulations. And those laws have failed to protect some residents living nearby.

To address this problem, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has created special rules for the biggest farms, like those with at least 700 cows.

But thousands of large animal feedlots that should be regulated by those rules are effectively ignored because farmers never file paperwork, E.P.A. officials say.

And regulations passed during the administration of President George W. Bush allow many of those farms to self-certify that they will not pollute, and thereby largely escape regulation.

In a statement, the E.P.A. wrote that officials were working closely with the Agriculture Department and other federal agencies to reduce pollution and bring large farms into compliance.

Agricultural runoff is the single largest source of water pollution in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the E.P.A. An estimated 19.5 million Americans fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study published last year in the scientific journal Reviews of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.

The problem is not limited to Wisconsin. In California, up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshold, according to studies. Major waterways like the Chesapeake Bay have been seriously damaged by agricultural pollution, according to government reports.

In Arkansas and Maryland, residents have accused chicken farm owners of polluting drinking water. In 2005, Oklahoma’s attorney general sued 13 poultry companies, claiming they had damaged one of the state’s most important watersheds.

In Brown County, part of one of the nation’s largest milk-producing regions, agriculture brings in $3 billion a year. But the dairies collectively also create as much as a million gallons of waste each day. Many cows are fed a high-protein diet, which creates a more liquid manure that is easier to spray on fields.

In 2006, an unusually early thaw in Brown County melted frozen fields, including some that were covered in manure. Within days, according to a county study, more than 100 wells were contaminated with coliform bacteria, E. coli, or nitrates — byproducts of manure or other fertilizers.

“Land application requirements in place at that time were not sufficiently designed or monitored to prevent the pollution of wells,” one official wrote.

Some residents did not realize that their water was contaminated until their neighbors fell ill, which prompted them to test their own water.

“We were terrified,” said Aleisha Petri, whose water was polluted for months, until her husband dumped enough bleach in the well to kill the contaminants. Neighbors spent thousands of dollars digging new wells.

One resident said that he had seen cow organs dumped on a neighboring field, and his dog had dug up animal carcasses and bones.

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Source: The New York Times

U.S. Marines Dying from Drinking Water Contamination

By William Levesque, St. Petersburg Times

The last years of Marine veteran Ian Colin MacPherson’s life were spent fending off one puzzling ailment after another. Rashes. Headaches. Vertigo. Nausea. And finally, the abnormally aggressive prostate cancer that killed the Riverview man at age 46 in 2004.

MacPherson always figured he must have been poisoned. But by whom?

His widow, Jody MacPherson, believed she found the culprit last year: MacPherson’s beloved Marine Corps. “They killed him,” she said.

Camp Lejeune, a sprawling Marine base on the North Carolina seaboard, is the site of what some scientists call the worst public drinking-water contamination in the nation’s history. Its water wells were tainted with cancer-causing industrial compounds for 30 years, ending in 1987.

An estimated 500,000 to 1 million people – including Marines and family living on base housing – drank, bathed and cooked using that fouled water.

Congress has dubbed ill Marines “poisoned patriots,” and in 2008 lawmakers ordered the Marines to notify those who might have been exposed.

So far, almost 10,000 affected Floridians have registered with the Marines to take part in a health study, the highest total for any state except North Carolina. About 1,500 claims have been filed against the government seeking $33.8-billion in damages.

Among the chemicals detected in high concentrations at Camp Lejeune are a metal degreaser, trichloroethylene (TCE) and a degreaser and dry-cleaning agent called tetrachloroethylene (PCE).

PCE appears to have been dumped by a private dry cleaner near one of the water wells, while the TCE was dumped by the Marines, according to documents and investigators. Federal limits on the chemicals are 5-parts-per-billion. The highest level of Camp Lejeune water for TCE was about 1,400-parts-per-billion. PCE was found at levels over 200-parts-per-billion.

The Marines discovered the water contamination in 1980, yet waited four years to close contaminated wells and then minimized the danger to Camp Lejeune residents, critics say. Two wells were later reopened for almost two years during a water shortage. In 1985, Lejeune’s commander told residents “minute” levels of contaminants had been found, failing to disclose that a lab had informed the Marines that water was “highly contaminated.”

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Source:  TampaBay.com

Oil vs. Water Causes Major Battle in the Rockies

SALT LAKE CITY – A titanic battle between the West’s two traditional power brokers – Big Oil and Big Water – has begun. At stake is one of the largest oil reserves in the world, a vast cache trapped beneath the Rocky Mountains containing an estimated 800 billion barrels – about three times the reserves of Saudi Arabia.

Extracting oil from rocky seams of underground shale is not only expensive, but also requires massive amounts of water, a precious resource critical to continued development in the nation’s fastest-growing region.

The conflict between oil and water interests has now come to a head. On Oct. 31, Congress allowed a moratorium on oil-shale leasing to expire. That paved the way for the Bush administration to finalize leasing rules in November that opened 2 million acres of federal land to exploration.

Oil companies say that at a time of increasing foreign oil dependence it would be unconscionable to forgo exploiting oil shale’s potential. “Considering the magnitude of this resource – it is so huge relative to other hydrocarbon resource around the world – it merits taking a look at trying any method we can, safely and responsibly, to get at it,” said Tracy C. Boyd, communications and sustainability manager for Shell Oil Co.

Oil shale companies acknowledge that the technology required to superheat shale to extract oil is unproven. They also concede that they are uncertain how much water would be needed in the process, although some experts calculate it would take 10 barrels of water to get one barrel of oil from shale.

That water-to-oil equation has inflamed officials in the upper Rockies, who are raising the alarm about the cumulative effect of energy projects on the region’s water supplies, which ultimately feed Southern California reservoirs via the Colorado River.

“There are estimates that oil shale could use all of the remaining water in upper Colorado River Basin,” said Susan Daggett, a commissioner on the Denver Water Board. “That essentially pits oil shale against people’s needs.”

Prospectors have known about the oil shale deposits in the Rockies for more than a century, but the technology to extract it has remained imperfect, expensive and polluting.

But for all the years of research into oil shale extraction, there is little hard information on exactly how much water would be drained from the region. In its recent environmental review of proposed oil shale projects, the federal Bureau of Land Management, which oversees energy leasing on public lands, was unable to estimate the industry’s region-wide water use.

“Can groundwater be protected?” asked Harris Sherman, executive director of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources. “Areas where this technology will be used are all tributaries for the headwaters for all of the seven Colorado Basin states.”

Despite the objections, oil shale development has been pushed forward. In an effort to encourage the fledgling industry, officials said, new regulations allow oil shale operators to pay unusually low royalty rates. The system calls for producers to pay 5 percent for the first five years, increasing 1 percent each year until reaching 12.5 percent, the standard federal oil and gas royalty rate.

In recent weeks, the industry was included in the $700-billion government bailout package with investment and tax incentives to help oil shale producers build refineries and other expensive infrastructure.

While the region’s elected officials support efforts to discover new sources of domestic oil, they say that with so many unanswered water questions, public land managers should be slowing the pace of development, not speeding it up.

The renewed push for oil shale development comes at time when conventional energy companies are being blamed for squandering and fouling water across the West.

Wyoming and Montana are squabbling over water quality concerns about coal bed methane drilling. Colorado and New Mexico towns have discovered benzene and other dangerous chemicals in their wells, with energy projects the suspected culprits. Ranchers in the region say their crops and livestock suffer as oil and gas production drains underground aquifers. Sportsmen complain that rivers and streams are being compromised by the energy industry.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in official comments to the BLM, expressed concerns about the possibility that oil shale production would deposit, “salts, selenium, arsenic and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in groundwater.”

Craig Thompson found many of the same compounds when he studied groundwater pollution from an abandoned oil shale project in western Wyoming that began during the last oil shale boom in the 1970s. Despite 30 years of cleanup efforts, he said, the aquifer is still not free of chemicals. “Development of oil shale is a groundwater nightmare,” said Thompson, a chemist. “Oil shale serves as the floor for the aquifer. When you heat up the aquifer, it dissolves nasty stuff like fluoride and arsenic and selenium and cyanide . . . the list goes on.”

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Source: Nashua Telegraph