_logo_phere . . .Takin’ the “BS” out’a the BlogoSphere

I guess this lawyer, Ed Hallman, of the Atlanta law firm Decker, Hallman, Barber & Briggs, has done more for the anti-BS effort than any other single individual I know. And let me just quickly follow that up by saying that I know a lot of dedicated individuals in this game. People who have committed immense amounts of time, energy, and money to the goal of ending land-application of BS, and for no other reason than to see that the right thing is done, particularly with respect to the rural people who are forced to eat BS spread all over the Atlantic Coast by Synagro, Nuti-Blend, and many smaller players. A few of these sludge-warriors do this work as a part of their job and get some remuneration, but many of them are slogging away week after week without a dime of compensation for their efforts. Every one of them is a part of the effort that will — eventually — eliminate all land application of sewage sludge in this country.

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Tags: Players, Litigation, EPA, Spin, States, Maryland by webmaster
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In my day job, which pays the web hosting fees for this blog, I’m a patent lawyer. And the reason I tell you that is to make the point that the US Patent and Trademark Office and the US EPA must be running a race to see which one can do the most damage to the country. There are real issues here that go beyond the normal incompetence we expect from large bureaucracies; there are issues of dishonesty and misleading the public and Congress.

The other thing these agencies have in common is that they are powered by b’cratic mules who, by and large, are competent and who work hard to do a good job. But the damage is done by the high-paid, nano-cephalic, nematode managers, like Jon Dudas and Margaret Peterlin in the USPTO and Stephen Johnson, John Walker, and Alan Rubin of, or formerly of, the EPA, who could screw up a one-car funeral and call it a success.

Now comes a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists telling us what David Lewis, who was the victim of career and character assassination by the EPA, has been hollaring for years: the EPA heavies gag the front line scientists who deliver scientific results that contradict EPA policy. Here is a report from the LA Times. (Thanks, Jo.) Nowhere has this scientific censorship been more of a problem than in the EPA’s suppression of evidence that the EPA’s policy of spreading BS from sea to shining sea was a real, real bad idea.

Gagging people, particularly scientists with hard data, who raise valid criticisms of government policy is the way Stalin worked. It’s the way you breed contempt and distrust of the government. It’s the way you destroy a government.

Fortunately, the US has a federal judiciary, like Judge Alaimo in the US Southern District Court of Georgia and Judge Cacheris in the US Eastern District Court of Virginia, who are more than willing to spank these dangerous governmental thugs if we can just get them into court.

Tags: Players, EPA, Spin by webmaster
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When I moved to Canada from Virginia, my Virginia friends said “Won’t it be good to get away from all of this sludge.” Ha, ha, ha, . . . joke’s on me. Some areas of Canada have got to be as stinking bad as anything in the US. Even Buckingham and Appomattox Counties, Virginia. Maybe we should hold a BS tournament and give a golden honey bucket to the most sludged area.

Marueen Reilly has her eye on what’s going down (literally) on both sides of the border. She publishes the e-Newsletter “Sludge Watch.” No one is more determined or more tireless in their efforts to stop the spreading of toxic sludge in Canada and the US than Maureen. My guess is that she knows as much about the subject as anyone living, and I know for sure that her observations are keener than anyone’s, and that includes the academics, who mostly seem to be just following up on her leads.

True to form, Marueen has let rip with a critique of that notorious human experiment carried out in Baltimore:

“Biosolids compost amendment for reducing soil lead hazards: a pilot study amendment and grass seeding in urban yards” by Farfel, Orlova, Chaney, Lees, Rohde, Ashley Science of the Total Environment. 340(1-3):81-95

I have published Maureen’s cutting analysis over at the Mother Site. Link here. She asks some very direct questions about the procedures used, the design, and the results of the study. Mark Farfel and Rufus Chaney ought to do themselves a favor and hire Maureen as a consultant to help them design their next far-fetched, abysmal piece of . . . research.

Tags: Players, Spin, Maryland by webmaster
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I know nothing about the BS laws and regulations in North Carolina, but judging from recent Emails from Nancy Holt, a sludge warrior/victim near Burlington, N.C, the Tarheel state is even further behind in this dangerous game than Virginia is.

But on the sunny side, you have one of the top-dog b’crat MD’s taking on the uber-lame regulatory branch, and that can only be good for the citizens and bad for Synagro et al. In 2005 Douglas Campbell, head of the Occupational & Environmental Branch of the state health department sent Kim Colson supervisor of the BS Land Application Unit a copy of the health department’s report “Human Health Risk Evaluation of Land Application of Sewage Sludge/Biosolids” and a list of 5 what I would call extremely conservative recommendations regarding BS land application. Here’s a .pdf..

The recommendations are not bad, as far as they go, and the report has some quite interesting and helpful material in it. But it seems to me to be overly focused on the rate of application of nitrates and testing for them in well water. I think I would have recommended, say, testing the BS before it is spread and testing core samples from sludged land at least twice a year for about 50 different potential toxins, at a minimum.

Unlike Virginia, apparently the NC permit procedures do not require local public hearings before permits are issued. It looks like the local governments have virtually no role in the permits. This appears to me to be a clear violation of federal law — namely 33 USC 1345(e), which says that the determination of how BS is disposed of is “a local determination” — no ifs, ands, or butt-heads, Kim. At any rate, due to Nancy’s effective advocacy, NC is about to hold it’s first public hearing on land application of BS.

I’d love to be there for that one.

Tags: Players, North Carolina by webmaster
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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I see the AP is reporting that the NCCAP has joined the fray over the Johns Hopkins study sludging the yards of inner city – mostly black – Baltimore families. Gerald Stanbury, head of the Md. NAACP, has put the Md attorney general on notice that the NAACP wants the AG to open criminal and civil cases against the Hopkins people. Here’s a link to one version of the AP story in Delaware Online.

Barbara Boxer, who is ramping up some Senate hearings on BS – not the first, by the way, so don’t get your hopes up – has promised to look at the Baltimore situation.

Yesterday I blogged the earlier AP article about a Hopkins research dude named Mark Farfel, who was the lead lead [sic] investigator in the Baltimore study, and who has a history of designing experiments in which children are exposed to lead. Today Helane sent me a cut-and-paste, but no link, to the most recent AP story on the NAACP. This new AP article also refers to Farfel and his having been chastised by the highest court in Md for his role in prior lead studies.

But, interestingly, when I went looking for the AP article about the NAACP I had trouble finding a complete version.  Parts of the article appears a gad-zillion times, but most of them have edited out any references to Farfel or the previous Hopkins lead study problems. Not even the story posted at AP.org carries the entire story now, even though the meta-data attached to the article still show reference to Farfel, so you can tell the whole complete story was originally posted there and later edited.

Sounds like somebody’s lawyers are at work doing damage-control.

Tags: Players, Litigation, EPA by webmaster
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It’s about time, too.

A federal judge in Augusta, Ga. has slapped back the EPA, John Walker, and a bunch of pro-BS academics at the University of Georgia. And they weren’t even parties in the lawsuit! The lawsuit was McElmurray v. USDA. There is a separate suit in which Walker and the Bulldog BS researchers are defendants. Can’t wait for the the judge to rip into them in that one.

Back at the Gutter Grunt’s Mother Site I have a summary of the judge’s opinion, a link to the opinion, and links to national news articles from the AP and Washington Post.

Here’s the link.

Tags: Players, Litigation by webmaster
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Dr. Rob Hale is a dedicated environmental scientist working for the Va. Institute of Marine Science. Rob is one of the world’s authorities on a particular organic contaminant found in BS: polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs. He also sits on the new BS oversight board for the Va. Dept. of Environmental Quality. Here are a few of his recent publications. Link.>

In many ways organic contaminants are the toughest problem with BS. Metals and micro-organisms are of limited types and can be detected, and there is a pretty good scientific basis for setting acceptable levels. But organic compounds are often quite exotic, which means that often not a lot is known about them or the levels at which they are toxic. It also means that detecting and measuring them can be difficult. Just the sheer numbers of such compounds rules out any possibility of monitoring them all — at least with today’s technology. Organic contaminants are virtually all man-made, which means that huge numbers of different types can be produced, so you never have a final list of the problem compounds.

PBDEs are one good example of the problem with organics in BS. PBDEs have been around as household flame-retardants for quite a while. They are sprayed on furniture and on electronic components. They are ubiquitous products of human synthesis and society, but there is at least one report of them being produced naturally by whales, not as flame-retardants of course because whales live underwater and don’t have couches or computers, but as a by-product of presumably normal metabolism.

Since the late 1990’s the Swiss have been all over PBDE’s as toxins, and it seems that until recently most of the research on these compounds is from Swiss scientists. Switzerland banned PBDE’s in 1998 — way before the rest of the world caught on. IN fact, the rest of the world hasn’t quite caught on yet, but the number of research articles on PBDE’s is growing every year.  A few green US states have started banning them. As of Jan 1, 2008 Calif. bans all products using the compounds. Washington and Maine are not far behind, but with more limited bans. Wiki Link>

PBDE’s are found in high concentrations in BS and wastewater treatment plant effluents. Recently Rob Hale and colleagues published an article showing that as a result of trash/sewage-dumping activities, McMurdo Base in Antarctica is a point source of PBDE pollution of one of the most and last pristine areas on the planet. Link.

Rob, a marine scientist, has focused a lot of his effort on understanding and documenting the hormone-disrupting effects of PBDE’s on fish — specifically, male fish producing eggs. PBDEs are also known to have effects on the thyroid, impair brain development, decrease sperm counts. They are concentrated in human breast milk. Studies published in 2007 show feminization of bass and other species in the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, including near the outflow of the Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility on the Potomac in Washington, D.C. Link. Blue Plains is a major contributor to BS spread on Virginia rural land.

You connect the dots, especially if you’re breast feeding a baby boy.

Tags: Players, Research by webmaster
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Dec31.07

In October, 2005 the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission of the Virginia General Assembly released its damning report on the Virginia’s regulation (i.e., read: non-regulation) of land application of BS. The report was a condemnation of the Virginia Department of Health, which had the major responsibility for regulating land application of BS. After the report was published the VDH quickly lost all remaining credibility as the state agency in charge of regulating BS operations. Consequently, in 2007 the legislature turned the job over to the Department of Environmental Quality.

Initially those of us who have been fighting the sludge-wars for years shared a certain optimism for a new regulatory regime. But a lot of the air went out of the balloon when it was announced that Dr. Alan B. Rubin had been named to the DEQ “Biosolids Expert Panel” (“BS Panel”).Appointing one who has been called the “Sheik of Sludge” to the BS Panel is an indication that this is going to be a case of deja vu all over again, and the DEQ, like the VDH and the US EPA, will become just another government front for the BS haulers.

Who is Alan Rubin, and why the negative reaction to his appointment to the BS Panel? Well, first of all, Rubin is not a citizen representative on the BS Panel, as reported by various news papers. The BS Panel minutes of September 18, 2007 lists Rubin as a “consultant.” The distinction is important, because if Rubin represents anyone, he represents not citizens, but the BS industry in its fight against citizens. For instance, Rubin was once a senior scientist for Water Environment Federation, which is the BS-industry PR machine that coined the term “biosolids” to help sell the idea of spreading New York’s fecal products and industrial spills on Virginia’s farmland. Now retired from the EPA, Rubin runs a BS consulting firm.

Sheik of Sludge, indeed. From the very get-go Rubin has been a tireless advocate of spreading BS from sea to shining sea. He is, arguably, more responsible than any other single person in the country for a million tons of human fecal products, laced with unknown amounts of industrial toxins, that have been spread on Virginia farmland and forests. For Rubin is the self-proclaimed author of the EPA’s BS regulations – the 503 Rules – which were promulgated in 1993 despite failing the EPA’s internal peer-review process. In sworn testimony before the US Labor Dept. in April, 1999, Rubin admitted that his professional reputation is linked to the 503 Rules. Rubin has a dog in this fight – protecting his professional reputation and his 503 Rules.Rubin is perhaps best known in the BS world for his use of heavy handed tactics against those who disagreed with him or who questioned the safety of BS when he was a major domo in the EPA. On September 27, 1999 Time magazine reported that several members of Congress were sending then EPA Director Carol Browner an angry letter, asking her to address allegations that Rubin had been engaged in threatening and harassing telephone calls and e-mails to anti-sludge activists.

In May 2000, the House Committee on Science held a hearing on BS issues at which hearing Jane Beswick, a dairy farmer from Stanislaus County, Calif. testified. Ms. Beswick had become a vocal critic of the use of BS as fertilizer. In her testimony before Congress she related how Rubin made implicit threats to bring the feds down on her if she didn’t stop speaking out about the risks of BS, and how Rubin began sending her unsolicited BS propaganda, including one hand-written note that said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” Ms Beswick’s testimony was: “To me, [Rubin] was saying that if I didn’t stop speaking out about the risks of using sludge, there would be closer scrutiny of animal manure by Federal and State inspectors–which has happened.”

My question to the DEQ is this: How does a person with Rubin’s overzealous pro-BS track record get appointed to an ostensibly objective BS expert panel?

Does Rubin have the necessary expertise in the BS field? Of course he does; he is the Sheik of Sludge. Is he smart? Arguably his brilliance matches his zeal for BS. But regardless of how much they know or how smart they are, zealots do not belong on a fact-finding panel.

If the DEQ insists on having pro-sludge zealots on its BS Panel, then it is obligated to balance the Panel with anti-sludge zealots. Otherwise the work of the Panel and the whole DEQ effort will be tainted by suspicions of industry influence, just like the VDH “efforts” were. Deja vu.

Tags: Players by webmaster
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