What transparency?

About that plume

By Mike Masterson

Posted: December 20, 2016 at 2:16 a.m.

NWAOnline

The Buffalo River Watershed Alliance says the state's Department of Environmental Quality (cough) didn't allow nearly enough time to effectively analyze and respond to the Dec. 1 release of a 540-page report that was supposed to explain the results of the test hole drilled near one of two waste lagoons at C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea.

The agency set Dec. 9 as the cutoff for online-only questions from the public. That was after allowing no questions of project manager Harbor Environmental at the Dec. 1 meeting where its results were publicly disclosed. The agency later extended that deadline until Dec. 16.

Frankly, the way this inadequate single drill hole (that cost Arkansans $75,000) has been handled from the beginning smells worse to me than, well, a hog wallow.

The sole reason for drilling at the hog factory was to confirm the electrical resistivity imaging test conducted in 2015 by Dr. Todd Halihan of Oklahoma State. His work detected a large plume that differed radically from the surrounding subsurface soils, located beneath a corner of the lower of two lagoons, as well as a fracture.

At the time, our state declined Halihan's offer to arrange drilling, likely at no cost, to determine if the plume was leaked waste.

Then there was the backhanded way Halihan's study came to public awareness after the Big Creek Research and Extension Team from UA's Division of Agriculture had failed to even acknowledge its existence until the Watershed Alliance sent a Freedom of Information Act request.

In its news release last week, the Alliance explained: "the hole was drilled due to concerns raised initially by members of the [Big Creek team] who noted a possible 'major fracture and movement of waste' near the ponds. However, neither [the Department of Environmental Quality], the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, nor the public was made aware of this concern until over a year later when [the alliance] brought it to their attention."

In the 540-page report, this clear and simple sentence has yet to be located: "We drilled directly into the plume and discovered the material inside consisted of ..."

So why not, since this suspicious glob was the very reason for the hole?

Alliance president Gordon Watkins said his organization is concerned that "in spite of ADEQ's assurances of improved transparency concerning the C&H Hog Farm, the public is being prevented from seeking clarification by asking questions directly of Harbor." Alliance questions and concerns are posted at buffaloriveralliance.org (click on BRWA questions to ADEQ).

Watkins said "conspicuously absent" from Harbor's Dec. 1 presentation or subsequent report was discussion of Halihan's study. He said the only reference made to it appeared in two sentences: "Interpreted results from a 2015 electrical resistivity imaging survey commissioned by the Big Creek Research and Extension Team suggested vertical leakage from the waste storage ponds and possible fracturing within limestone bedrock below the site. The location of the boring was chosen by ADEQ based on the ERI data." Again unclear.

The Alliance news release notes the drilling found that an apparent void was detected at a depth that closely corresponds to that of the pond floors: "The void was detected during drilling and again when difficulty was encountered while sealing up the hole above a depth of 25 feet below the ground. Water for lubricating the drilling process was lost at this depth and the final grouting of the shaft required almost 50 percent more in cement than what the driller had calculated.

"The report provided little discussion regarding this seemingly significant karst feature. The report and the cores show that karst is indicated throughout most of the 120-foot range of the drilled shaft. Contrary to the earlier environmental assessment of the site, this facility and its waste ponds are clearly sitting atop karst," the alliance added.

Alliance member Jack Stewart: "Our questions are the result of a hurriedly prepared analysis of a fairly lengthy report. We continue to ask ADEQ why they have chosen to force the public to respond in such a short time frame."

Stewart said the agency was notified that alliance efforts to correlate field notes, data, photos, and interpretation will result in questions that will then result in follow-up questions. "We have emphatically requested ... an interactive public question and answer session with Harbor Environmental."

Ellen Corley of the alliance noted: "Thankfully, the sampling results do not appear to show contamination of groundwater inside this drilled hole. However, the report by geologist Tai Hubbard hired ... as an independent observer ... clearly noted multiple limitations of the study, not the least of which was that it provided for only a single drilled hole."

Yep, valued readers, still lots more questions than answers.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 12/20/2016

Harrison Daily Times

Watershed alliance questions hog farm test results

https://thefern.org/ag_insider/pig-cafos-influence-timing-human-flu-seasons-study-shows/

Pig CAFOs influence timing of human flu seasons, study shows

By  Maryn McKenna,  December 15, 2016

The enormous numbers of animals concentrated in industrial pig farms are changing the pattern of flu seasons, by providing flu viruses a place to jump between humans and animals and multiply faster than they otherwise would, according to  new research from North Carolina — a state that is second only to Iowa in pig production.

Using publicly available data, researchers at Duke University mapped the locations of swine in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in North Carolina, which sells almost 10 million hogs per year and accounts for more than 14 percent of the U.S. pig market. They crossmatched that information with data on the occurrence of flu in the state during four flu seasons, from 2008 to 2012. They found that in two of those flu seasons, 2009-2010 and 2010-2011, cases peaked significantly earlier than in the other two.

What likely happened, they say, is that the virus circulating in those flu seasons was carried onto farms by workers and spread to the pigs — and as it passed from pig to pig, the virus had a chance to reproduce in a manner that would not have happened in the absence of CAFOs. That much larger amount of virus spread back out into surrounding community, spiking the number of flu cases earlier in the flu season.

The researchers did not have the data to say whether the virus circulating through pigs made the flu season worse overall, nor whether it caused more serious illness in individual people. But the effect on the timing of the season ought to be enough to prompt a public health response, they said.

“We don’t want to be implicating the swine industry as a public health threat; it’s a phenomenon of modern food production that there are heavy concentrations of animals like this,” said  Paul Lantos, a physician and expert in geographic information systems who is the first author of the paper, which appears in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

But, he said, health authorities should think about creating surveillance systems around areas where diseases can pass between animals and humans, to detect their crossover. And they should consider emphasizing flu vaccination in communities around CAFOs, to protect farm workers and anyone to whom workers might transmit flu.

“Farm workers are predominantly young healthy males, and they are not the people usually targeted by intensive flu vaccination campaigns; those focus on children, the elderly and the infirm,” Lantos said.

There’s a nuance to the Duke team’s findings, and it has to do with the complex ecology of flu. The years when the North Carolina flu season was affected by local CAFOs were years when the seasons’ main virus was a “ swine flu” — that is, a strain of flu that had already partially adapted to pigs.

Flu is a virus that easily swaps genetic segments, and strains that infect humans can incorporate portions of flus that previously passed through birds or pigs. When those segments combine, they can create a new flu that human immune systems have never experienced before, which can lead to more frequent and sometimes more severe illness. The 2009-10 virus was so novel that it sparked a worldwide pandemic, the  first in more than 40 years.

But because that virus was already adapted to pigs, it was able to get back onto pig farms and boil up into greater amounts of flu by passing among the animals. That did not occur in the first and fourth seasons the team studied. In 2008-2009, the seasonal flu was not a pig-adapted strain; and by the fourth year, 2011-12, the state data shows there were fewer cases in humans, and presumably fewer to pass along to pigs.

Flu viruses change every year — which is why flu vaccines are adjusted and repeated annually — and their makeup from one year to the next is unpredictable. But it’s been known for a while that pig farms are hot spots for flu transmission. Flu passing from farm workers to pigs, and from pigs to workers, has been documented in  Canada,  Romania,  China , and in  several  studies  in Iowa.

Because of that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people who  work on pig farms, and even people who  raise pigs to show at fairs, be vaccinated against flu. But given this research, Lantos said, maybe vaccination should be emphasized for people who also live near pig farms. Farm workers may unknowingly be serving as bridges that allow flu to cross unmonitored back into their families, to their communities and then to the outside world.

Maryn McKenna is a  National Geographic contributor , and the author of Superbug and Beating Back the Devil . She last wrote for FERN about  how the Netherlands cut antibiotic use on farms. Her new book on antibiotics in agriculture will be published by National Geographic Books/Penguin Random House in 2017. She writes regularly about antibiotics and agriculture for Ag Insider.

Watershed meetings underway

By Emily Walkenhorst

Posted: December 12, 2016 at 2:29 a.m.

NWAOnline

MARSHALL — About 100 people attended the first public meeting of an 18-month process to create a watershed management plan for the Buffalo River last week.

Many of them — farmers, neighbors and outsiders who love the Buffalo — agreed on some of the same concerns for the river: too much gravel in the river, failing septic tanks, erosion. Many also agreed that research on the area’s lagging economy should be done before a management plan is finalized, and many agreed that education and cooperation between all levels of government and locals is important.

They disagreed on other issues: whether agriculture poses a threat, and whether visitors contribute to degradation of the river. Some expressed concerns about whether the management plan would consider all the relevant players in the watershed and be fair to everyone, and whether the management plan would ever become more regulatory than voluntary.

FTN Associates, an Arkansas environmental engineering firm, held the public meeting Thursday morning at the Searcy County Civic Center gymnasium, the first of six public meetings on the proposed watershed-management plan. Hired by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, the firm has handled watershed-management plans in other parts of Arkansas, in Mississippi and in West Virginia.

The plans always outline recommended voluntary actions for watershed management, FTN Systems Ecologist Kent Thornton told Thursday’s group. None have ever become regulatory.

The purpose of a watershed-management plan is to outline conservation recommendations and make watershed landowners available for U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grant funds to implement those recommendations, Thornton said.

Allen Brown, environmental program coordinator for the commission, described Thursday’s meeting as a “fact-finding mission” to gauge people’s concerns for the river.

“We got some pretty good responses from landowners as far as what they want to address,” Brown said, adding that people had some common themes in their concerns.

But the ways issues may be addressed are myriad, Brown said, and would be a part of the discussion during the development process for the management plan.

The Buffalo River watershed spans hundreds of square miles in mostly Newton and Searcy counties. Parts of the watershed extend into Marion, Baxter, Stone, Van Buren and Pope counties.

A watershed is an area surrounding a body of water that eventually drains into the body of water. The watershed management plan would be intended for all 150 miles of the river, not just the 135 miles that are designated as the Buffalo National River by the National Park Service.

The plan will not consider facilities that have Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality permits because the commission has no authority over those, Thornton told the crowd.

Gordon Watkins, a Jasper cattle farmer and president of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance, expressed concern that his nonpermitted cattle farm would be subject to more scrutiny than a permitted hog farm during the watershed-management plan development process.

FTN Associates will host additional meetings about every three months during the watershed-management plan development process. Thornton said he expects to hold the next meeting at the end of March.

Funds for the plan came from a $107,000 grant from the EPA. The plan is a part of the state’s larger Beautiful Buffalo River Action Committee — a committee created by Gov. Asa Hutchinson that comprises five state agencies and will include public meetings and stakeholder input. That committee will meet for the first time in January, officials have said, although no date has been set.

There was little mention Thursday of C&H Hog Farms in Mount Judea — the only federally classified “large” hog farm in the watershed. The farm has drawn opposition for about the past four years because of the perceived risk it poses to the river, and that opposition has been the catalyst for research at the farm and regulation changes, including a temporary ban on medium and large hog farms in the watershed pending certain research results.

But agriculture and whether the management plan would address it were among the major concerns expressed Thursday.

Niagle Ratchford, Mike Love and Billy Ragland — all farmers — said they attended Thursday’s meeting to learn more about the development process for the management plan and make sure it weighed all stakeholders’ input evenly.

“I just want to see it’s done fairly,” said Ragland, a cattle and hay farmer just north of Marshall.

Love, a hay farmer, said he was concerned about any possible government control of land that wouldn’t benefit the environment. He said he didn’t want to see regulations turn the area back into forestland, arguing that farming and timber were both major industries to the area.

Twin brothers Larry and Garry Lilley, who live outside of the watershed but are frequent visitors to the Buffalo River, noted the great economic impact of both tourism and trout fishing in the watershed and said their top concern was seeing C&H shut down.

Sara Thorne, a member of the White River chapter of Trout Unlimited, said she’s concerned for Buffalo River tourism, which she described as a major industry in the watershed.

Thorne said Thursday’s meeting was informative and helped familiarize people with the development process for a watershed management plan.

Thorne said she hopes the process will consider groups in the watershed that would be willing to help implement it and the pollution risk posed by animal farms and associated fertilizer runoff. She’s also concerned about erosion and wants to see more measures taken to prevent it.

“You’ve got to get involved in taking care of this stuff,” she said.

NW News on 12/12/2016

Earthjustice Fertile Grounds Blog

POTENTIALLY LETHAL EMISSIONS GO UNREPORTED ON FACTORY FARMS

By Jonathan Smith | Monday, December 12, 2016

In many rural communities across the country, longtime residents have suddenly found themselves surrounded by industrial livestock facilities. In these facilities, hundreds of cows, thousands of pigs or tens of thousands of chickens are kept in confined spaces to be fattened up as quickly as possible. Most meat in America comes from factory farms like these. Every day, families living near these facilities are exposed to toxic ammonia and hydrogen sulfide from the manure created and stored at these confined animal feeding operations. People experience nausea, headaches, increased rates of asthma and chronic lung disease due to air pollution from livestock factories.

This pollution isn’t reported to the public or to local authorities, thanks to an exemptiongranted by the outgoing Bush administration in 2008. Today, after years of procedural delays, I’m finally going to court on behalf of local communities to demand that the EPA take back this irrational exemption. While other industrial facilities are required by law to report their toxic releases, tens of thousands of livestock factories have essentially been given a free pass by the EPA. The exemption stymies local efforts to clean up pollution and puts the health of local people at risk. It’s also unlawful, as I will argue in court.

The manure produced by a medium-sized livestock factory is equivalent to that of a city of almost 70,000 people. But unlike cities, these factory farms don’t have sewage treatment systems. They often store manure in open pits and then pump it out and spray it onto surrounding fields—much more manure than would be needed to fertilize the fields. Some livestock factories emit as much as 2,000 pounds of toxic ammonia a day from manure, as well hydrogen sulfide and other pollution.

People who live nearby suffer from constant exposure to foul odors, as well as the toxic effects of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. At low levels, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide can irritate the eyes, nose and throat. Prolonged exposure to ammonia can burn lung tissue, and the long-term effects of hydrogen sulfide exposure include memory loss, poor motor function and decreased attention span. Toxic emissions from manure can even be fatal. On two separate occasions in 2015, father and son hog producers in the Midwest were overcome by fumes from a manure pit and died.

Livestock facilities produce more ammonia than any other industry. In fact, by the EPA’s own estimate, 73 percent of U.S. ammonia emissions come from livestock facilities. Why would the EPA allow these emissions to go unreported? Without basic information about emissions, communities across the country cannot take steps to protect their health, such as avoiding polluting facilities or working at the local level to clean up the dirtiest facilities. Without this information, the government won’t be able to determine what steps may be necessary to fix the problem, such as monitoring and clean-up efforts or new permitting requirements for facilities to reduce pollution. 

Iowa native Jason Chance and several other rural residents submitted sworn statements to the court last year recounting how the arrival of large hog factories forced them to completely alter their lifestyles. The Chance family lived within two miles of 19,000 hogs and the open pits that held their manure. Chance, his wife and his daughter experienced nausea, diarrhea and respiratory problems; eye, nose and throat irritation; and severe headaches because of the noxious gases from the hog factories. They gave up taking long walks on their property and had to wear respiratory masks to do yard work.

“I believe that my family, my community and I have the right to know about the hazardous air pollutants to which they are being exposed,” Chance told the court. He also believes hog operations would be more likely to take steps to reduce or eliminate their emissions if the pollution had to be publicly reported.

State and local emergency response agencies have also spoken out against the reporting exemption. Tim Gablehouse, spokesperson for a national association that includes 4,500 emergency planning and preparedness agencies, writes in a personal blog post that toxic emissions reports provide critical information that helps responders do their jobs in case of an emergency at or near a factory farm. Without this information, public safety and even the lives of emergency responders are at risk.

Ever since the exemption was granted in 2008, Earthjustice has been fighting to roll it back and protect people’s right to know about potential health hazards in their neighborhoods. The EPA has been dragging its feet on this issue, perhaps hoping it will just go away—but we are not backing down.

In court, the agency will have a hard time explaining its unlawful, arbitrary decision to allow the livestock industry to keep the public—and those charged with protecting public health—in the dark about hazardous emissions. Eliminating the exemption for livestock factories will be a promising step forward for public health and quality of life in rural America.

Threat unchanged 

NWAOnline

Lest readers become confused by results coming out of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality's (cough) results of the single hole drilled near one of the waste lagoons at C&H Hog Farms in the Buffalo National River watershed, please allow me to remind everyone.

This was but a single hole sunk at a cost to taxpayers of $75,000 specifically to determine if the large plume of suspected waste (detected by an electrical resistivity analysis in 2015) was indeed swine waste that had been leaking into what also appeared to be a fractured area beneath one corner of the lower lagoon.

Like many others, I'm waiting for experts who comprehend the technical jargon in the contractor's findings to determine if the hole was sunk directly into the plume rather than near or above it.

When it comes to ensuring public transparency, I also vastly prefer plain spoken English, as in, "We dug into the questionable plume that started all this and discovered 1. hog waste, 2. wet clay, 3. Skippy's Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter."

Regardless of what the findings of this boring are interpreted to reveal, the potential threat to our sacred Buffalo from the continually spraying of millions of gallons of untreated hog waste onto a limited number of acres close to or adjoining a major tributary of the Buffalo remain more obvious, relevant and significant than ever.

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 12/06/2016

Arkansas Times

Judge hears arguments in appeal of hog waste 'land farming' permit near Buffalo River

Posted By Benjamin Hardy on Mon, Dec 5, 2016 at 4:26 PM

Environment notebook

By Emily Walkenhorst

Group wants time with hog-farm data

The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality should allow the public more time to submit questions regarding the test results on a project to detect whether a hog manure pond is leaking on a farm in Mount Judea, a member of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance told the Pollution Control and Ecology Commission on Friday.

Brian Thompson told the commission that his group would have to hire outside researchers to go through the data and that the group would need more than a week to be able to ask good questions of the department.

The question-and-answer period ends at noon Friday.

Department Director Becky Keogh told the commission last Friday that the department wanted the period to end Dec. 9 to conduct a more expeditious review of the test results.

The alliance also issued a release lamenting that only one hole was drilled into the ground at C&H Hog Farms in the Buffalo National River watershed during the research process, which involved taking samples at various depths below the farm’s surface. The alliance also expressed continued concerns that C&H poses a pollution risk to the Buffalo River.

State-funded research so far has drawn no conclusions.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau also issued a news release Friday saying its environmental experts had looked at the data and “they say it’s clear the team at C&H Hog Farms is doing the right things and are good stewards of the environment, as well as good neighbors to the Buffalo River watershed.”

Samples taken at C&H were tested for 18 nutrients and minerals, although not every sample was tested for all 18. The results mostly were within the parameters set by the U.S. Geological Survey, except where the Geological Survey did not have comparable data, according to a presentation Thursday by state contractor Harbor Environmental.

Soil leachate samples showed higher concentrations of the nutrients and elements below the ponds but still fit within Geological Survey parameters when applicable. The Geological Survey did not always have comparable data for nitrogen, phosphorus or total organic carbon. No soil samples detected E. coli, and ammonia was found above Geological Survey levels in one of five water samples.

Many questions, no answers

Not transparent

By Mike Masterson

t's taken months for the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) to finally announce to the public that the suspicious large plume and suspected fracture cited beneath the corner of a massive hog waste lagoon at C&H Hog Farms apparently contains nothing overly foul.

But as of Thursday evening, no one could even say that for certain because neither the agency nor Harbor Environmental, retained to perform this testing, didn't answer in plain English. Nor did they take questions during their public meeting to release the results.

So much for all that "transparency" the state agency's director, Becky Keogh, promised when announcing in September that the state would contract to bore a single hole into suspected waste leakage beneath a corner of the lower of two lagoons.

Instead of getting simple answers about the specific nature of this plume and the relative location of the single bore hole, the audience got peppered with chemical-ese then promptly ushered off to the agency website with any pesky questions.

Retired engineer Duane Woltjen said describing the test hole's location only in terms of decimal degrees of longitude and latitude rather than Arkansas English amounted to "virtually complete obfuscation."

Many who'd driven hours to finally learn the plume's contents and get answers face-to-face justifiably were upset to get none. Some had serious specific questions about the tax-funded $75,000 study to ask of Harbor's project manager as he delivered a PowerPoint-assisted message. Interestingly, it did reveal suspected signs of fracturing between 28 and 120.5 feet, and a "porous zone" between 100 and 120 feet deep.

Public concerns have run deep over the ecological welfare of our country's first national river ever since the state agency responsible for maintaining environmental quality quickly and quietly permitted the hog factory to raise 6,250 swine about six miles upstream of the Buffalo.

UA Geosciences Professor Emeritus John Van Brahana of Fayetteville has spent two years with other volunteers scientifically testing for harmful effects of the millions of gallons of hog waste continually sprayed across fields in the watershed. He said five people who attended told him they felt "ripped off" because meaningful details of the study "were hidden behind the ongoing manipulation of ADEQ."

"No scientific questions of the presenter were allowed, either during or after the talk," Brahana said. "The promise was made that all questions could be asked from the web page, but most felt this was for appearance only, based on ADEQ's previously documented history of ignoring meaningful environmental queries."

Members of the Buffalo River Watershed Alliance pointed out that the single hole was drilled due to concerns that group and others raised after a Freedom of Information Act request by the alliance uncovered internal emails among members of the UA Division of Agriculture's Big Creek Research and Extension Team.

The alliance cited one email saying, "there was a possibility of a major fracture and movement of waste" near one of two waste lagoons discovered during an electrical resistivity study performed by Dr. Todd Halihan of Oklahoma State University. This bore hole was recommended to confirm the findings.

Alliance president Gordon Watkins left unimpressed after driving hours to attend. "While Harbor apparently intended to leave the impression that there was little or no evidence of contamination, questions from attendees were disallowed and the complete report was unavailable for review, " he said in a news release.

"The information provided by Harbor was not strongly interpretive, and we need to have it reviewed by experts ... . Professional geologists were present who attempted to ask pertinent questions about Harbor's processes," but they weren't allowed.

Watkins said Dr. Joe Nix of Ouachita Baptist University, who performed some data analysis for the study, commented: "When you close the door on questions, that only raises questions. That's not how science is done."

Ah, but it is how politics too often is done, Joe.

Ginny Masullo of the alliance said: "We certainly could just as easily have reviewed the slide presentation online and gotten just as much out of it. Now there will be no opportunity to ask questions directly to the Harbor representative ... . Until we have experts examine all of the Harbor documentation, we currently have more questions than answers."

Alliance member Marti Olesen said, "We strongly suggested to ADEQ at least three holes should have been drilled to achieve the level of credibility that would put the public's mind at ease. ... We urge the governor's office and ADEQ to demonstrate better scientific protocol and share information with the public with the collaboration and transparency that they promised."

Watkins added: "Aside from this less-than-productive presentation, there remains the larger issue of hundreds of acres of karst spreading fields throughout the Buffalo River watershed. Geologists have indicated to us a better than 90 percent chance the CAFO will eventually pollute the Buffalo River."

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.

Editorial on 12/04/2016

Questions remain after report on C&H Hog Farms drilling study near the Buffalo River