As The Water Flows

Mike Masterson

October 14, 2014

The public outcry to preserve the purity of our Buffalo National River continues to build, as evidenced by an informational event scheduled for 7 p.m. Saturday in Fayetteville's St. Paul's Episcopal Church Parish Hall.

A public singalong and rally is slated for Fayetteville's Town Center the next morning. The plan is to create a YouTube video that continues to spread the word about the 6,500-swine-strong hog factory our state wrongheadedly approved in our sacred Buffalo River watershed two years ago.

Saturday's event features five experts including hydrologist and emeritus University of Arkansas geosciences Professor Dr. John Van Brahana. Brahana and his band of volunteers began regularly monitoring water quality and subsurface flow a year ago, largely at personal expense and energy.

Speakers say they'll offer updated scientific findings that validate public concerns about potential contamination of the Buffalo from enormous amounts of untreated hog waste being regularly applied to fields along Big Creek in Newton County. The creek is a major tributary of the Buffalo flowing six miles downstream.

If you've been resting on the sidelines in this important, yet shamefully politicized, matter created by our state's Department of Environmental Quality (cough), either weekend event would be well worth showing up for.

Meanwhile, the state's Farm Bureau is said to be lobbying to prevent the existing temporary moratorium against future factories placed in the Buffalo watershed from becoming permanent. The Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission is expected to make its final decision when its moratorium expires Oct. 22.

I've always admired the Farm Bureau and the many stances it has taken in support of individual family farms across our state, which only leaves me dazed and confused to see this organization so aggressively and actively championing the cause of this Cargill-supplied factory farm (or others like it) so obviously misplaced in this sacred region of our state. Seems common sense to me that mega-factory farms are a serious threat to replacing family farms as we've known and cherished them in Arkansas.

It's time to let your elected state legislators know your feelings as well as the commissioners. This river and the responsibility for preserving its purity do belong to all the people rather than one family or a multinational corporation such as Cargill.

I've lately noticed a new effort among concerned citizens who are writing Cargill's major Arkansas corporate customers such as Wal-Mart and Tyson, asking for their considerable influence (even behind the scenes) in doing their part to help protect and preserve America's first national river and all it means to our state and nation.

I asked Brahana--who told me he had a car tire slashed while in Newton County--for his top three latest discoveries.

His results steadily confirm what he feared and predicted in letters sent in 2012 to Gov. Mike Beebe and former Department of Environmental Quality director Teresa Marks. Brahana's letters, incidentally, were never answered. Mighty rude considering that Brahana is acting solely in the best interests of the national river rather than the arrogant self-interests that sadly characterize so much of politics today.

First, Brahana told me dye tracings continue to prove how rapidly groundwater beneath this hog factory travels through the Big Creek valley around Mount Judea. The water "moves under surface divides and the hills into private wells and springs" to ultimately wind up in the Buffalo, he said. Thus far the dye already has been discovered in two private drinking wells.

Secondly, present water quality is near the upper limit of what the systems can accommodate. "Adding additional animal waste from the CAFO will overload the entire system and cause long-term problems that will be expensive and take a long time to clear up. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, pathogens, nutrients, algal blooms, excessive biofilms and low oxygen concentrations are but a few of the problems we are seeing." I'm told the untreated waste from 6,500 swine equals that of about 30,000 humans.

Third, Brahana, who is not controlled by the state or fearful of offending political contributors, said his measurements are providing clear insights into how water is stored in the watershed and the ways in which it moves through intervals of subsurface containing chert (flint) layers in the limestone. Such terrain underlies the manure-spreading fields.

"The water enters the rock as recharge from the top, either precipitation or captured streamflow into sinkholes. It gets down to the rock very quickly, a matter of several hours after the rain starts.

"It moves on top of the chert through small 'minicaves' which are major flow paths, and it spreads out downgradient," said Brahana. "This means that where the water and waste will end up are predictable after we have conducted our preliminary research, and that the flow goes to the Buffalo, and the speed of the movement is very rapid, as fast as most surface water."

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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mikemasterson10@hotmail.com. Read his blog at mikemastersonsmessenger.com.

Editorial on 10/14/2014