The nightmare scenario many fear when it comes to hog waste polluting our Buffalo River watershed (the country's first national river) has been playing out in Illinois, where the Chicago Tribune reports swine factory waste polluted 67 miles of that state's waterways between 2005 and 2014.
Those who say a similar scenario can't happen from C&H Hog Farms, misplaced in Arkansas' sacred, karst-permeated watershed, clearly aren't paying attention.
In Illinois, David Jackson and Gary Marx last week reported that the once-clear Beaver Creek in Iroquois County has become a foul-smelling contaminated stream filled with dead fish.
"It looked like ink, the water. It had fish all over the place, dead. It wasn't fit for nothing," 75-year-old retired farmer Leland Ponton told the Tribune.
The story said government officials blamed the deadly discharge on a swine-waste spill from Hopkins Ridge Farms. Like our state's hog factory with some 6,500 swine that was quickly and quietly allowed into the Buffalo watershed by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (cough) in 2012, Hopkins Ridge Farms is a similar factory, raising more than 8,000 pigs.
"The July 2012 spill polluted more than 20 miles of Beaver Creek, wiping out 148,283 fish and 17,563 freshwater mussels, according to reports from state biologists. Four years later, the creek's aquatic life has only begun to recover," the story read.
Reporters said authorities had yet to collect penalties and cleanup costs from the confinement's agribusiness-executive owners, who deny responsibility.
"As hog confinements like Hopkins Ridge spring up across Illinois, producing massive amounts of manure," the story continued, "a new pollution threat has emerged: spills that blacken creeks and destroy fish, damaging the quality of life in rural communities."
In Arkansas, C&H is beside the rural hamlet of Mount Judea with spray fields along Big Creek, a major tributary of the Buffalo.
The Tribune report noted: "The lagoons that hold pig manure until farms can use it as fertilizer sometimes crumble or overflow. Leaks gush from hoses and pipes that carry waste to the fields. And in some instances, state investigators found polluting was simply 'willful' as confinement operators dumped thousands of gallons of manure they couldn't use or sell as fertilizer."
In examining reports from Illinois and federal agencies, the Tribune found pollution incidents from hog confinements killed some 492,000 fish between 2005 through 2014, and said no other industry came close to causing the same amount of damage.
"Fish kills are an imperfect measure of the damage caused by businesses, as some Illinois waterways already are so contaminated that little if any aquatic life remains," the story said, "and some pollution sources degrade rivers without sending multiple fish to their deaths on a single day. Still, the fish kills do provide a gauge of the environmental impact of the modern pig-raising facilities that helped make Illinois the fourth-largest pork producer in the U.S."
While we rely upon our Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission and the Department of Environmental Quality to properly approve hog-factory permits and protect places as precious as our national river's watershed, Illinois' livestock factories are permitted by its Department of Agriculture, whose mission is to promote and regulate livestock agriculture, the story said.
Such large animal factories with multimillion-dollar annual revenue often pay only a few thousand dollars in fines after causing massive fish kills. Many go to court to challenge authorities. Since 2005, the Tribune reported, the Illinois attorney general filed or resolved at least 26 pollution lawsuits against such businesses. Some operators polluted repeatedly and multistate pork suppliers only rarely are held accountable, reporters also found.
Hopkins Ridge isn't the only hog factory accused of causing serious pollution, the Tribune reported. In 2009, the story said, "some 200,000 gallons of swine waste drained from a breach below the surface of one of the [4,500-hog R3E LLC] facility's massive earthen holding ponds. State biologists counted 110,436 dead fish along 19 miles of Spring Creek." That same facility in 2003 pumped manure onto fields through leaky pipes, killing all aquatic life along a one-mile stretch of Spring Creek.
This cautionary tale is told as Arkansans, who seek to protect their treasured Buffalo, wait to see how well our Department of Environmental Quality carries out its plan with a private contractor to drill for truths deep beneath one lagoon at C&H.
I know many people expect an honest, thorough testing from Director Becky Keogh's department to determine just what is the wet stuff pooling 120 feet underground that one Oklahoma geologist believes is likely hog waste.
Folks also expect this testing to be conducted as transparently as Keogh and her department publicly promised and I want to believe Gov. Asa Hutchinson would demand.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 08/13/2016