Down the Drain

When New Yorkers flush their toilets, the waste ends up more than 2,000 miles away in Hudspeth County, Texas. It's carried there by train and then sprayed on 78,000 acres of desert only a few miles from the small town of Sierra Blanca.

Remember Sierra Blanca? It's the largely Hispanic town that in 1999 fended off plans to locate on its doorstep a dump for radioactive waste from the Northeast. Now it finds itself as the neighbor of the largest sewage sludge dump in the nation. On most days the air is putrid, and now people are beginning to come down with strange illnesses. And in George Bash's Texas there's little legal recourse to stop the flow of sludge.

How New York City's sludge--toxic, foul-smelling and loaded with live pathogens--got to Sierra Blanca tells us a lot about the way poor, minority-dominated communities in America become dumping grounds for the powerful. And it also speaks volumes about the shameless political panderings of George W. Bush.

For decades, New York City dumped its sewage into the ocean off the New Jersey coast. Then in 1988 Congress banned the ocean dumping of sludge and a mad rush ensued for a new disposal site. First they looked to Oklahoma, but reports that the sludge was contaminated with a toxic menu of pollutants, ranging from arsenic and chromium to mercury and lead, prompted the state legislature to pass a law banning the import of out-of-state sewage. Next New York eyed Arizona. But this normally compliant state also rose up, banning sewage shipped by rail after finding out about the high levels of benzenes and disease-causing germs. Finally, in 1992 they homed in on a site in Hudspeth County, Texas, only three miles away from the town of Sierra Blanca.

The company that won the lucrative contract to haul away and dispose of New York's sludge was Merco Joint Venture, a Long Island firm with a nasty reputation. In return for its $158 million deal, Merco pledged that they would use the "nutrient rich" sludge on arid ranch lands in the Southwest in order to "reclaim" them. Merco didn't take any chances that their permit might be denied. They put 40 local people on their payroll, including the former sheriff and his wife, former state environmental regulators, and politicians. They unfurled a $598,000 public relations campaign and, according to a 1995 report in the New York Times, "threatened to sue anyone who stood in the way." They also made a $1.5 million bequest to Texas Tech University. The funds were earmarked for a study of the beneficial uses of sludge, although officials at the university had endorsed the dump even before the money was in their pockets. The permit was approved almost immediately, without an environmental review or any public hearings.

The permit allowed Merco to dump more than 200 tons of wet sewage sludge every day. There were problems almost immediately. The air began to stink, causing residents who lived more than 20 miles from the dump to gag from the odor. Property values dropped and some ranches close to the dump simply couldn't be sold. Then people began developing skin rashes, blisters, and strange cases of influenza. Complaints to the state environmental agencies went unheeded. "The chemical vapors mixed with a fecal smell are indescribable, except to say it smells like death," says Bill Addington, a Sierra Blanca resident and environmental organizer. "The Texas Air Control Board came down and told us it was just the smell of cow patties."

Addington and others filed a civil rights action with the EPA in 1997, alleging that the dump amounted to an act of environmental racism. The EPA summarily dismissed the action. Later that year, Merco applied to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission for a five-year extension of its permit. They also requested that the permit be expanded, allowing them to triple the amount of sludge the company could dump on each acre. The members of the commission are Bush appointees. According to a report on the dump by the Texas chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Merco hired Cliff Johnson to navigate the permit through the commission. Johnson is Bush's former legislative director.

The commission dismissed complaints by local residents and swiftly approved the new permit. Soon Merco began dumping 400 tons of wet sludge a day. When New York City's Environmental Protection Commission dispatched a fact-checking team to Sierra Blanca, they were met with hostility. "I don't think it's fair for you people to come here and shove this thing down our children's throats and say that it's good, because it's not," said Margie Mendez, a teacher at the local grade school. "You're not here to see the kids come in with warts, or having stomach viruses, or blisters in their mouths."

Naturally, Merco's management of the dump didn't improve. In 1999, the company was forced to admit that it had violated federal and state regulations by not properly treating the New York City sewage sludge for bacteria and pathogens. This was the second time Merco had been caught. In 1994, it was fined $12,800 for dumping untreated sludge. This situation is serious, since untreated sludge can carry e. coli, salmonella, and TB. In 1996, there was an outbreak of New York flu virus in Van Horn, Texas, 30 miles west of the dump site. "We feel like guinea pigs," says Addington.

The town of Sierra Blanca is so destitute it can't even afford to build its own sewer system.