Let’s review two historical events which share some parallels with what our residents are facing today.

The first case dates to the early 1970s in a small town known as Times Beach, Missouri.   Times Beach was a quaint area, dotted with farms and horse farms and arenas and small cottage style homes lining the Merrimac River.  Dust was a major problem in the horse arenas, and dirt roads.  Enter Russel Bliss—a farmer and waste hauler.  He had been collecting and applying waste oil to the horse arenas and applying and dumping the material on his land.  At first, this waste product appeared to be a cheap and effective dust control method and a great way to recycle a waste product.   He was eventually contracted by City to spray the municipal roads.   Mr Bliss land applied thousands of gallons of the used oily products on his own land, on the roads, parking lots, horse arenas, and dozens of other areas.   At 6 cents a gallon; this material was considered a bargain but the residents reported the material had an “awful odor” and changed the roads to a purple color (Dyrud, 2018).  Residents and animals began to get sick, and some were even dying.  

In 1971, A resident named Judy Piatt paid Mr Bliss to spray her horse arena.  Several of her animals got sick and died shortly after, and her children had taken up a non-specific type of flu like illness.  She began to follow Bliss and his trucks for months and witnessed his activities collecting the material from the processors.  As the author Dyrud puts it; “Piatt sent her list, supported by photographs and documentation, to various state and federal officials and waited for action. Nothing happened: there were no visits from officials, no one collected soil samples for testing, and no one contacted her.” (Dyrud, 2018) 

The CDC did review the activity in the mid 1970s, but they were unable to identify a specific chemical.  The toxicity of the chemicals applied was not known at the time.  It wasn’t until 1979 that the EPA became involved.  As it turns out, Mr Bliss was spreading residual oily chemicals left over from Agent Orange production, which contained Dioxin and PCBs.  The town was evacuated for a flood, and the residents were never allowed to return as the flood spread the Dioxin far and wide.  The town was designated a superfund site in 1983.  The town was dis-incorporated in 1985, the same year that the EPA listed Dioxin as a probable human carcinogen--- nearly 15 years after it destroyed a town.  In total, Mr Bliss spread 160,000 gallons of waste oil over 4 years.  This is a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions of gallons of food waste spread in Cumberland County alone.

The farmers, processors, and DEP would be quick to point out that they are not spreading industrial products.  They are spreading food waste, which is inherently “safe.”  Could Food Waste cause the same kind of disaster?  Yes, it already has, and you’ve likely already heard of it:  Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), better known to the public as Mad Cow Disease.

Mad Cow Disease was spread through food waste byproduct known as Meat and Bone Meal or MBM. 

“During rendering, carcasses from which all consumable parts had been removed were milled and then decomposed in large vats by boiling at atmospheric or higher pressures, producing an aqueous slurry of protein under a layer of fat (tallow). After the fat was removed, the slurry was desiccated into a meat and bone meal product that was packaged by the animal food industry and distributed to owners of livestock and other captive animals.” (Brown, 6)  “Cattle carcasses and carcass wastes were then recycled through the rendering plants, increasing the levels of the now cattle-adapted pathogen in the protein supplement and eventually causing a full-scale BSE epidemic”  (Brown, 7)

Mad Cow disease infected more than 200,000 cattle, in the 1980s and early 1990s which led to an outbreak of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, the human variant.  Since 1994, it has infected dozens of humans with an untreatable, progressive, and fatal disease.   Its important to note that the rendering process that created Meat and Bone meal, is a similar rendering process that creates the meat sludges being land applied in the state.  Even if these materials are safe in small quantities--- they are being applied in the hundreds of millions of gallons quantity which is a different problem entirely. 

History should teach us that the ultimate problem is that “we don’t know what we don’t know” until it’s too late. ­ We cannot simply assume that applying hundreds of millions of gallons of waste is safe because a processor tells us it is. History is full of situations where human arrogance led to crisis.  The residents of this state do not wish to be part of the next disaster.  The time to act is now, not years from now when it’s too late.

Read More about Times Beach
https://peer.asee.org/a-midwestern-ghost-town-times-beach-missouri.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/20/us/missouri-dioxin-cleanup-a-decade-of-little-action.html

Read More about Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/animal-health-literacy/all-about-bse-mad-cow-disease

https://berkeleysciencereview.com/2012/05/problematic-prions-and-the-history-of-mad-cow-disease/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2631690/pdf/11266289.pdf