Bio

A Brief Auto-bio of a Gutter Grunt

In my day job I'm a patent lawyer in Amherst, Va. Here's a link to my professional site, which gives my fractured professional history: www.ThePatentGuy.net

My career as a gutter grunt began back about 1970, when I got my first taste of sludge, so to speak.   I was working as a pollution peon in the Ohio Dept. of Health's wastewater engineering division, which converted over to the new Ohio EPA, taking it me with it. Next thing I knew I was pulling filthy, smelly, oily water samples out of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland where US Steel and about 1000 chemical plants were dumping every nasty thing you could imagine straight into the river. The Cuyahoga soon after became internationally famous for catching on fire. Fortunately, it wasn't my cigarette that lit the river. Really. I don't even smoke.

In one case I remember too well, a bunch of us sewer-pipe gophers flipped a coin and I came up the loser. So they tied an oxygen bottle to my back and a rope around one ankle and sent me about 200 feet back into a 3-foot pipe with sample bottles to sample about four different chemical and paint plant effluents that we could hear splashing into the pipe. I believe benzene was the pollutant one of the plants was flushing, and we were trying to figure who was guilty. It's a wonder I have a liver or a working kidney left. Note of advice: never try to turn around in a sewer pipe with an oxygen tank strapped to your back, especially if you're claustrophobic. Thought I'd never get unstuck.

But with respect to the current sludge-war in Virginia, the scariest case I worked on while in the OEPA was one in which we suspected that a small plant -- some sort of rubber processor, I believe -- was dumping acid into a river that ran along the plant's property. The river had had a number of serious fish-kills over the period of a few years. My boss set up a sting by placing a couple of engineers with binocs on a hill overlooking the plant and then calling the plant and telling them we had information that they were holding illegal amounts of pollutants and we were on our way over with a warrant. Sure enough, these idiots immediately started carrying 55 gallon drums of pollutants out back to the river with fork-lifts and emptied them in the river.

As usual, I missed all the fun. I was downstream taking water samples every 10 minutes. But the point here is that my experiences in the OEPA really opened my eyes as to how some of the morons who run industry are willing to put the public's health in serious jeopardy just to save the money it costs to dispose of toxic waste properly. Who knows what sort of illegal "contributions" are being made to the sewage sludge from New York, New Jersey, and Washington, DC that ends up in Appomattox and Buckingham counties?

Thirty-five years later, here I am, schlepping around in the poo again. I became an unwilling gutter grunt in the sludge-war when a farmer applied for a permit to spread sludge next to a rails-to-trails project I've been involved with for a number of years here in Amherst County, Va.

This is a fight no one in their right mind would take on for fun, but I have a lot of very intelligent and dedicated comrades in this war. My experience over the last couple of years has been that people don't find the sludge-war, the sludge-war finds them. Most of the anti-sludge activists I know have been directly and adversely affected by sludge spread near or next to their homes. Unlike the sludge proponents, these dedicated anti-sludge activists are not making a dime in this fight, and many of them are contributing large sums of their own money and huge sums of their time in order to try and protect the environment and the public from sewage sludge. I am proud to be standing with them, and I am ashamed that the U.S. EPA, the Virginia Dept. of Health, and Virginia's state and federal courts have taken an overtly pro-sludge, pro-industry position in the face of mounting evidence that the policy of spreading sewage sludge on farmland is a health and environmental disaster waiting to happen.