Some Hicks Valley residents this week expressed dismay that thousands of tons of smelly sludge have been dumped on a pasture owned by the Marin French Cheese Company.
Rancher Bill Barboni Jr. noted the ranchland drains into Marin Municipal Water District's Soulajule Reservoir and said the county should have warned residents at a public meeting.
"There's general concern among everybody in the valley," Barboni said. "I can't believe the county permitted this kind of thing." In fact, the county didn't permit it. It didn't have to.
Here's what happened:
Ranchers Jim and Ed Grossi, who lease land from the Cheese Factory for silage production, bought 6,000 to 7,000 tons of treated sludge from Redwood Sanitary Landfill, which gets the muck from sewage-treatment plants all over the Bay Area.
In this case, the sludge was dumped at Redwood by East Bay Municipal Utility District, said Lauren Fondahl, an environmental engineer with the federal Environmental Protection Agency's San Francisco office.
Not so, said Riesenfeld. "They wanted to keep truck traffic off the highway," he said. "They wanted to do it at a time of day that would be the least problematic."
The EPA's Fondahl said her agency regulates the sludge at the treatment-plant level. However, the sludge can conceivably violate the Clean Water Act if it comes in contact with surface water.
Other violations depend on what the land is used for. In the Grossis' case, they must wait one to two months before growing the silage. The wait is one month for grazing cattle and up to 30 months for food crops.
Carlsen said he plans to monitor the situation to make sure it's within health standards. "I think the idea of applying material that has the potential of [carrying] heavy metals and the potential of [carrying] pathogens" is cause for concern.
"The assumption was to apply the material before the rains start," Carlsen said.
For his part, Stewart said on Wednesday, "It's been completed for several days. It's not going to occur again without a countywide policy in place."
Libby Pischel, a spokeswoman for Marin Municipal Water District, said the district is not concerned about the muck contaminating the Soulejule Reservoir.