Did pollutants used as fertilizer kill cattle?

Cities' sewage and industrial pollution had spewed untreated into lakes, rivers and oceans until 1972, when Congress passed the landmark Clean Water Act.

Back then, cleaning up waterways was the first target of the newly created EPA. The agency oversaw a multibillion-dollar grant program that Congress set up to help cities and counties build wastewater treatment plants that would filter out pollutants.

Alaimo, citing data from an environmental engineer hired by McElmurray, found that the Augusta plant was sending out hundreds of truckloads of sludge daily with dangerously high levels of cadmium, molybdenum and chlordane.

The engineer, William Hall of Atlanta, had been a project manager at seven Superfund cleanup sites and had extensive experience with toxic chemicals and heavy metals. His tests found polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs in the Augusta sludge at levels 2,500 times higher than the EPA standard, thallium levels 25 times the legal limit, and arsenic levels twice the government's health standard.

Scientist wrote 'fess up' note
William Miller, a University of Georgia soil scientist who co-authored the 2003 study commissioned by EPA, stands by the conclusions it drew on how much sludge had been applied to McElmurray's and Boyce's land and the composition of it.

But in a draft of the paper obtained by The Associated Press, he wrote a note by hand saying the authors should "fess up" that they didn't know those things.

"Now, we didn't really know exactly how much sludge and we didn't know the quality of sludge," Miller told the AP in an interview. Despite the discrepancies, he maintained the study was valid. "It does not include fake data," he said.

Boyce told the AP that in January 1999 he informed Georgia dairy regulators and EPA that tests he had ordered on the milk from his cows had come back showing high levels of thallium, molybdenum and cadmium.

A top state official alerted the Food and Drug Administration, but Boyce said no one ever told him to stop selling his milk or mentioned a possible threat to public health.

"We were a little startled," Boyce recalled. "They concluded that our permit was good, and we could continue to sell milk. So we did."

EPA lists thallium as a toxic heavy metal that can cause gastrointestinal irritation and nerve damage, but the agency has no standard on the metal's presence in milk. Neither does the Agriculture Department, even though it regards thallium as one of the most dangerous agents of potential bioterrorism against the nation's food supply.

State and EPA officials followed up by testing Boyce's milk, but he said they wouldn't share all their results with him or McElmurray. There is no evidence that those officials took any further action. Boyce said he decided finally to reveal the milk contamination to the AP to illuminate a broader issue.

Farmer: Officials blamed disease
"The real problem was the state and federal regulatory agencies did not do their jobs," he said, adding that EPA and Augusta officials "tried to say we were just a disease-infested herd. Well, that's just a bunch of bullhockey."

Charles Murphy, then head of Georgia's dairy program, said he notified FDA's Administration's office in Atlanta of Boyce's contaminated samples. "I know I talked to them some, shared some of that information with them," he recalled. "I don't think they sent anybody out."

Murphy said he was persuaded by evidence provided to him by Boyce and McElmurray to seek broader state testing of dairy cows, but there wasn't enough money.

FDA officials in Atlanta and Washington said they had no record of Murphy's account.

But over the Super Bowl weekend in 1999, two senior EPA officials, Robert Bastian and Bob Brobst, huddled with the two dairy farmers and their lawyer, Ed Hallman, to talk about sludge.

"They showed us some data," Bastian recalled. "I don't ever remember seeing any milk data."

Boyce and McElmurray insist they shared all of their data with the two EPA officials, including separate tests they ran on milk pulled from store shelves in Charleston, S.C. That milk, which came from other farms in the Southeast, suggested more widespread contamination, they said. It had heavy metals similar to those found in Boyce's milk.

There are no records that anyone became ill because of milk tainted with heavy metals or other contaminants that could have come from sludge.

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