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Saturday, August 16, 2008
Environment - Still more on: massive fish kill in Union City
Updating this ILB entry from August 11th, Joy Leiker reports today in the Muncie Star-Press, under the headline "Attorney says manure could not kill 25,000 fish."
UNION CITY -- A hog farmer's attorney denies the state's assertion that its manure spill last week caused thousands of fish to die in the Little Mississinewa River.The side-bar to a Star-Press story dated Aug. 11th quotes from the 23-point complaint filed in Ohio."It seems improbable to me that the amount of runoff from the type of application that occurred could cause a fish kill of the magnitude that the government's talking about," said Jack Van Kley, attorney for Ohio farmer Rick Kremer's Stateline Agri Inc.
On Aug. 8, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and Indiana Department of Natural Resources responded to a fish kill that the DNR said killed about 25,000 fish. That same day, IDEM said Kremer's company had taken responsibility for the manure that flowed into the river.
The previous weekend, 27,000 gallons of manure had been applied to a field near Randolph County's Base Road and 625-E. Heavy rains on Aug. 4 washed that manure into an underground field tile, which dumps into the Little Mississinewa.
Van Kley admits "there may have been some runoff from a field," though he wonders whether something else contributed to the pollution of the river. He noted there are lagoons and other hog farms in the vicinity.
IDEM said there's no indication that anything else, or any other party, contributed to the fish kill.
"The pollution of this nature normally moves as a slug. Once it passes, it's gone," Van Kley said. "It's kind of hard to say that Stateline's manure application caused the problem, because there was no real evidence of that."
The evidence he's looking for includes actual manure, or elevated ammonia levels, remaining in the water. But by the time the spill was discovered -- first by someone in Union City's Harter Park -- that evidence already was removed from Kremer's farm ground.
Van Kley has worked as an environmental attorney for 28 years, in both private practice and for the state of Ohio, according to his firm's Web site. He said he's seen a number of fish kills.
"I know what a fish kill looks like and what causes it and how it acts, and this one doesn't look like it came from a simple manure application because of the volume that could come off a field; ... (there) doesn't appear to be enough manure to do that," Van Kley said.
But Stateline Agri's problems in Randolph County look a lot like the complaint lodged against Kremer and his company in Ohio. Last month, the Ohio Attorney General's office filed a 23-point complaint against Kremer, Stateline Agri, an employee, Kremer's sons, and Stateline Resource Management, a manure application business operated by one of Kremer's sons.
Van Kley said Ohio's charges are "greatly exaggerated" and a result of the fact that Kremer wouldn't settle and pay the fines the state wanted. He said those fines added up to a six-figure settlement.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 16, 2008 09:17 AM
Posted to Environment