Add Coxton citizen Barbara Artinian to the list of rural Hoosiers who would bust a gut at 1999 claims by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) that one of the agency's priorities is to "target children's health."

IDEM's mantra du jour in early 1999 was "protecting children from environmental threats." It had a "children's environmental health coordinator." One of the state's most powerful industrial lobbyists once characterized IDEM Commissioner John Hamilton's emphasis on it as "playing the kid card."

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Third in a series

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The lead story in the January-February edition of IDEM's newspaper, the Indiana Environment & Materials Exchange, began: "Parents of the estimated 100,000 children who attend child-care facilities in Indiana will be better prepared to protect their children from environmental threats under a new initiative announced in December by IDEM and first lady Judy O'Bannon."

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Links to "Indiana Environment Revisited - CAFOs"
Video Conversations with Barbara Sha Cox, Photo Album, Amber's blog

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Artinian and her neighbors understand that children shouldn't be exposed to lead, pesticides, asbestos, radon, mercury and other hazardous substances at day care centers. But less than 10 years after Gov. Frank O'Bannon's IDEM talked about protecting kids from Indiana's environment, a Coxton infant could die from pollution released from a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) near her home, permitted by Gov. Mitch Daniels' IDEM.

Approximately 40 families live in the small Lawrence County community where 30,000 turkeys, their waste and carcasses will be confined year-round at one facility in barns and other structures, she said. The family that lives two homes away from the CAFO has a child younger than a year.

"She has a diseased lung, and she has to sleep with a breathing apparatus now," Artinian said. "Her doctor said if the turkey operation goes in, there's no way she can survive."

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Alan Hamilton is another Coxton citizen who, along with rural Hoosiers in Randolph and dozens of other Indiana counties, can wax eternal about IDEM's shortcomings when it comes to protecting children or anyone else from the environmental threats posed by CAFOs.

Standing along a fence that separates a neighbor's home from the under-construction CAFO by a mere 150 feet, Hamilton clicks off a list of examples of state and local officials' abdication of their environmental-protection responsibilities.

For example, the Kyle Hall Farm CAFO, as the Coxton facility is known, sits on the Salt Creek a quarter mile upstream from its confluence with the White River. As Hamilton speaks, the creek has overflowed its banks such that a nearby slightly right-leaning, "High Water" road sign is submerged to just below the "r."

Pointing to flood water on the CAFO property, Artinian noted that this late-March wet-weather event is a "minor flood compared to what we've had." She points uphill several yards to a tree to illustrate how high the water has gotten in the past.

The wells that Coxton citizens get their drinking water from are located within two miles of the CAFO, Hamilton said, citing a July 24, 2007, study prepared by Hydrogeology Inc. of Bloomington titled "Kyle Hall Farm CAFO: Preliminary Geologic and Hydrologic Assessment."

"The proposed location is situated in limestone bedrock, which raises concerns about the stability of the CAFO structure and also the potential for contaminants to enter the groundwater system," the Hydrogeology report's conclusion said.

Both the CAFO and the land where the turkey

manure eventually will be applied for fertilizer are in a floodplain, the conclusion continued. "According to IDEM's guidelines a CAFO cannot be within a floodplain."

The report also warned that surface runoff from the CAFO could contaminate Salt Creek and the East Fork of the White River.

"Based on the findings in this report it is the professional opinion of the authors that this is a poor location for the proposed CAFO and the permit should not be approved," the report concluded.

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Artinian said the CAFO owners didn't even know which direction north was on the first site plan they filed with IDEM. Nor, Hamilton added, did they mention flooding or its location in a floodplain.

"It was just ignored entirely," he said.

After neighbors raised concerns, IDEM contacted the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR), which produced a report that said the CAFO was in a floodway.

"You cannot build in a floodway," Artinian said.

IDEM then decided it wanted DNR to conduct a study, Artinian said.

"We were under the impression that a study was going to be done, I mean a thorough study," she said. "What happened was some papers were shuffled here and there, a little bit of data was obtained from other areas around here, and they came up with the determination that it's okay."

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Water pollution isn't the issue for the infant Coxton girl with the lung disease. It's the air. And again, IDEM's Office of Air Quality offers no protection, the citizens say.

Artinian said part of the CAFO operation will involve slow cooking dead birds and manure, literally, in the open air.

The eight to 10 birds that die each day will be stacked and covered with chemical-laced sawdust and the birds' manure in a three-sided building with a tin roof. "Once it gets to 130 degrees in the barn, the dead birds will actually start to cook, and the smell will be unreal," Artinian said. "We were told we'd just have to live with it."

The resulting turkey compost will only be removed once a year, she said.

Smell is only one consequence of a barn full of rotting dead birds, Hamilton added. "It's the perfect breeding ground for flies."

There's also the feathers, Artinian said, and the coyotes and the rodents.

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IDEM and the other state agencies point to each other and say the problem is that Lawrence County does not have any zoning laws, Hamilton said. They also "aren't worried about the air pollution or emissions."

"IDEM will tell you they're not about a good-neighbor policy," he said.

Noting that work is being done on the CAFO site, Artinian said as far as neighbors know, the property owner, who purchased the land for the facility but lives elsewhere in Lawrence County, has never said where he plans to place the CAFO structures.

"To this day we still don't know where the barns are going to be," Artinian said. "I don't know that anyone does, or that IDEM even cares. I really don't think they do care."

Hamilton said he's not sure if it's a lack of manpower at IDEM or what, but the agency hardly ever shows up. Oversight responsibility for CAFOs rests with the owner-operators.

"They just assume that they're going to be truthful," he said of IDEM.

Randolph County family farmer Allen Hutchison said much of the problem with IDEM, in fact, is a lack of manpower.

"IDEM's only got enough inspectors to get around to each of them once in every six to seven years," he said. "And they always call before they go."

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IDEM spokeswoman Amy Hartsock wrote in an e-mail that Indiana has higher livestock agriculture standards than the federal government does.

"Regulated

farms are subject to routine inspections and manure management standards designed to protect water quality," she wrote. "All of Indiana's regulated farms are required to meet environmentally-sound manure storage and land-application standards."

IDEM oversees 2,221 permitted livestock operations, she wrote, 1,714 confined feeding operations and 507 concentrated animal feeding operations. CAFOs are larger than CFOs and have more than 30,000 birds.

Hartsock acknowledged, however, that the agency has only 17 inspectors for those 2,200-plus facilities. And citing IDEM's Legislative Report on CFO/CAFO Activities: Senate Resolution 2512-2007, she noted that inspecting and responding to complaints about CAFOs is just part of their work.

In addition to CAFO and CFO inspections, the inspectors are responsible for inspecting municipal landfills, industrial waste disposal sites, construction/demolition debris disposal sites, transfer stations for municipal waste, open dumps, waste tire processing sites and waste tire dumps. And that's a partial list. There are more.

Inspectors also respond to complaints from the public on any of these facilities or related waste disposal practices.

"Approximately 50 percent of an inspector's time was spent doing CAFO and CFO inspections," she wrote.

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When it comes to seeking help from state and local officials, CAFO neighbors in east-central Indiana like Allen and Judy Hutchison share similar experiences with their counterparts in Lawrence County.

Kathryn Petry, another Randolph County farmer, can't imagine a place where IDEM wouldn't permit a CAFO.

"They're building CAFOs within a half a mile of a church," she said.

And their local officials have been as bad or worse than the state agencies.

Hutchison said more than 60 fully loaded cement trucks that weigh eight tons empty were routinely crossing a Randolph County bridge each day when a nearby CAFO was under construction. The bridge had an eight-ton limit.

"They had the sign right down there by the bridge," he said. "And we complained, so they came out there and took the sign down."

Loretta Miller, another Randolph County family farmer, said the commissioners cited jobs as the reason for approving so many CAFOs.

"When people from Ohio come and run it, that's not adding jobs to Randolph County," she said. "It's adding problems to Randolph County."

Miller argued that some of those who voted for CAFOs have financial interests in CAFOs.

Two of Lawrence County's three commissioners have confined feeding permits themselves, Hamilton said. One has a direct interest in the Kyle Farm Hall CAFO.

"He's contracted to take the manure off of this site and to spread it onto another farm that he leases for farming purposes," Hamilton said. "And this farm sits in the bottoms, and right now it's totally underwater. It's surrounded by Salt Creek."

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The Hutchisons, the Petrys and others, like Rex and Brenda Jones from Henry County and Eric and Lisa Stickdorn from Wayne County, say moving out of their homes may be their only hope of escape.

"It won't be Indiana because Indiana's not safe," Allen Hutchison said.

"Another state, that's for sure," Judy Hutchison agreed.

But Miller said moving may not even be an option for CAFO neighbors. Living near one isn't exactly a selling point.

"Your home is your investment," she said, "and if it's worth half of what you gave for it, you can't decide to move."

Steven Higgs can be reached at editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com.