Photograph by Steven Higgs
The property beyond this sign is the site of the Kyle Hall Farm CAFO in Lawrence County. IDEM issued a permit for the 30,000-turkey facility, despite its location atop karst topography and the encroaching flood waters from the Salt Creek.
When we decided to launch the "Indiana Environment Revisited" (IER) project, I knew it would be an emotional journey. As an Indiana-based environmental journalist for the past 27 years, I'm intimately familiar with the anger and frustration that comes from being victimized by our state's extreme brand of environmental neglect.
I expected to encounter a long list of fevered citizens, like Rex Jones from Henry County, who would tell us, "My honest opinion of IDEM? ... They are a big joke." I mean, I couldn't disagree with him or any of the other rural Hoosiers we've interviewed in the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) series, all of whom echoed Jones's sentiment.
But because I spent four years working inside IDEM with the Media and Communications Services team, getting to know and, on more than a few occasions, befriending the men and women who are legislatively charged with protecting Indiana citizens from air, water and land pollution, I knew I was venturing onto sensitive new terrain.
I had only been to IDEM once since I left my position as editor of the agency's newspaper Indiana Environment in 2000. Exactly three years ago this week I interviewed IDEM Commissioner Thomas Easterly, who had occupied the corner office on the 13th floor for less than four months.
On April 9, I once again turned right from the Indiana Government Center North's revolving door, slipped into the elevator and set my sights on IDEM's 12th floor public file room, which is situated directly below Easterly's desk.
It was the angry frustration of environmental victims like the Rex and Brenda Jones and other CAFO neighbors we've met and heard from these past few weeks -- nearly all of them Republicans -- that brought me back to the halls of IDEM.
Specifically, I was there to look at IDEM's file on the Lawrence County confined feeding operation I wrote about last issue in "Permitting CAFOs on the water's edge." The facility will house 30,000 turkeys, their waste and the eight to 10 birds a day that will die.
On June 6, 2007, the Bloomington-based engineering firm Hydrogeology Inc. conducted a site visit on the "Kyle Hall Farm CAFO," named after its owner, and concluded the site was inappropriate.
It is situated on "karst bedrock," the study found, and "several sinkholes were identified at the location."
Karst is a landform underlain by limestone bedrock with caves, underground streams and other subterranean features. Indiana's karst region, the limestone belt that extends from Monroe County south to the Ohio River, is called the Mitchell Plain.
The Hydrogeology report said "subsidence sinkholes" can develop in such topography and threaten the stability of the CAFO barns and other structures. In other words, the land beneath the structures could actually cave in beneath them.
Karst is also particularly susceptible to groundwater contamination.
Wikipedia explains the threat: "Water supplies from wells in karst topography may be unsafe, as the water may have run unimpeded from a sinkhole in a cattle pasture, through a cave and to the well, bypassing the normal filtering that occurs in a porous aquifer. Karst formations are cavernous and therefore have high rates of permeability, resulting in reduced opportunity for contaminants to be filtered out."
The Hydrogeology report on the Hall site concluded: "The applicant does not describe how they plan to address karst issues."
An Aug. 27 site visit from an IDEM inspector found that the Hall Farm barns were 550 feet from the Salt Creek and 550 feet from a well. The inspector recommended permit approval.
The site is just upstream from the Salt Creek's confluence with the White River near Coxton and was prone to severe flooding throughout the pre-global warming era.
On Sept. 4, IDEM sent Hall a response to a Department of Natural Resources floodplain analysis that found "the base flood elevation of the site is 506.0 feet." IDEM asked Hall to provide documentation showing the elevations of production barns and the waste storage structure will be "at least 2 feet above 506.0 feet."
IDEM issued Hall a CFO permit on Jan. 11, 2008, IDEM spokeswoman Amy Hartsock said.
When I think of Hartsock, whom I know as Amy who sat 20 feet from my desk, or Cyndi Wagner from the Office of Water Quality, with whom I spent a half hour catching up during my file room visit, I am reminded of former independent presidential candidate Ross Perot.
"Good people, bad system," was one of the Texan billionaire's electoral sound bites that helped give the world the Clinton presidency in 1992.
In the course of reporting the CAFO series, Hartsock told me that IDEM has 17 inspectors assigned to the Hall Farm and 2,220 other permitted CAFOS.
According to IDEM data from July 2007, the state at that time had 2,226 confined feeding facilities holding 2.49 million swine, cattle and poultry. That's on average 130 CAFOs with 146,471 animals per inspector.
In addition to those 130 confined feeding facilities, the 17 inspectors are also responsible for landfills, industrial waste sites, construction debris sites, waste transfer stations, open dumps, waste tire processing sites and waste tire dumps, to name but a few.
They also respond to citizen complaints on facilities regulated under all of those program areas.
The professionals who staff IDEM are not the reason Indiana has the 49th worst environment in the nation, most recently exposed by Forbes magazine. The politicians who occupy the Statehouse just across the Government Center Plaza -- the governor, state senators and representatives -- bear that responsibility.
Gov. Mitch Daniels appointed Easterly, who told me four years ago, without a hint of shame: "I don't think we have a resource problem. I think we have an efficiency problem."
Environmental crises in Indiana decision-making circles are not defined by environmental threats posed to citizens like Rex and Brenda Jones. Daniels and the 150 men and women of the Legislature, whose loyalties lie with the polluters, only act when an environmental issue becomes a political crisis.
They're dominated by conservative extremists, which means they do not let environmental protection interfere with the flow of commerce, or the flow of polluter profits into their campaign coffers. Their mission is to keep IDEM from protecting citizens from environmental threats, not to enable it.
At IDEM, environmental action means moving inadequate resources from one area of environmental protection to another. I haven't looked deeply enough into the IDEM organization chart under Daniels, but given the political outrage his CAFO policies have ignited in rural Indiana, my educated guess is that this is probably one of the higher-priority programs.
It makes me wonder exactly what those 17 CAFO inspectors are not doing. Makes me shudder, actually.
That will be among the issues we will explore as we shift the IER focus to our next topic: combined sewer overflows (CSOs).
Chief among the enviro-political crises during my four years as the Indiana Environment editor was water pollution from the 100-plus Indiana communities with antiquated sewer systems that, by design, discharged untreated waste into Indiana's rivers, creeks and streams.
The crisis was not the billions of gallons of untreated human and animal waste that pours into state waterways every time we have heavy rains or snows anywhere in the state. It was that Indiana was so neglectful of its waterways that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was threatening to strip the state of its authority to protect them.
From what I gathered from my conversation with Wagner, EPA did just that with several of Indiana's larger CSO communities.
She was brought in to salvage the situation and is now in charge of IDEM's CSO program.
Talk about sensitive terrain.
Steven Higgs can be reached at editor@bloomingtonalternative.com.