Instead of my normal morning bike commute, this morning I made the cold rain-filled walk to the Rayburn House Office Building for an early hearing.   The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee held a hearing called "The Clean Water Act after 37 years: Recommitting to the Protection of the Nation's Waters."  You can watch a video of the hearing here. 

This oversight hearing explored whether the states and EPA have effectively used the enforcement tools at their disposal in responding to violations of the Clean Water Act. 

I went to the hearing expecting to hear the normal political hoopla.  What I didn't expect was Judy Treml's testimony.  She said that every member of her family, including her infant daughter, became seriously ill from exposure to contaminated water.  You see the Treml family lives across the street from a large scale animal feeding operation that, according to  Mrs. Treml, spread 80,000 gallons of liquid manure across its fields in winter.

In her written testimony, Mrs Treml described how melting snow caused the manure to run off the field the field and into a neighboring stream:

 My husband, Scott, came home from work and watched the tractor enter the field and begin spreading the liquid waste on the ground. He also watched as the manure ran into the ditch line and down the incline of the field towards School Creek, which runs under our road and through our property.

The way wastes are stored and applied has profound effects on human health and the environment.  Releases from storage areas and runoff from manure spread on fields contain a host of nasty contaminants, including parasites and bacteria.  This pollution can seep into drinking water and contaminate surface waters.  An NRDC report documents the health effects associated with lagoon discharges and spraying fields with too much manure.  According to the report, water contaminated by animal manure can contribute to human diseases such as acute gastroenteritis, fever, kidney failure, and even death.

Mrs. Treml talked in detail about her fear for her children.  She even brought bottles of water collected from her home to show the House committee, explaining that this is the water that her three children were exposed to.   In her written testimony Mrs. Treml described how her youngest daughter, then only a few months old, became ill shortly after they discovered the manure runoff.

All through that night and Saturday morning, we continued the best we could to push fluids. We could not feed her breast milk as we didn't know whether or not E. coli bacteria passed through breast milk and we pushed as much of the non‐milk formula we could. Every 6 hours our pediatrician called and by 9pm Saturday with no let up in the vomiting or bowel movements, we brought her into the local emergency room, to monitor her hydration. It was there the Emergency Room doctor told me what my daughter's doctor just didn't have the heart to tell me. When I asked the ER doctor, what she thought Samantha's illness was from she stated that in her medical opinion it was her exposure in her Sunday night bath that infected Samantha.  I was devastated. I had unwittingly exposed my baby to E. coli contaminated water, because I trusted our safe water sample and I didn't have any knowledge that the manure applied to the land could cross under a road and contaminate our drinking water well.

Unfortunately, due to legal loopholes-such as an EPA regulation adopted late in the Bush administration — and weak enforcement, factory farms have often escaped needed pollution control. Animal factories are not the only pollution sources that have avoided requirements, a New York Times series called, 'Toxic Waters' reports that fewer than three percent of more than 500,000 violations of the Clean Water Act over the past five years by various facilities resulted in fines or other substantial penalties by state officials, and that 40 percent  of the country's community water systems violated the Safe Drinking Water Act at least once last year.   But just because under-enforcement is common doesn't make it acceptable for an industry as polluting as the industrial livestock sector.

The problems caused by animal factories can be addressed.  EPA should adopt clearer, stronger regulations, and enforcement officials need to step up oversight of these operations. That kind of leadership will spur the use of more sustainable livestock production and alternative means of waste disposal. Hopefully today's hearing and Judy Treml's story will help us get there a little quicker.