The Number One Menace - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 33

Approximately 43 million Americans—15 percent of the population —get their
drinking water from “self-supplied sources,” which usually means wells. But the Safe
Drinking Water Act does not protect wells that serve twenty-five or fewer people; in
those cases, homeowners are responsible for the quality of their own water (and should
test it). The quality of that water depends on what is happening around the well, which
homeowners cannot always control.
“NOT A MATTER OF CONVENIENCE”
In February 2004, just ater Samantha Treml turned six months old, her doctor sugges-
ted that her parents, Scott and Judy Treml, test their well water. The Tremls live in a
rural area near the town of Luxemburg, about fifteen miles east of Green Bay, Wiscon-
sin. Using a testing kit, they sent a sample to a state lab. A few days later they received
the results: the water was free of harmful bacteria and chemicals, and perfectly safe for
Samantha to drink.
Three weeks later, on the evening of February 22, Glen Stahl, who runs a large feedlot
nearby, with about nine hundred cows—a so-called CAFO, or concentrated animal
feeding operation—began to spread liquid manure on the field across the road from the
Tremls' house. Stahl wasn't spreading the manure as fertilizer; his large storage pits had
filled to nearly overflowing, and he was spreading the manure simply to get rid of it. At
the time, this was a common and legal practice.
That day, eighteen inches of snow lay on the ground, but the temperature had risen
to forty degrees and the snow was melting. As the snow melted into water, it carried
Stahl's manure into a ditch, where it pooled and seeped through cracks in the bedrock
into the groundwater, which flowed west, toward the Tremls' well. When Scott Treml
asked Stahl to stop spreading manure, the farmer cursed and said he had permission to
spread from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR), the state envir-
onmental regulatory agency. Stahl continued to spray for three days, eventually coating
the field with eighty thousand gallons of liquid feces.
On February 29, Judy Treml filled her bathtub for six-month-old Samantha; the wa-
ter looked clear and was odorless. The following evening Judy turned on her kitchen
tap. Instead of clear water, a thick brown liquid that smelled of fresh cow dung sputtered
out. Repulsed, she jumped back and asked her husband to call the WDNR.
“Judy, I already tried,” he said. “They don't care.”
Scott had called David Bougie, the WDNR enforcement agent responsible for Stahl
Farms. Bougie visited the field across from Treml's house and judged that there was no
evidence of manure runoff. Calling other DNR officers, Scott was told by one, “I'm a