Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
very busy man … call someone else,” and by another, “If you think that's bad, I've actu-
ally seen straw coming out of someone's kitchen tap.” At a public meeting, Bougie would
say only, “Glen Stahl's spreading met the conditions of his permit” and refused to take
regulatory action. Feeling “utterly helpless,” the Tremls walked away. Just then, a man
who worked for the local government pulled them into his office and showed them a
map of the field Stahl had sprayed. A shallow, fractured bedrock, known as karst, lay
just beneath the surface of much of the field. Karst is porous and allows water, and the
things it carries, to seep underground. State guidelines now restrict the spreading of ma-
nure on fields overlying karst.
On March 5, Scott Treml opened the door to Samantha's room to discover that the
baby's hair, face, ears, body, and crib were coated in vomit and diarrhea. By the follow-
ing evening, Samantha was growing listless, and the Tremls rushed her to the emer-
gency room. The ER doctor judged that Samantha had been infected by E.colifrom her
Sunday-night bathwater.
E.coliis the common abbreviation for Escherichiacoli,a rod-shaped bacterium that
originates in the lower intestines of warm-blooded organisms. It is transmitted by an-
imal or human feces. Some strains of E.colican be beneficial to the host, but virulent
forms, such as the O157:H7 strain, can cause painful cramps, diarrhea, kidney failure,
or even death. Coliforms are a family of bacteria including E.coli; they are also associ-
ated with animal or human excrement and cause gastroenteritis. According to the EPA,
the safe limit for both E.coliand other coliforms is zero. In Wisconsin, E.colibacteria
present in water at 1,000 parts per milliliter are sufficient to close a public beach. The
manure flowing from the Tremls' tap had an E.colicount of 2,800 parts per milliliter
and coliform at 9,800 parts per milliliter. Tests of the Tremls' well by the state hygiene
labs confirmed that the water was contaminated by both E.coliand other coliform bac-
teria (which can be present even in clean-looking water).
“I was devastated,” Judy recalled. “I had unwittingly exposed my baby to E.colibe-
cause I didn't have any knowledge that manure applied to the land could contaminate
our drinking water.”
In the hospital, the doctor explained that Samantha faced four possible outcomes:
she could be sick for a few days, then recover; she could suffer kidney damage, then re-
cover; she could suffer permanent kidney damage, which would require a transplant; or
she could die.
As Judy Treml considered this, she suddenly felt woozy and was admitted to the ER,
infected by the same bacteria that had sickened her daughter. At home, her two older
daughters and Scott had also been stricken.
Every member of the Treml family eventually recovered, but in April 2004, with the
help of Midwest Environmental Advocates, Wisconsin's only pro bono environmental
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