Legal Actions Follow Suspicious Vandalism In Biggest Hog Waste Spill In Indiana History - 04/09

[hatrack]

EDIT

On April 30, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management obtained a court order to lower a lagoon brimming with manure at the abandoned Muncie Sow Unit. The manure was being hauled by an IDEM contractor in tanker trucks to an Indianapolis wastewater treatment facility at a cost of 9 cents a gallon.

But on May 10, the dike of the lagoon was damaged, emptying 4 million to 5 million gallons of manure into a ditch that drains into the river and killing more than 1,000 fish. That ended the need to continue the costly draining of the lagoon. According to the Hoosier Environmental Council, it was probably the largest hog manure spill in the history of Indiana.

Court documents show that the damage to the lagoon wasn't the only suspicious activity at the cleanup site. On May 21, equipment owned by Wealing Brothers, an IDEM cleanup contractor from Fowler, was vandalized. The air bags for the air brakes on a parked semitractor-trailer were cut. Newspaper was stuffed into a fuel tank of the semi. Debris was placed into the line of the pump that was being used to pump manure out of the lagoon. And an oar was stolen from a boat being used to determine the depth of the lagoon.

IDEM had paid $195,964 to Wealing Brothers to remove millions of gallons of manure from the lagoon, and it would have paid the contractor much more had the dike not been damaged. "There was an investigation into the breach of the lagoon that was inconclusive," IDEM spokesman Barry Sneed said recently. "Should something develop with that, we would pursue it."

EDIT

http://www.thestarpress.com/article/20100214/NEWS01/2140327

[Turbineguy]

1. That's the advantage of vandalism.

Nobody expects them to be socially or environmentally conscious.

[Cirque du So-What]

2. Follow the money

Cui bono? Who benefits?

The current owners no longer have to pay for removal of the remaining sewage in the lagoon, but vengeance on the part of the previous owner is also a possibility. In any event, I hope investigators are able to determine who vandalized equipment and caused an environmental disaster. This isn't the sort of 'prank' that bored high-school kids would undertake; there's a stronger motivation than boredom in this case.

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not in a position to offer a valid opinion, but I think it's a travesty that the original owner hasn't been charged in criminal court since he abandoned the property in 1999.