[USCC] California Composting in the news

[Jim McNelly]

Friday, April 20, 2001
Los Angeles Times
News from Inland Valley in the Times Community Newspapers

Prison workers blame ills on plant Attorney for employees of California 
Institution for Women faults nearby composting facility for respiratory 
distress, headaches and other ailments.

By DAVID HERMANN, DAVID.HERMANN@LATIMES.COM

Dust and odors from a plant that turns cow manure and sewer sludge into 
fertilizer are making employees and inmates at the California Institution 
for Women sick, according to an attorney who represents more than 20 prison 
employees who have filed workers compensation claims against the state.

Reseda-based attorney John Ferrone said he first learned of health problems 
at the Chino area prison two years ago when a worker came to him 
complaining of allergies and breathing problems related to the nearby 
composting plant, which is owned by the Inland Empire Utilities Agency.

Ferrone said the number of claims grew steadily until it snowballed in 
recent weeks.
"I filed 10 [claims] just yesterday.  I've been filing them on a weekly 
basis," he said.  Ferrone said the complaints listed in the claims range 
from burning eyes, allergies, and headaches to breathing difficulty, 
temporary paralysis and cancer.  Ferrone cautioned that the majority of 
people he represents are not suffering from life threatening or exotic 
illnesses, but from respiratory distress and headaches that cost them money 
for medical care and time away from work.

He said employees are not the only ones whose health has suffered at the 
prison.
"At least the officers can go home," he said.  "The inmates are trapped 
there."
Prison spokesman Lt.  Robert Sebald said dust and odors from the composting 
plant, which sits about 200 yards away across Chino-Corona Road, have been 
a problem for the prison's 600 employees and nearly 1,800 inmates ever 
since the plant began operating on the site of a former cornfield more than 
five years ago.

The prison has inadequate air conditioning.  Windows there are frequently 
left open for ventilation and Sebald acknowledged that the fine dust tends 
to work its way inside the institution. Sebald said prison administrators 
have been working with the Inland Empire Utilities Agency to reduce the 
amount of dust that blows into the prison and have had some success.

He declined to talk about the possible effects of the dust on health, the 
worker's compensation claims or to allow interviews with inmates, saying it 
was against prison policy.

An attorney for the California Department of Corrections appeared Thursday 
before the San Bernardino County Planning Commission to state concerns 
about the proposal to expand the composter.

"What we really want to ask is that the Inland Empire Utilities Agency 
continues to work with us," staff counsel Keri Faseler said.

The commission postponed consideration of the expansion -- which would 
increase the maximum daily limit of sewer sludge coming into the composter 
from 150 tons per day to 200 tons per day and allow the agency to import up 
to 400 tons per day of wood shavings and rice hulls to mix with the 
composted waste -- until May 24.

Utilities agency officials say the expansion, which would not increase the 
size of the plant, will reduce the salt levels in their fertilizer, making 
it more marketable, and allowing them to move compost off site more quickly.


County planner Tina Twing, who wrote a staff report recommending approval 
of the expansion, said that the county has to balance the negative impact 
of the composter with the interests of the entire Chino Basin, where dairy 
cows produce more than one million tons of manure per year that has to be 
disposed of.

"This has to be in somebody's backyard," Twing said, adding that the 
expansion proposal includes conditions that should improve the monitoring 
and regulation of dust and odor problems at the plant.

"As a county, we have to look at all the angles and all the issues," she said.
Two years ago, Warden Susan Poole wrote San Bernardino County planners a 
letter opposing the expansion, stating that it could "pose significant 
difficulties to the California Institution for Women and the confined 
inmate population contained within."
Blanche Batiz, an 18-year employee of the prison, says many of the inmates 
she supervises suffer from the plant's dust and odors, which she described 
as the same as a "real bad dirty diaper bucket."

"Inmates are always complaining about it hurting their noses and their 
chests," she said.  Batiz said people who have never had allergies are 
starting to have allergy symptoms.  She recalled when a strong gust of wind 
kicked up dust from the composter at an inmate craft show in front of the 
prison.

"A big red cloud of that stuff blew up and hit me in the back," she said.
"Three weeks afterward I was still choking.  I was thinking, 'Dang, that 
can't be good for us.' "

Batiz said she used to call air quality officials to complain about dust 
from the plant, but never got any help.

South Coast Air Quality Management District officials could not be reached 
for comment on Thursday, but district records show that the monitoring 
agency received at least 15 complaints about the composter in 2000.

Richard Atwater, the CEO and General Manager of the Inland Empire Utilities 
Agency, acknowledged that the composter produces dust and bad odors, but 
said there has been no scientific proof that exposure to the two causes 
illness.

He said a study conducted by the Riverside County Health Department of a 
larger composting facility near Corona revealed no such health threats.

Atwater said the agency has taken vigorous steps recently to reduce the 
dust that migrates from the plant, including spending about $100,000 to 
cover some of the piles of waste with mesh as well as increased 
watering.  The plant will also stop operations when the wind blows above 25 
mph, Atwater said.

He said plans to relocate operations to several enclosed plants that the 
agency hopes to build in coming years will further reduce dust and odors in 
the region.

One of those sites is next to a new $85-million sewage treatment plant in 
Chino near the Chino Hills border.  Agency officials said they believe it 
makes sense to compost the sewage sludge next to the plant that produces 
it, but Chino Hills officials and residents have opposed any such plan 
claiming that it threatens area property values, their quality of life and 
their health.

One of those residents, Anne Elefante, lives in the Fairfield Ranch 
neighborhood less than a mile from the proposed site of the new plant.

"It gives me a lot of concern," Elefante said.  "If they're incompetent at 
taking care of the problems that occur at their current facility, which is 
only five years old, how can they be trusted to do a better job with more 
complicated equipment and the same management?"