STANTONSBURG — Don Webb, a former hog farmer and founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance in 1992, said he saw pink sludge in a Stantonsburg waterway the morning of March 15 when he was driving down Sand Pit Road.
The pink sludge was caused by a hog waste spill in Greene County near the Wilson County border.
“(Representatives of the farm) weren’t even down here when I came by here that morning,” he said, adding he was the first person to call David May, Water Quality’s aquifer protection regional supervisor.
May said he received a phone call from Webb, and within minutes an email was sent to his office from the farm, but he didn’t see it until later that day.
A neighbor, Katie Joyner, said she saw the pink sludge in the waterway that wraps around her home on March 14. A video of Joyner and her grandson being interviewed by Webb and Rick Dove, president of Coastal Carolina Riverwatch, shows her grandson insisting he saw the pink water two weeks earlier when he was repairing his grandmother’s roof.
The Waterkeeper Alliance took samples from what the Alliance and Coastal Carolina Riverwatch say is a blue line stream three days after the report on the spill was made on March 15.
Larry Baldwin, an Alliance inspector, said the fecal coliform count was 1,545 coliform units per 100 milliliters of water sample at the Sand Pit Road site. Anything over 200 CFUs per 100 milliliters is considered a high count.
“We had numbers that were almost eight times that at the Sand Pit Road site,” Baldwin said.
Across the road where the unnamed stream meanders around Joyner’s home and continues along Bad Alley Road, the count was 300 CFUs per 100 milliliters.
Baldwin said nitrogen, phosphorous and ammonia levels were also elevated, indicating waste in the water.
“Even on Monday (March 18),” he said, “we’re seeing some elevated levels of all the parameters we test for,” he said.
That incident wasn’t the first time water samples have come back from a lab with high levels from the same waterway near the farm, in operation since 1991.
Webb provided The Free Press with documentation of three water test results that were performed by Southern Testing & Research Laboratories in Wilson at various locations near the farm in January 1995.
The results were 190,000 CFUs per 100 milliliters, 246,000 CFUs per 100 milliliters and “Too Numerous To Count,” according to the report of analysis.
“It was pink all the way to the tree line,” Webb said. Just beyond the tree line is Contentnea Creek, which is about a mile from the spill site. The creek drains into the Neuse River.
Under the federal Clean Water Act, a facility that continues to discharge pollutants into public trust waters could receive penalties up to $10,000 a day, Dove said.
The farm, owned by Murphy Family Ventures, received a notice of violation from the N.C. Division of Water Quality March 21 for discharging hog waste into surface water.
The Division also issued notices of deficiency on March 11, Feb. 6 and Jan. 9 for a high freeboard level and failure to maintain waste levels in the lagoon in accordance with the farm’s Certified Animal Waste Management Plan.
The hog farm is required to respond by the end of the week.
In October 1999, the farm, then owned by Donald Parker and contracted with Murphy Family Farms, was cited for a 16-inch freeboard — the distance from the surface of the lagoon’s waste to the rim of the lagoon. The report also noted the total freeboard and storm capacity at the farm was less than adequate.
The incident occurred in the morning at the spray field. The Division of Water Quality inspectors who came to the site following the October incident reported a cap had become loose on an irrigation hydrant while spraying effluent on a field, and the hydrant’s opening wasn’t large enough to automatically shut down the pump. Waste in the waterway wasn’t spotted until 4 p.m.
The investigation revealed nearly a month later the discharge, which spread through a wooded area to the unnamed waterway, occurred because the hydrant was not capped securely after the field was sprayed the previous day, according to the Division’s violation notice.
Fecal coliform sample levels in the waterway exceeded 30,000 CFUs per 100 milliliters.
Stantonsburg Farm was issued a notice of violation Nov. 16, 1999 for failing to comply with the performance standards of the general permit issued to the farm.
Margaret Fisher can be reached at 252-559-1082 or Margaret.Fisher@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter @MargaretFishr.