2/8/2016 11:11:00 AM
By Lidia Epp
It was a sunny Sunday afternoon in late October 2014. My husband and I were enjoying a soft shell crab sandwich at the Blue Crab Festival in West Point, Va., just a few miles from our home. Local arts and crafts were on the display, the Main Street was filled with people, cotton candy carts, draft beer stands, merry-go-round, the usual.
A lady with the Sierra Club baseball hat and a handful of flyers came over and asked if we know about the problem with biosolids.
“Biosolids?” we both asked in unison. “What’s that?”
“It’s a municipal sewage sludge and industrial waste that is applied to the farmland as a fertilizer. A company called Synagro applied for a permit to spread industrial waste on 17,000 acres in our area over the next 10 years. This practice is mostly unmonitored and the permit is very likely to be granted,” she answered, frowning.
“WHAT?!” we screamed, in unison again, and looked at each other in horror. This woman is crazy! This just can’t be!