A poultry plant, years of groundwater contamination and, finally, a court settlement
Source: Washington Post
A poultry plant, years of groundwater contamination and, finally, a court settlement
Residents in Millsboro, Del., sued the local Mountaire facility, which they suspect is linked to their cancers and other serious health problems
By Darryl Fears
April 13, 2021 at 3:51 p.m. EDT
Even with the stomach cramps, nausea and hurried trips to the bathroom several times a day, Gary Cuppels never suspected his tap water. He kept drinking it, brushing his teeth with it and bathing in it.
Not until he came home one night and found a large pallet of water bottles on his porch did Cuppels start to worry. A note from his “friends at Mountaire,” the chicken processing plant up the road in rural Delaware, said he should drink the bottled water instead of the groundwater his deep well pulled from the northern Chesapeake aquifer. That was in 2017. Investigators would later find that abnormally high level of nitrogen produced by the plant had long made the drinking supply dangerous, possibly even deadly.
On Monday, Mountaire agreed to pay $65 million to settle a state lawsuit filed by Cuppels and hundreds of other residents who rely on the aquifer for water. The nation’s sixth-largest poultry company, which is based in Arkansas, also entered into a federal consent decree that requires it to upgrade its facilities at a cost of $120 million and pay another $20 million for maintenance of the improved operations.
According to the Delaware Superior Court lawsuit, the company “sprayed billions of gallons of highly contaminated wastewater and liquefied sludge onto fields,” which then percolated into the groundwater for nearly two decades.
While Mountaire was violating its permits, the suit contends, the state Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control repeatedly failed to adequately punish the company. A consent decree the state originally sought with Mountaire amounted to less than half of what was announced Monday and “was basically a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound,” attorney Chase T. Brockstedt said Monday.
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/04/13/poultry-plant-years-groundwater-contamination-finally-court-settlement/
