A brown frothy mix of water tumbled from the mouth of a 42-inch pipeline to a cinderblock basin covered with slime, its rim shining with the gloss of accumulated muck.
The air smelled of boiled sour chicken.
Beyond the pit of churning water, 12 brown ponds spread across a patch of earth edged by dirt roads.
"Welcome to the chicken sewer," said Larry Parlin, as he looked at Livingston's Industrial Waste Water facility, which his company, Environmental Management Services, runs for the city.
Waste it might be, but it's no sewer. The 283 million gallons of water in the ponds came from the nearby Foster Farms chicken processing plant. The water that is used to clean chickens in the nearby plant ends up here.
Five days a week, roughly 4.4 million gallons of water empties into these ponds along the Merced River. It is through these ponds that the plant's dirty water is meant to be cleansed. About half the water is spread across nearby reclamation fields, said Parlin. The rest seeps into the soil below where toxins, in theory, filter out. Leftover solids are trucked away and used as fertilizer.
But the ponds haven't been working as they should. They are leaching nitrates into the soil and groundwater -- nitrates that in some cases are high above the levels deemed safe by the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, which regulates wastewater discharges.
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Overrun by Waste: Large Agriculture Operations Add Billions to Our Economy but What Price are We Paying?
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By Jonah Owen Lamb
Merced Sun Star - CA, March 21, 2009
Straight to the Source