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By Sarah Robertson

BOSTON – Soil products derived from sewage sludge have been applied to land for decades – on golf courses, to remediate disturbed land, and even to fertilize crops. Options to dispose of wastewater sludge are limited, and much of it ends up at commercial composting facilities. In the United States, approximately 47% of all “biosolids,” an industry term for sewage sludge, end up applied to land.

While a patchwork of regulations have been aimed at ensuring pathogens and heavy metals do not end up in our food supply through land application of sludge, in recent years it has become clear that a class of harmful manmade chemicals has been spread undetected. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in our soil, food, and water have been linked to the practice, and it is likely that many farms have been contaminated unknowingly.

For some farmers, biosolids have offered an affordable alternative to traditional fertilizers. 

“I don’t think we know the extent of the problem,” state senator Jo Comerford’s office said in a statement. “This is a complex issue that deserves a lot of careful scrutiny and input from stakeholders and policy experts.”

This session, Comerford filed a bill that would protect Massachusetts farmers whose lands are discovered to be contaminated with PFAS from legal and financial repercussions. S.39, An Act protecting our soil and farms from PFAS contamination, would set up a special relief fund to test soil, water, and agricultural products for PFAS, remediate contamination, and pay costs incurred by affected businesses and individuals, including farmworkers’ medical bills. 

Additionally, the bill would require all soil products manufactured with “biosolids” to be labeled as such.  

“Enacting legislation like this would be the first step in a longer process of deciding who might receive funds and how much would be available,” Comerford’s office wrote. “We hope the bill will open up a discussion on the best policy choices…. [The] first step is to test biosolids being used on agricultural land to understand the scope of the problem, and to let farmers know about any products used in their soil so they can make decisions about their land.” 

On May 15, a hearing for S.39 and its sister bill in the House, H.101, was held on Beacon Hill by the Joint Committee on Agriculture. 

“We want to ensure that farmers are not at risk of losing their farms, losing their livelihoods, due to practices employed on their land in the past that have generally been accepted management practices – until this point,” said Winton Pitcoff, director of the Massachusetts Food System Collaborative. “We need more research, we need more education, and we need to be prepared to support farmers in understanding the risks and addressing them where that’s needed.”

Pitcoff’s organization, an association of food and farm policy organizations, helped bring the issue of PFAs contamination of farmland to the legislature’s attention. PFAS, he argued, puts the stability of the state’s food systems at risk. 

Removing contaminated farmland from agricultural use permanently, an approach taken recently in Maine, is “pretty extreme,” Pitcoff said. After several farms had to close due to high levels of PFAS found in milk, soil, water and vegetables, the state banned the land application of biosolids entirely. 

“What this bill does is make sure we’re talking about the protection for farmers,” Pitcoff said. “I think Maine talked about that way too late in their process.”

Laura Spark, a policy advocate with Clean Water Action, called Maine’s approach the “most protective.”

“The problem with PFAS contamination on farms is that PFAS are persistent – they last, essentially, forever,” Spark told legislators. “They are bioaccumulative: the more we consume, the more they accrue in our bodies. And they are toxic at very, very low levels.”

Assessing the Impact

The state Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) currently regulates and permits the land application of biosolids, and determines whether products are fit for agricultural use, or for other uses such as capping landfills. No state or federal limits have yet been set on PFAS levels in land-applied biosolids, but this is expected to change. In Massachusetts, wastewater treatment facilities have been required since 2019 to test for the presence of the chemicals in their sludge.

In 2018, after a review of the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Office of the Inspector General released a report titled EPA Unable to Assess the Impact of Hundreds of Unregulated Pollutants in Land-Applied Biosolids on Human Health and the Environment. This report detailed, among other things, that the agency does not have the data or resources necessary to assess the safety of 352 pollutants found in biosolids – 61 of which are designated as “hazardous” or “priority” pollutants by other EPA programs. 

These chemicals include PFAS, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and other chemicals. The federal agency only sets limits for nine heavy metals in sludge.

Janine Burke-Wells, executive director of the Northeast Biosolids and Residuals Association, said that the farms in Maine with the most potent contamination had applied biosolids originating from a facility that processed high levels of industrial waste, including waste from paper products manufacturers.

“We need to just take a step back and have some more conversations about the risks of various sources,” Burke-Wells said, adding that she would support legislation relieving public water treatment facilities from liability for PFAS contamination, and exempting them from federal Superfund laws in such cases.

Burke-Wells praised Montague Clean Water Facility superintendent Chelsey Little for piloting a town-owned biosolids composting program. “There are others out there that will push this down the pipeline,” she said of other wastewater treatment plant operators. “They’re all deers in the headlights… They don’t want to move until this all shakes out.” 

Movers and Shakers

Casella Waste Systems, one of the largest waste management companies in New England, recycles or disposes of most of the municipal sludge produced in Franklin County. A number of towns coordinate with the Franklin County Solid Waste Management District to ship their sludge to a facility in Lowell, where it is treated further and then trucked away by Casella for either disposal or recycling. 

In the past, Casella contracted directly to dispose of sludge from both the Montague Clean Water Facility and POTW#2 plant in Erving, where residential and paper mill wastewater are treated by ERSECO Inc., a subsidiary of Erving Industries. Casella ended its contract with ERSECO in 2021, citing concerns over “emerging contaminants” such as PFAS, forcing the paper company to procure a more expensive contract sending its sludge to Canada.

“In the absence of federal regulations concerning biosolids management,” said Casella director of communications Jeff Weld, “ states will be introducing unique approaches based on the volume of biosolids production vs. available landfill space, incineration capacity, and suitable land for treated biosolids application purposes…. Our charge is to work within the regulatory framework of each state in which we operate while providing solutions that are economically and environmentally sustainable for our customers and the communities we serve.” 

In recent years Casella has been responsible for most of the biosolids application on farmland in Hampshire and Franklin counties. A public records request filed by this reporter found that between 2010 and 2021, five farms in Greenfield, Hatfield, Sunderland, and Northfield and a parcel of land in Orange were spread with biosolids-based soil products. 

In five instances, the product in question was Casella’s Biomix, produced using sludge from the Erving plant; the Northfield farm contracted with a different company that composed sludge from Nashua, New Hampshire. None of the landowners responded to requests for comment.

“We will continue to engage with all stakeholders concerning the emerging science around PFAS, and will be proactively providing comment and feedback on H.101/S.39,” Weld said.

How Much Farther?

Mickey Nowak, executive director of the Massachusetts Water Environment Association, which represents wastewater operators, said that in his opinion a complete ban on the land application of biosolids would have serious repercussions on an already precarious and expensive waste stream. The state, he said, needs a master plan for biosolids. 

“Anything else will result in chaos,” Nowak said. “If land application is greatly reduced or banned, where will these biosolids go? Incineration and landfill capacity is full. How much farther to distant locations can we ship our biosolids?”

Asked for comment on S.39, Nowak said that “the key to a long-term solution” is the reduction of PFAS at its source. “The bill addresses the concerns of farmers,” he argued, “but says nothing about the concerns of the 120 publicly owned wastewater treatment works in the Commonwealth.”

Last year, Senator Comerford introduced another bill, An Act restricting toxic PFAS chemicals in consumer products to protect our health, which would have banned PFAS in child car seats, cookware, fabric treatments, cosmetics, and furniture. It did not pass. Comerford sat on the legislature’s PFAS Interagency Task Force, which helped to draft both pieces of legislation.

Senator Comerford’s office said groups such as the American Farmland Trust, Northeast Organic Farming Association and Sierra Club brought the issue of farmland application of biosolids to her attention, and that she has yet to engage in conversations with Casella over the issue. “We have not talked with them yet, but would welcome discussions with them,” the office said.

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A version of this article was published in the Montague Reporter. Mike Jackson contributed additional reporting.

Sarah Robertson is an independent journalist living in western Mass.

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Advocates for both sides say public drinking water may be tainted by underground leaks of “produced water” from fracking.

The post Ohio environmentalists and oil companies battle state over dumping of fracking wastewater first appeared on Athens County Independent.

Ecologist Joel Berger wasn’t pleased when he learned his research had been cited as evidence — inaccurately, he says — that the famous Path of the Pronghorn migration route ends well short of Jonah Energy’s Normally Pressured Lance gas field. 

The contention came from state and federal attorneys during oral arguments last week in the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, where environmental groups are challenging the NPL field. They argue the Bureau of Land Management didn’t properly account for impacts to migratory pronghorn and the world’s largest-known sage grouse winter concentration area. 

Defending the BLM’s decision from a Denver courtroom, Wyoming’s senior assistant attorney general, Travis Jordan, said studies from Berger and former colleague Renee Seidler “indicate that the Path of the Pronghorn terminates 30 miles north of the project area.”

Without naming the researchers, U.S. Department of Justice Attorney Sommer Engels made a similar claim during oral arguments Wednesday. 

“Ultimately, the Path of the Pronghorn, which is discussed in petitioner’s briefs, occurs well outside of the project area,” she told appellate judges Nancy Moritz, Timothy Tymkovich and Veronica Rossman.

Berger, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, charged the state and federal government’s counsel of “doing a deliberate mislead” because, he said, “we know that migration is continuous and the animals continue.

“There are semantics and there’s biological reality,” Berger told WyoFile. “The semantics are making an argument about where the legal end of the path is. But we know that … the animals that use the Path of the Pronghorn migrate far to the south of the NPL gas field.” 

Jordan, the state’s attorney, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did the U.S. Department of Justice regarding an email request to interview Engels.

Presumably, the attorneys were referring to what could be considered the legal end of the officially designated pronghorn migration route — which is well to the north of the biological end. 

Scientists have mapped the complete route the animals travel each year, and it extends well beyond what’s formally designated. Animals in the Sublette Herd seasonally travel as far as 220 miles one way, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Yet only one agency has officially recognized the path — and it only recognizes the portion that traverses land it manages. The Bridger-Teton National Forest designated the route’s northern 43 miles via a protective forest plan amendment adopted 15 years ago. 

Considerable efforts to designate the more southerly reaches of the Path of the Pronghorn, which cuts through the Green River basin’s gasfield country, have failed or stalled. But if official designations were granted, wildlife advocates say, Wyoming could more effectively protect the critical routes. 

Years of effort

At the time of the U.S. Forest Service’s designation, “the BLM refused to participate,” Berger once told the Jackson Hole News&Guide, attributing the agency’s lack of participation to “politics.”

More recently, political pressure has stymied the state of Wyoming’s attempts to protect the migration route used by animals that summer in and around Grand Teton National Park. 

The Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration, which includes the Path of the Pronghorn, was next in line to be designated as a Wyoming Game and Fish Department-recognized route in 2019. A coalition of industry groups, however, protested and effectively halted the process. In the aftermath, Gov. Mark Gordon created an all-new migration corridor designation process. That was more than three years ago, and the Path of the Pronghorn has remained on deck in the designation queue. 

Meanwhile, litigation over the NPL gas field, once valued at $17 billion, remains unresolved. Citing sage grouse- and pronghorn-centric concerns, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Watersheds Project and Upper Green River Alliance first brought the lawsuit in 2020, but U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl ruled against the three conservation groups last year. Quoting precedent, he wrote that environmental law “merely prohibits uninformed, rather than unwise decision making.”

The environmental groups appealed the decision, which led Jordan, Engels and Jonah Energy counsel Kathleen Schroder to Denver last week to exchange oral arguments with Center for Biological Diversity senior attorney Wendy Park.

In those arguments, the Path of the Pronghorn took center stage. 

“Did [the BLM] consider the Teton pronghorn — the Path of the Pronghorn — as part of the evaluation, or did they completely disregard potential impacts on that herd?” appellate judge Timothy Tymkovich asked Jordan, with Wyoming. 

In its environmental impact statement and decision, Jordan said, the BLM “very candidly” said there would be impacts to migration, including the loss of migration. The agency’s analysis was of the larger Sublette Herd, he said. 

During her arguments, Park said the EIS devoted only three sentences to Jackson Hole’s migratory pronghorn. 

“It was just so general that there was no indication in there as to whether the Grand Teton pronghorn would survive or not,” she said, “and whether that Path of the Pronghorn would continue.” 

In 2018, BLM officials told the Jackson Hole News&Guide that impacts to pronghorn migration were scant in the planning documents because the corridor hadn’t been designated. 

“It would help us out if the [Wyoming] Game and Fish were to formally designate something in there,” former BLM Pinedale Field Office Manager Caleb Hiner said at the time. In lieu of codified protections, he said, the agency would “micro-site” during the application-to-drill process to diminish impacts.

Jonah Energy has contested designating the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration route, which cuts through two more mature gas fields — the Anticline and Jonah fields — before spilling into the NPL field. The company’s vice president of public affairs, Paul Ulrich, did not respond to WyoFile’s request for comment.

In 2019, Ulrich expressed incredulity about the prospect of a state designation for the Path of the Pronghorn. 

“I’m questioning why we’re talking about a … migration corridor for pronghorn in two of the most intensely filled fields in the country,” Ulrich said at a Wyoming Game and Fish meeting that year.

A blow from winter

Amid the delayed designation, Wyoming Game and Fish Department officials have been trying to more thoroughly track and map the Sublette Herd’s movements. 

Scientists were tracking 93 GPS-collared pronghorn in the herd at the onset of winter, which walloped the herd. Some 75% perished, including all three Teton Park migrants, leaving the Path of the Pronghorn on shaky ground. At least a few of the farthest-traveling animals remain: Jackson Hole photographer Tim Mayo reported seeing four animals in northern Grand Teton Park on Monday morning. 

The Wildlife Conservation Society’s Berger, who’s also the university chair of wildlife conservation at Colorado State University, described the winter of 2022-’23 as a “catastrophic mortality event” and a reminder of what happens when animals don’t have adequate food — in this case from an unusual inverted, persistent snowpack.

“When animals have to deal with all the pressures, all the disturbance and the loss of habitat, we know what the consequences are,” he said. “Their immune systems are compromised. And they have a higher probability of death, as we have just seen.” 

Other, longer-lasting forms of pronghorn habitat loss are on display in the Green River basin. Research published in 2019 led by Western Ecosystems Technology research biologist Hall Sawyer found that Sublette Herd antelope are avoiding and even abandoning the Anticline gas field, dispelling the notion that Antilocapra americana adapts well to industrial activity. Industry attempted to partner with biologists to conserve Anticline pronghorn, but the collaborative effort ended in ruin after gas companies tried to massage data and alter reports, according to a Journal of Environmental Management study. 

Seidler, the other scientist whose study Jordan, the state attorney, cited during oral arguments, also criticized how her research was presented as evidence that the Path of the Pronghorn ends before the NPL gas field. 

“That’s a strange argument to put out there in the public eye,” she told WyoFile. “I think it’s pretty well known that these animals at least get fully onto the gas field in the winter, if not further south.”

‘Red flags and warnings’

Now the executive director for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation, Seidler specifically examined how pronghorn used the then-proposed NPL project area during her time at the Wildlife Conservation Society. Publishing the results in the journal of Conservation Biology, she illustrated how pronghorn were using the NPL while simultaneously avoiding the drilled-out Anticline gas field and especially densely drilled Jonah field.

A map of the Sublette Pronghorn Herd’s migration published by the U.S. Geological Survey in May 2022 illustrates dozens of animals traveling through the landscape where the NPL field was approved. 

“Eight years ago, we were giving red flags and warnings,” Seidler said. “We said, ‘Hey, if you’re going to develop this NPL [field], you better do it in a way that works for the wildlife or you’re going to be blocking major migration routes.” 

Erik Molvar, who directs one of the plaintiffs, Western Watersheds Project, described the state and federal attorney’s remarks about the NPL field and Path of the Pronghorn being apart as a “fictional argument.” 

“Since the Wyoming Game and Fish Department is responsible for managing the pronghorn that migrate along the Path of the Pronghorn,” he said, “you would think that the state of Wyoming ought to know where that migration route lies, and shouldn’t be misrepresenting it in court.” 

Molvar had no predictions about which way the appellate court would rule, but remarked that he believes the stakes are clear. 

“I think this is the big chance for the courts to reverse what is likely to be a death blow to the Path of the Pronghorn migration,” he said. 

Berger, meanwhile, said that his frustrations fall on state of Wyoming officials. It’s their delays, he said, that have clouded the picture and created ambiguity about the landscapes the Sublette Pronghorn Herd depends on to migrate. 

“Mark Gordon and Wyoming Game and Fish’s leadership should be ashamed of themselves,” Berger said. “Not the biologists. People are being suppressed within the organization. They don’t have the freedom to speak.” 

“Mark Gordon and Wyoming Game and Fish’s leadership should be ashamed of themselves.”

Joel berger

A Gordon spokesman was unable to be reached before press time. 

The governor listened to calls to designate the Path of the Pronghorn at a Pinedale meeting about the severe winter for wildlife.

“Our pronghorn cannot wait another minute,” Upper Green River Alliance Director Linda Baker told Gordon. “Please do it now.” 

The governor offered his thoughts in response. He called for a “durable” solution that transcends political swings and changes in federal land management policy. 

“Drawing a line on a map is not going to fix that,” Gordon said. 

Instead, he said, a “committed” coalition of private landowners, local agencies and the public is needed to make the “migration corridor work.” 

“That’s what’s going to be durable for generations,” Gordon said, “and that’s what we need to have.”

In 2020 Gordon issued a gubernatorial executive order establishing the state’s approach to designating and protecting migration corridors. It’s state policy, not federal, though federal officials can heed its guidelines about what occurs in migration corridors in their land management decisions. The document states that, “Wherever possible, development, infrastructure and use should occur outside of designated corridors.” 

Under the policy, the governor of Wyoming ultimately calls the shots.

The post Scientists: ‘Path of the Pronghorn’ misrepresented in gasfield suit appeared first on WyoFile.

Londonderry contractor Abe Crossman was keeping busy with small projects at his family’s home in June 2020 during the newly arrived coronavirus pandemic. He was working outside when he noticed that the paint was peeling off the trim at the peak of the gable end of his roof. 

With 25 years of building experience, he knew that peeling paint indicated the presence of moisture. But the location was odd — that trim underneath the overhang should stay dry. So he grabbed a ladder and a pry bar to take a closer look. 

His stomach dropped as he sank the pry bar into the soft wood sheathing underneath the trim and peeled away the vinyl siding down to four feet below the roof line. What had been wood disintegrated into dust in front of his eyes, he later recalled, leaving behind nothing but spray polyurethane foam insulation. 

At first, Crossman thought he might have a roof leak. But he found no issues with the standing seam roof. In any case, he said, when a contractor had installed spray foam insulation in his roof and second-floor walls a decade earlier, he had been promised that the type of foam used, open cell, would let water come through in case of a leak, so he should have noticed it immediately. 

He headed inside to his daughter’s bedroom, cut a square out of the ceiling’s sheetrock and hacked at the spray foam so he could see the structure underneath it. He grasped a rafter, and it crumbled in his hand. The roof had dry-rotted. 

“I was in shock and disbelief,” he told me this past winter. “I wanted to cry, honestly.”

He was starting to wonder if the spray foam itself might be the problem. 

The big spray foam push

Vermont’s old homes desperately need to be insulated and upgraded. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential homes consume the largest share of energy in Vermont, representing 35% of its energy consumption, and account for one-fourth of Vermont’s petroleum consumption. About three out of five Vermont households use some sort of fossil fuel to heat their home. Only Maine and New Hampshire have a larger share of such homes.

The federal government and Efficiency Vermont both hand out rebates to encourage homeowners to weatherize their homes and reduce their oil consumption. The Inflation Reduction Act signed into law last summer provides new federal income tax credits of up to $3,200 annually to homeowners to help cover heat pumps, heat pump water heaters, new doors and windows, home energy audits and, of course, insulation. 

While there are many types of insulation — cellulose, mineral wool, foam board and batting — the spray foam industry has benefitted mightily from this green weatherization push, since spray foam is such a terrific insulator and can be easily installed in one day without tearing out walls. 

I experienced this push toward spray foam myself. In early 2022, my husband and I purchased a 180-year-old farmhouse in southern Vermont, near Londonderry. After my first $600 oil bill, I visited Efficiency Vermont’s website and found two certified energy auditors. One was booked for months, but the other showed up the next week.

After touring the house and doing a blower door test, he recommended we spray foam the cathedral ceilings, inside the knee-wall attic and in the basement.

I questioned how green it was to fill my walls with a fossil-fuel-based plastic product, but the energy auditor assured me that there wouldn’t be any problems; we would have heard about them if there were. And he knew a local spray foam installer. (I recently called him back, but he wouldn’t comment on the record for this story.)

Two days later, we had our first walk-through of the house with Crossman, whom we had hired as our contractor for renovations. When I shared the energy auditor’s recommendations and said that I had asked Chester-based Vermont Foam Insulation to give me an estimate, he gently cut me off. 

“You know I’m suing Vermont Foam, right?” he said.

After Crossman left, I canceled my appointment and began investigating best practices for weatherizing my home. I figured, as a journalist with years of experience researching green materials, I would make quick work of it. 

Instead, during what would become a year-long journey, I found myself in a thicket of contradictory, outdated or biased information. Plenty of horror stories lurked in forums and blogs: historical homes ruined, fishy smells, moisture problems and people falling ill. 

Every terrible tale, however, was followed by an explanation excusing the foam. The homeowners didn’t run a proper ventilation system. They should have installed a vapor barrier. The contractor built the house wrong. That particular spray foam installer did a bad job. Anything and everything but the spray foam itself seemed to be the culprit. 

I was left with more questions than answers. Are Vermonters unwittingly destroying their homes in their quest to be green? And how many people are about to peel back their own siding and find a nasty surprise?

For this story, I spoke with four Vermont building science experts, plus a building materials specialist, residential architects, contractors, homeowners, spray foam representatives, and a mold remediation expert. I dug through forums, building trade journals, news reports, and court cases looking for clues. 

As I tried to cut through the noise of online comment sections, a clearer picture started to emerge. 

• Spray foam can be an excellent insulation material and safe for people and homes when perfectly applied — which is difficult to accomplish in real Vermont conditions. 
• Underqualified and unregulated contractors are pitching spray foam insulation to bewildered homeowners as a safe, easy, quick, affordable and eco-friendly solution to cutting their heating bills, without disclosing its risks. 
• Poor application can lead to extensive moisture damage, including rotted framing and toxic mold. Remediation and repair can easily run into the tens of thousands of dollars. 
• Spray foam is the best option for old, rubble-stone cellars and basements, but building science experts don’t recommend it for anywhere else inside homes. Nevertheless, it’s frequently specified for insulating cathedral ceilings, attics and walls. 
• Spray foam is especially risky for homes built prior to the 1950s, and for low-income homeowners who cannot afford architects, contractors or energy auditors with building science training. 
• Homeowners have little protection from shoddy workmanship, and those who discover damage and mold years later have little recourse. 
• Industry representatives like to say that less than one-tenth of 1% of spray foam installations fail, but this is based on informal polling of installers and manufacturers. There has been no comprehensive short-term or long-term followup with homeowners to ascertain the real percentage of unhappy customers. 

Among the experts I talked to was Jacob Deva Racusin, the director of building science at the worker-owned cooperative New Frameworks in Burlington, which specializes in sustainable retrofits of older homes. He doesn’t want to demonize spray foam as a product, he said, but he’s seen the installation process go off the rails.

“I just see spray foam being used inappropriately very frequently without consideration around its moisture management applications,” he said. “It can be a real liability in (above ground) scenarios.”

Is anyone in charge? 

Americans — and Vermonters in particular — are especially vulnerable to the risks of poor spray foam installation. In Canada, spray foam installers must be third-party certified. In the U.S., there are no legally-required training, educational or certification requirements for spray foam installers at the federal or state level. 

Until last year, when the state passed legislation aimed at making housing more affordable, Vermont was one of the few states that didn’t require contractors to register with the state. And there was no way for homeowners to lodge an official complaint against any residential contractor, including weatherization contractors. Even now, most spray foam jobs cost less than $4,000, and the new law exempts jobs under $10,000. (State officials unveiled the registry earlier this month.) 

Efficiency Vermont has partnered with Vermont Technical College to offer a free, voluntary educational program, the Building Performance Institute, for builders and weatherization contractors. And two trade organizations, the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance in Virginia and the Air Barrier Association of America in Massachusetts, offer voluntary professional certifications. The only Vermont spray foam contractor listed by either trade organization is an Overhead Door Company location in Williston. 

When asked how a homeowner could assess whether they’re hiring a high-quality insulation installer, Brent Ehrlich, a products and materials specialist at BuildingGreen, an information platform based in Brattleboro, said, “I don’t really have a good answer to that.”

I asked Matt Sharpe, a senior building consultant for Efficiency Vermont, about the issue.

“We want to make sure whatever you’re doing to the house is not going to do more harm than good,” he said.

But he remained agnostic throughout our conversation as I delineated the potential risks from spray foam. 

“Those are all legitimate concerns. And I think those concerns would all be legitimate to other products as well,” he said. “The performance of the work in general, no matter what material you’re using, is very important.” 

Unfortunately, there’s currently a shortage of qualified weatherization experts and contractors in Vermont. Efficiency Vermont estimates that only 2,000 homes in Vermont are weatherized a year, when 13,400 homes need it to meet the state’s climate goals. Many other states report similar labor shortages in weatherization and residential construction. 

“Weatherization is a higher-skill job than I think most people realize,” Sharpe said. “And it’s in horrible conditions. Not many people want to do it.” 

The result is a Wild West of spray foam installation, raising questions about the long-term damage to homes and ruinous costs to homeowners who are just trying to do the right thing.

Onsite chemistry 

Polyurethane, also known as PU, was invented in Nazi Germany in 1937 by Dr. Otto Bayer, who discovered mixing isocyanates and polyol would create a special type of plastic. One of its first uses was for mustard-gas-resistant garments. After the war, manufacturers found other uses for it in an expanding range of consumer products, including fake leather, mattresses and foam insulation panels. 

In the 1960s, the spray foam gun was invented, which allowed polyurethane foam to be sprayed to fit perfectly into any wall or ceiling cavity that needed an airtight seal — at the time, mainly industrial sites. The 1970s energy crisis, which drove the price of heating oil sky-high, made homeowners receptive to this new, super-insulating product. 

But it was the Canadian spray foam manufacturer Icynene, founded in 1986, which pushed spray foam deep into the consumer market. The company sold its product to a network of independent contractors across North America, who in turn pitched it to homeowners as an easy and effective way to save on energy costs. 

Here’s how it works. The spray foam contractor brings the chemical ingredients to your home in separate canisters. One contains the main ingredient for foam: highly reactive chemicals called isocyanates. The other contains a trade-secret mix that varies from manufacturer to manufacturer of polyol, fire retardants, catalyzing amines, blowing agents and other chemicals. These are mixed together through a tube and sprayed onto the unfinished wall, roof decking or into tight spaces, where the combined chemicals immediately expand into a foam. 

There are two different types of spray foam. In open cell foam, the little air bubbles in the foam are broken open, leading to a spongy and soft foam. In closed cell foam, the air bubbles are completely encapsulated, for a harder and denser foam with higher insulation value. The latter is also more expensive to install but today is recommended over open cell foam for cold climates such as Vermont’s.

The most common spaces where spray foam is applied are inside walls, under the roof, inside attics, and on the walls of basements and cellars. Contractors often use it for tight spaces instead of using thicker types of insulation, in order to more easily fulfill building code requirements. 

The application process makes spray foam unique among plastic consumer products. “Unlike a foam board product, which is manufactured in climate-controlled factory conditions where they can really manage quality control, you’re doing onsite chemistry,” said Racusin, the Burlington-based building science director.

The installation process releases toxic fumes, which is why spray foam technicians must wear a full protective suit and respirator. The foam spends the next day “curing,” or drying and hardening, during which time homeowners must vacate the property. 

If all goes well, the spray foam is inert and done off-gassing by the time the homeowners are back inside. And it has fitted neatly into every space in which it was applied, with no holes or cracks, creating an airtight seal and a deliciously warm home — if everything goes right.

Several building science and material experts, however, say there are many ways spray foam application can go wrong. 

Taking the temperature

Rick Duncan, the Maryland-based executive director of the trade group Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance, said spray foam can be applied in every season because contractors can heat the home, heat up the material where it is being applied or use cold-weather foam. Below 40 degrees Fahrenheit is the absolute cutoff for proper application, but “the warmer the better in terms of getting the most out of your chemicals,” he said. 

This may represent an optimistic view. 

“The conditions where the manufacturers say that you should be mixing and installing this site-created insulation are very strict and almost never met in the field,” said Chris West, a Jericho-based certified consultant and trainer for Passive House, a design standard for ultra-low-energy-consumption homes. “It’s like, 80 degrees, and no dust and the perfect humidity of the material you’re spraying against.”

Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that more research is needed, it found that if the chemical mixture or temperature is wrong, it can fail to cure and may continue off-gassing amines, isocyanates and other chemical fumes. In 2013, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on homeowners who had to abandon their home after it was insulated with spray foam because it made them so sick. Around the same time in the U.S., an “avalanche” of similar health complaints and court cases cropped up against spray foam manufacturers. 

According to 2013 testimony to the General Law Committee of Connecticut from a homeowner, the spray foam installed in his 1890s home shrunk, cracked, gave off a strong noxious odor and even exploded in the middle of the night. He was never warned about the health effects, even while his family lived in the house during remediation, when spray foam dust filled his home. 

Once people are exposed to a high amount of isocyanates, they may become sensitized, meaning even a tiny bit of exposure — like walking into a building with spray foam insulation or buying a memory foam mattress — could trigger asthma. This is particularly a problem for spray foam installers. 

“Isocyanates have been reported to be a leading attributable chemical cause of asthma in the workplace,” the EPA warns. “Even if you do not become sensitized to isocyanates, they may still irritate your skin and lungs, and many years of exposure may lead to permanent lung damage and respiratory problems.” 

In 2016, a whistleblower lawsuit was filed on behalf of the U.S. government against four major manufacturers of spray foam chemicals — BASF Corporation, Bayer Material Science, Dow Chemical Company and Huntsman International, which had bought the spray foam manufacturer Icynene. It alleged that the companies knew of the serious health effects of isocyanates and kept that information from the EPA. The case did not move forward.

While failures to cure are immediately apparent, another danger that only presents itself many years later is that the spray foam doesn’t actually create the airtight seal promised, which can lead to air quality complaints and devastating structural problems. 

One Kansas City builder, Travis Brungardt, has documented for The Journal of Light Construction every type of failure in spray foam, even when working with reputable local installers: improperly cured foam; voids, which are akin to air bubbles or caves within the foam; gaps, which reveal the sheathing or decking; the foam “delaminating,” or pulling away from the wood; and even failure to achieve the thickness that would provide the insulating value promised. 

“While I believe spray foam can be a path to success, I haven’t seen it executed successfully in my market, and I will avoid that risk whenever I can,” Brungardt wrote last June in The Journal of Light Construction

The moisture lurking in old homes

When you look online for Vermont spray foam experts, Peter Yost’s name is one of the first to come up. A building consultant with more than 30 years of experience in contracting and building science, he recently moved from Brattleboro to Durham, New Hampshire, with an eye on retirement. 

I thought he would fall in the spray foam supporter camp, especially since he’s been hired by at least one spray foam company in the past, but his views on insulation are more nuanced. 

“My mantra is: We have to manage energy and moisture with equal intensity,” he said. “If we just go after the energy and don’t recognize the moisture, we’re going to create problems.” 

Houses always have a certain amount of water vapor in the air, which can come from wet basements, but also everyday necessities such as cooking, bathing, and even breathing and sweating. 

In a house with little insulation, the escaping heat dries out the walls. Spray foam, as a plastic, is hydrophobic, so it air seals if applied perfectly. But if there are any pathways, cracks or voids, humid air can sneak in and hit the cold exterior framing, condensing into water. That water can then be trapped by the spray foam and settle in to rot the wood framing members. 

Rot issues related to foam tend to show up around eight years after the initial application, according to Jim Bradley, founder of the building science consultancy Authenticated Building Performance Diagnostics in Cambridge. In fact, he had the roof of a new addition to his home spray foamed a little over eight years ago using what he thought were best practices at the time. That meant his roof was spray foamed, with no ventilation, making it what is called a “hot roof.” 

Recently, he’s noticed “tea stains” dripping out of the soffits — where the roof overhangs the house’s exterior siding — and staining the drywall, indicating a wood rot problem. 

“And it makes me sick, because this is my business,” Bradley said. 

In 2005, a New Jersey couple sued both the foam manufacturer Icynene and the spray foam installer of their new vacation cabin in Warren, claiming the spray foam had caused extensive moisture damage. The case was settled with Icynene out of court in 2006, a week before it was set to go to a jury trial. (I contacted the spray foam installer, but the company is under new management and could not comment on the specifics of the case.) 

“There are a lot of good spray foam contractors in Vermont that do good work and there are places where spray foam is perfect,” said West, the Passive House consultant. But, “When we go into an old house, we never spray foam.” (By “old” he means 1950s or older, but, he later clarified, he’s not a fan of it in any age home.)

There are only a handful of people across Vermont who can give unbiased and holistic consultations to homeowners about moisture management and weatherization together, according to Yost.

“We don’t have nearly enough building professionals that understand building science,” he said. “If you’re an existing building owner, it can be so complex. You need to make sure that you don’t have just an energy auditor looking at your building.” 

A slow-moving health crisis

Health complaints could also, ironically, arise because the home is too tight. 

“What we find is if you go in and you spray an entire home, seal up that complete building envelope, you are not going to have enough natural ventilation to maintain good indoor air quality,” said Duncan, of the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance. 

He and other building science experts I spoke to recommend homeowners install an air exchanger, equipment housed in the basement that circulates stale, moist air out while pulling in dry, fresh air.

If not, particulates from cooking, off-gassing from furniture and carpets, and other other indoor air pollution could build up and bring the home’s air quality to below a typical day in New York City. Add in the mold that can come from trapping moist air, and you’ve got yourself a health crisis in the making.

Government agencies have not tracked the prevalence of homes with mold in the U.S. or Vermont over time. But according to a 2022 NIOSH assessment, dampness and mold problems are estimated to affect 47% of U.S. homes. 

Business has been swift in the past couple of years for mold remediation, according to Chuck Nystrom, a contractor and co-owner of Catamount Restoration Services in Manchester Center. He at least partly attributed the uptick in calls to homeowners tightening up the air flow in their homes. “A lot of people didn’t see mold for many years. Fifty years ago it wasn’t an issue. The homes breathed more,” he said. 

One big problem Nystrom has seen is when the soffit vents are sealed up by foam. “So by changing the way a house breathes, you’re now trapping the moisture in,” he said. “And once it gets in, because (the house) is so efficient, the only way to get it out is to use a manmade device: a dehumidifier, an air exchanger, something of that nature.”

When asked his opinion of spray foam, Nystrom called it “a great product — if applied correctly.”

He noted that traditional insulation with rock wool or fiberglass is “easy enough” to undo if issues arise. But, he said, “Once you go spray foam, there is no going back.”

Spray foam permanently sticks to whatever it is sprayed on, and it can cover up and hide water leaks, mold and damage for years. For inspectors to view a home’s framing, the foam has to be chopped away. Complete removal is prohibitively expensive for most homeowners.

Everyone I spoke to agrees that spray foam is better suited for some jobs than others. Instead of the top of a home, look to its bottom, they said — particularly old rubble-walled foundations.

“That’s where spray foam really shows up as one of the best options available, without going to more heroic measures that can cost a lot more money,” said Racusin, New Frameworks’ building science director.  

Unfortunately, as Yost points out, homeowners don’t get rebates for addressing their homes’ moisture problems. Without financial incentives, owners with lower incomes often cannot afford to solve water issues before they call in a spray foam installer. 

It’s unique to each house, but West says $15,000 “is a pretty standard price” for basement remediation work to address water intrusion for a 2,000-square-foot house.

Green, how? 

Some industry observers have raised questions about just how sustainable spray foam really is. 

The building standards of LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, gives builders green points for using spray foam because of its high R-Value, which denotes how much insulation it can provide per inch of depth. In 2007, licensed architect David Pill built his family a LEED Platinum house and Vermont’s first Net Zero home — meaning it generates as much energy as it consumes in a year — and used spray foam to insulate it.

“I can’t believe (LEED) let me use that. But at the time, nobody knew about spray foam,” Pill said.

Pill hasn’t used it in a project since, mainly because he doesn’t consider it a green product. Traditionally, spray foam has required a blowing agent with a global warming potential (a widely used measurement for emissions) of 1,000 or more. Spray foam manufacturers are moving to a blowing agent with a lower global warming potential of just five. 

But because it’s made completely from fossil fuels, spray foam still arrives with a high amount of “embodied carbon,” meaning a lot of fossil fuels were used and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions were released before it is ever sprayed into a home. 

According to a report by Efficiency Vermont released last summer, it would take about 10 years of energy savings for a home with spray foam insulation to match the carbon savings of a home with dense-pack cellulose and rigid foam board insulation. (That’s assuming a typical homeowner sticks with an oil furnace and makes no other changes.)

Unlike some green builders and experts, Efficiency Vermont does not currently consider embodied carbon in its recommendations to homeowners, Sharpe said. 

“Our first and foremost mission is to reduce energy waste and save Vermonters energy and money,” he said.

Experts say that heat pumps, which efficiently condition outside air into hot or cool inside air depending on the season, cannot do their job in a very drafty, uninsulated house. But once you’re no longer primarily heating with oil, it doesn’t do much for the environment to stress over getting your house perfectly sealed — you might as well go with an alternative with a slightly lower R-value. 

The report by Efficiency Vermont also assumes best practices for spray foam application.

“When you go ahead and build something, and it fails prematurely within five years, 10 years, and you’re replacing siding, roofing, whatever, how much more of an energy cost is that?” Bradley said. “This whole movement that we have for global warming initiatives and saving the planet and all this energy savings, we are missing the mark, especially in Vermont.” 

The architect Pill’s spray foam application didn’t go well. He called the installation “completely wrong.” When he discovered gaps, voids and cracks several years later, he called the contractor who built the home, who told him the spray foam company was out of business. 

Recently, Bradley stopped by and took a look at the spray foam in Pill’s attic and discovered many more gaps, plus areas where the foam is peeling away from the roof deck and areas of moisture. There’s no rot that they could see — Pill credits the plywood for being rot-resistant — but the gaps will have to be filled again … with more spray foam. 

No one to turn to

Crossman bought his grandparents’ modest 1950s timber-frame home in 2001 and spent the next 10 years steadily renovating it. Room by room, he tore out the walls down to the studs, and replaced the old batt insulation with new fiberglass batt insulation. By 2009, he was done with the first floor and ready to start the second. 

At the time, Vermont Foam Insulation was on-site at a job Crossman was working on and he accepted a pitch from its sales representative, Will Reed, to insulate the entire top floor of Crossman’s home with open cell foam — the spongier, more affordable option with little air bubbles that are broken open. 

The company did one side of the house in 2009 and came back to do the other side the following year. Crossman applied a vapor retarding primer paint as recommended. 

“There was definitely a smell that first couple of years. I don’t know if we got used to it or if it just went away,” Crossman said. But he didn’t notice anything was really wrong until the winter of 2012, when moisture started building up on the windows. It got worse the next year. 

“The bottom two inches of the sash on the glass in the mornings would be just drenched with water,” he recalled. “We’d have to go around wiping them down every morning.” 

At the time, some people inside the spray foam industry were raising the alarm about shoddy workmanship. Henri Fennell, a Thetford-based spray foam consultant with 25 years of experience, wrote in The Journal of Light Construction that contractors who were out of work during the 2008 financial crisis had rushed into the growing spray foam field, bringing little experience with them and pushing prices down to unsustainable levels. 

“The ongoing price wars have also been accompanied by a pronounced increase in bad installations. Industry experts tell me they’ve seen more foam quality problems in the last two years than in the preceding two decades,” Fennell wrote. 

Part of Crossman’s problem might also have had to do with the choice to use open cell foam, which Crossman said was pitched to him as a way to identify leaks should they happen. 

Rick Duncan, executive director of the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance, confirmed that leak detection was a common marketing point 10 years ago, though he doesn’t believe it is true. 

“You don’t always see a leak developed right below where the hole is on the roof,” he said. “You never know where that water is going to come out. It can actually be retained in the open cell foam like a sponge, and then it can drain out towards the soffit and come down the walls.” 

He said open cell foam is fine as long as you use a vapor retarder, including paint, like Crossman did. But he acknowledges the models used to support this recommendation are based on ideal conditions and perfect application. 

Vermont Foam Insulation declined to comment on Crossman’s case. Reed, the sales representative who worked with Crossman, said the company still uses open cell foam, though he wrote in an email that the company installs more closed cell foam today.  

In 2012, Crossman called Reed, who told him that he would have to install an air exchanger at a cost of $5,000, according to Crossman. It did seem to mostly fix the moisture problems, until eight years later when he discovered his roof had dry-rotted. 

First, he called Efficiency Vermont, who sent someone out to take a look. Crossman said he was told the insulation had been done wrong and to call Vermont Foam Insulation. 

Dissatisfied with the quality of the company’s work, Crossman had stopped bringing Vermont Foam Insulation into his projects years before. But he called up the company, and owner Joe Thompson came to check out the problem. (When I reached out to the company asking to speak to Thompson, I heard back from Reed.)

As Crossman tells it, Thompson peered into the walls and told him, “You’ve definitely got a problem but it’s not as bad as you think.” Thompson contended the wood stove or the moist basement could be to blame, Crossman said, and suggested spray foaming the latter. Finally, Thompson offered to pay for Yost to come take a look. 

Yost later performed a blower door test and a smoke test, during which a house is filled with theatrical smoke to identify air leakage. “And what I remember is that there were significant (air leaks) that the spray foam was not addressing,” Yost said.

He recommends that these tests be done immediately after any insulation is installed. Crossman says a moisture assessment before the installation in 2009 and blower door test after in 2012 did not happen. 

Reed, of Vermont Foam, said in an email that “almost all of our retrofits get a pre and post blower door.”

“We are slowly adopting blower door testing for new construction projects,” he wrote. “We agree with, and promote this measure, particularly with regard to its adoption into the building code.” 

Without commenting on Crossman’s case, Reed said that Vermont Foam Insulation advises customers to fix moisture issues before having spray foam installed, and also that it will recommend and install other forms of insulation when it’s appropriate. 

“Spray foam is used to insulate buildings, not to repair water issues, preexisting moisture, or air flow issues,” Reed wrote. “You wouldn’t put a blanket on a leaky pipe and say that it’s fixed.”

Because Yost was paid by Vermont Foam, he couldn’t share his findings with Crossman. In any case, he said he didn’t come to a clear conclusion of fault. 

“It was very difficult for me, because the spray foam that was done was done 10 years prior to my involvement. (It’s) very difficult to separate out what conditions were the result of a lack of perfection in the installation of the insulation, versus the existing moisture conditions in that building,” Yost said. “I don’t think either party was going to end up being particularly happy with what I was going to say.” 

When asked how Vermont Foam Insulation recommends homeowners monitor their spray-foamed homes for leaks or damage, Reed wrote, “Homeowners need to work with their general contractor, HVAC provider, architect, or building science expert to ensure their home has no leaks or damage. As an insulation contractor, we are there to insulate, not provide an entire home review.” 

Crossman couldn’t find a building science expert to advise or help him. After hunting high and low, he found a lawyer who would file a claim with Vermont Foam Insulation’s insurance company, Liberty Mutual, which forbade Crossman to do any work on the house until the claim was resolved. 

So, after waiting some time, Crossman filed a lawsuit and got to work replacing the roof, plus many of the second-floor walls and windows of his home. 

His lawsuit asked for $300,000 to cover materials, labor, renting another home, and other costs. It was sent into mediation, which dragged on for a year and a half. This winter, his lawyer advised him to settle with the insurance company for less than half of what he was asking. 

Vermont Foam Insulation would only say that “a mutual agreement was reached and we did not accept liability.”

“I can’t even put into words how hard the past two years have been,” Crossman said. 

What’s a homeowner to do?

If you don’t have the budget for an architect or high-end green contractor with a building science expert on staff, Efficiency Vermont has a hotline with trained customer support agents. If your questions get into more complicated territory, you’ll be referred to an engineering consultant such as Sharpe, and you can even have a virtual home energy visit. You can also contact one of the building science experts quoted in this story. 

Racusin said that if you’re a homeowner looking to tighten up your house because you’re miserably cold and paying through the nose for heating oil, and you want to take advantage of the rebates and incentives, there are two places to focus.

First, insulate your basement (after you’ve solved for any water incursion or moisture issues). After that, complete some targeted air sealing via some caulk or tape in the attic, and finish it off with some dense-pack cellulose. That will go a long way to make you comfortable without taking unnecessary risks. 

When you’re ready for a larger renovation project, you can visit Efficiency Vermont’s website to find contractors who have gone through the Building Performance Institute, or the Brattleboro-based Sustainable Energy Outreach Network for a list of members. Or, you can choose a contractor who is open to going through one of these certification programs. 

If you’ve already spray-foamed your home, Duncan recommends getting a moisture meter with an alarm and putting it in your attic, plus having your roof inspected every five years. An inspector with an infrared camera can identify moisture issues, and there are now mini infrared cameras available that plug into your smartphone.

I feel lucky that I was nudged away from spray foam at the last minute and — through this story — have been able to ask the state’s foremost experts for advice on what to do. I paid almost double the usual fee to have Bradley drive three hours from northern Vermont to audit my home. His first recommendation? You guessed it: Fix my leaky basement.

Crossman joined us for part of the tour. Having experienced the downsides of poor weatherization, he is ready and eager to learn the ins and outs of building science alongside me as we set out on our home renovation. 

But I’m just one person. Hopefully, for the sake of my neighbors down here in southern Vermont, there will be more contractors learning building science soon.

Otherwise, Vermonters are in for some nasty and expensive surprises, lurking right inside their walls. 

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘I wanted to cry’: Devastating risks of spray foam insulation hidden from Vermont homeowners.

Devon Parfait steers his truck into the parking lot of what used to be a firehouse on Shrimpers Row in Dulac, Louisiana. He tries to get his bearings in a landscape both familiar and strange. He spies a bayou down a side street, so we walk in that direction, searching for traces of the home his family fled as Hurricane Rita barreled in. Back then, in 2005, Parfait was a second grader who collected Ranger Rick Zoobooks. Today he’s a 25-year-old coastal scientist with a mop of curls, a nose ring, and a puzzled look in his brown eyes.

“I’m scanning through the memory of all my old neurons,” he tells me. “Maybe this is it. Maybe it really has just changed so much I don’t even recognize it.”

Parfait’s January 2023 visit isn’t just for nostalgia. He’s the new chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, and he’s getting reacquainted with his community. The 1,100-citizen tribe has traditionally fished and hunted along this fertile edge of the Gulf of Mexico. But human engineering and extreme storms have reshaped Louisiana’s coastline, swallowing up 2,000 square miles of land since the 1930s. Many of the land patents granted to the tribe’s ancestors in a 19th-century treaty are now largely or wholly underwater. Land loss has chiseled away at tribal livelihoods and traditional diets, exacted a toll on citizens’ mental health, exacerbated chronic illnesses, and displaced families.

The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and its neighbors also serve as harbingers of a climate crisis that threatens more intense high-tide floods on every U.S. coast by the mid-2030s. Unless protective measures are taken, rising waters could displace up to 13 million Americans by century’s end—“a magnitude similar to the twentieth century Great Migration of southern African-Americans,” wrote the authors of a 2016 University of Georgia analysis.

As we stand alongside the bayou, overshadowed by tall dry grass, a car pulls up to a nearby house. An older couple gets out and Parfait approaches them. “I’m trying to figure out if this is the place I used to live,” he says, naming his grandparents.

“I’m a Parfait,” the woman volunteers.

“Oh! Hey! Give me a hug then,” the chief says.

The couple lead Parfait to the footprint of his old home, now a garden bed that, later in the year, will produce mustard greens, speckled butter beans, and tomatoes. A fig tree Parfait remembers remains, but the rope swing of his childhood has vanished. The couple, who have lived here almost 50 years, say the land has eroded so much that the backmost six feet of their property has crumbled into the bayou.

“Now, you step out your back door, you’re going to sink.”

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue

Parfait understands the changes he sees represent both an existential crisis and a leadership burden. He prepared for this moment by leaving Louisiana to study geosciences. Now he’s back, crafting a plan to hold his tribe together, and shaking the hands he needs to get it rolling. Still, he’s cognizant of the obstacles ahead.

Coastal land loss has upended life in South Louisiana—for Cajun, Black, and Creole residents, for Vietnamese refugees and their descendants, and in particular for the half-dozen Indigenous tribes that rely on the abundance of its wetlands. Some 11,000 Native Americans live in the four coastal parishes (counties) with the highest Indigenous concentrations—flat expanses of two-lane roads that parallel bayous lined with oaks, elevated houses, and shrimp boats, and occasionally converge on small, industry-thick cities.

Cleveland “Coco” Rodrigue, a 61-year-old shrimper and citizen of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, says he used to walk into the woods near his house in Dulac and hunt ducks and rabbits—“live off the land.” But those woods are gone, replaced by water. “Now, you step out your back door,” he says, “you’re going to sink.”

These losses stem from vast projects that altered the Mississippi River and its delta. The building of flood-control levees, according to many scientists, has prevented sediment from reaching and replenishing wetlands that naturally subside. The dredging of 10,000 miles of artificial canals by oil and gas companies altered the delta’s hydrology. Shipping channels allow saltwater to penetrate inland. Until recently, climate change was a minor factor, but now accelerating sea-level rise threatens even more inundation. Fewer wetlands mean less protection from hurricanes, which lately have intensified. The storms themselves erode the coast—a feedback loop of destruction.

Land loss impedes not just hunting and trapping but also raising livestock. Vegetable gardens face higher flood risk. Fishing and shrimping have become dicier, partly because the wetlands serve as nurseries for aquatic animals. Loss of natural food sources mean tribal citizens now have to rely more on grocery stores than in the past. But historic discrimination, like being kept out of public schools until the 1940s, has created barriers to wealth that have spanned generations. In the parish that includes Dulac, the poverty rate is 30 percent for Native Americans and 12 percent for non-Hispanic White people.

“When you don’t have the funds to purchase foods that are healthier, or better quality, you’re going to get what you can get [to] fill your stomach,” says Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Parfait’s predecessor as chief. Alongside this shift toward less healthy processed food, she has seen a rise in heart disease and diabetes.

Parfait-Dardar’s anecdotal observations square with national figures (local data are hard to come by). Native Americans, for whom diabetes was once rare, now have twice the rate of White Americans. Obesity and cardiovascular illness run rampant, too. A key culprit is the shift from traditional to Western diets, whether because of forced migration, environmental degradation, or government policies like the mandated thinning of livestock herds.

Beyond dietary disease, tribal leaders describe crushing stress from living in a place that’s increasingly uninhabitable. “Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included,” says Parfait-Dardar, whose home Hurricane Ida leveled in 2021. Researchers studying the Gulf Coast have seen domestic abuse and substance-use disorders spike after hurricanes. The former chief has seen similar patterns in her tribe.

Health experts call the psychological and dietary tolls inseparable. “Stress triggers hormones that let you eat more, and eat more junk,” says Maureen Lichtveld, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, who has researched and collaborated with Indigenous people in the Louisiana bayous. “Stress also triggers sleeping less. A short night’s rest actually increases obesity. So, the physiological consequences of stress feed into the social consequences of stress. And that, I think, is a cycle very difficult to break.”

Julie Maldonado, an anthropologist who has studied Louisiana’s tribes and is now working with them on issues like climate adaptation, says contemporary stresses are intertwined with a collective trauma that stretches back centuries. European colonization set the stage for the altered coastal landscape, the pollution, the hurricane damage, the growing untenability of commercial fishing, the scattering of neighbors.

“What people often talk about is a legacy of atrocities, or these cascading effects as these disasters are layered upon each other over time,” says Maldonado, associate director of the non-profit Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network and a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Now, as these climate-driven events get closer together, become more intense…you’re still recovering from one when the next one hits.”

That’s a lot of history to place on the shoulders of a Generation Z chief. But Parfait is in an unusual position: He knows firsthand how environmental changes can affect a community’s health, and he has done the academic work to help him address the underlying causes.

The summer of 2005, when Parfait’s family was forced from its home, was especially bad for land loss: Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone claimed 217 square miles. After Rita destroyed the house and ruined his grandfather’s shrimp boat, the three-generation family uprooted three times. They traveled a 200-mile circuit before settling into the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. Parfait’s mother, Dana, wanted him to have a male mentor, so she sent him to live with her brother. But his uncle was also struggling, and eventually committed suicide.

Already diagnosed with ADHD (a condition linked to childhood trauma) and depression, Parfait retreated into himself. “He rarely came out of his room,” says his mother. He failed his freshman year of high school.

“Everyone here is suffering from PTSD, myself included.”

Shirell Parfait-Dardar, former chief, Grand Caillou/Dulac Band

But Parfait’s curious mind caught the attention of his mother’s cousin, then-chief Parfait-Dardar. As early as age 12, he watched her try to gain federal recognition for the tribe, a cumbersome, elusive, ongoing process that could bring financial benefits and self-governance rights. He asked questions and offered to help, and over time Parfait-Dardar identified him as her eventual successor. (Each chief names the next.) “When I recognized that it was him—and I still get chills today—it was like the ancestors spoke,” she says.

To face the tribe’s issues, Parfait needed a specific kind of education. It happened that the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band has a relationship with the Williams-Mystic Program, a collaboration of Williams College and Mystic Seaport Museum that runs a coastal field seminar in Louisiana. Rónadh Cox, a geosciences professor at Williams and seminar instructor, invited him to a scientific meeting in 2017, noticed his drive and curiosity, and wondered if her school might entertain a transfer from his community college. “This could be a moment where we can do something,” she remembers thinking, “to make a difference, to give back to the tribe.”

Admissions officers at Williams, a competitive liberal arts college, looked at Parfait’s grades and declined his application. After another year of academic preparation, he reapplied to Williams and this time was accepted. At Williams, Parfait studied geosciences and collaborated with Cox on several mapping projects related to the tribe’s historic territory. One showed the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band and nearby Jean Charles Choctaw Nation were losing land faster than the surrounding basins, and at more than double the rate of Louisiana’s entire coast.

Parfait always imagined his tenure as tribal chief would begin in the distant future. But as he was finishing up his undergraduate degree in 2022, Parfait-Dardar called to say she was ready to step down. “I knew what we were facing,” she says: further land loss, potential dispersion, continued public health challenges. “And Devon had the education that I don’t have.” Knowing the burden Parfait would be taking on, the outgoing chief also called his mother. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

After graduating, Parfait returned home and started working as a coastal science coordinator for the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). In August 2022, he recited the oath of office at a kitchen-table ceremony scaled down for the pandemic. That same month, he turned 25.

One of Parfait’s first orders of business as chief was to assist an intertribal effort to get the federal government’s attention. The Grand Caillou/Dulac Band had teamed up with four other tribes—one from Alaska, the others from Louisiana—that have seen their traditional lands disappear. The five had petitioned for a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), alleging that the government had failed to protect them from the impacts of climate change and other human-caused disasters.

The consequences, the petition claimed, amounted to a forcible displacement. Grand Bayou Indian Village, home to the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha, has lost nearly all its land; the handful of remaining houses sit on pilings and can only be reached by boat. Jean Charles Choctaw Nation has watched its ancestral island erode down to a sliver and the state’s relocation plans devolve into conflict over how much decision-making power the tribe would retain.

The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, had scheduled a hearing for October, two months after Parfait’s swearing-in. The commission lacks binding powers for the U.S. government, “but it’s still important,” says Maryum Jordan, an attorney with EarthRights International who worked with the tribes on the hearing. “This is a key moment to put displacement on the radar at the international level. And it’s also an opportunity to pressure the government to do more.”

The hearing was online, but there were private in-person meetings, too. The day before, Parfait took an early-morning flight to Washington, D.C., where the team huddled over sandwiches and cupcakes, crafting testimony and supplemental material. They met with a White House official. And they talked with an IACHR attorney to provide more context than they could squeeze into the 90-minute hearing. Parfait talked about how colonialism had altered the coastal environment, making it harder for the tribes to stay self-sufficient.

The next day, Parfait watched off-camera as his predecessor, Parfait-Dardar, logged in from a hotel ballroom in Thibodaux, Louisiana—in her emerita role as elder chief, she retains moral authority and years of knowledge. She sat at a conference table with Rosina Philippe, an elder from Grand Bayou. Tribal banners hung behind them.

“The lands once lush and fruitful have eroded away, so that all that remains today are strips of land that stick out like fragile fingers on a badly wounded hand,” Parfait-Dardar testified. The declining harvest, compounded by education discrimination, “has led us into lifeways that have also caused negative consequences for our mental and physical health.” And without federal recognition, she said, the tribe can’t secure the funding it needs to recover from hurricanes and adapt to climate change.

After Parfait-Dardar and three other tribal representatives made their case, the U.S. government responded. Department of Interior staffer Joaquin Gallegos, who is from the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the Pueblo of Santa Ana, acknowledged that climate change poses “existential threats” to Native economies and health. But, Gallegos said, the government “takes its political and legal responsibilities to Indigenous people seriously,” funding climate-resilience programs, supporting traditional food systems like fisheries, and consulting with tribes on issues like relocation.

Still, the panel seemed alarmed by the tribes’ testimony. “Why is it taking so long…to assist these communities?” asked commissioner Margarette May Macaulay, a Jamaican attorney. She announced the IACHR would submit an official request to visit Louisiana and Alaska. “Around the world,” she said, Indigenous tribes “have the least footprint and suffer the greatest crisis from climate change, which is committed by the industrialized state in pursuing industrialized profits.”

Then the laptop screen went dark. Parfait-Dardar turned to Philippe. “OK,” she said. “We survived.”

Philippe exhaled. She had watched the federal officials talk about collaboration. But that didn’t square with her own experience of a process that solicits tribal input without any real intention of disrupting the oil-and-gas economy. “The government—they maintain that whip hand,” she said. “So they can tout and say, ‘We are engaging the tribal communities.’ …But in the end product, we don’t see our suggestions. We see them just forging ahead with what they planned to do in the beginning.”

As winter approaches, Parfait confronts the enormity of his unpaid role as chief. His tribe’s mental and physical health, limited food access, and economic insecurity all demand attention, but so does his full-time day job at EDF. “I can’t do everything,” he says.

Sometimes, public-health problems require action in areas that look tangential but are actually foundational. “You could treat that diabetes, you could tell people to walk,” but health is collective, too, says the University of Pittsburgh’s Lichtveld. “The sense of community cohesion, or the gaps in it, in Indigenous communities is very strong.”

And so Parfait gravitates toward the issue that, to him, undergirds all the others. “How do you live a healthy, happy, productive life,” he says, “when you can physically see your lands eroding away in your backyard?” He fixes on a primary task: pushing for coastal restoration efforts that would slow the degradation enough for his tribe to plan an orderly retreat.

Louisiana has a 50-year, $50 billion coastal master plan, released in 2007 and updated every five to six years. Some of the funding comes from a Deepwater Horizon oil-spill settlement. But no amount of money can fix the entire coast. “It’s not like restoring a chair, where you’re going to strip the old varnish off and put some new stuff on, and it’s going to look exactly the same as it was,” says Denise Reed, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans and a member of the master plan development team. “If you have limited resources, where are you going to put them? Where can you achieve most of your objectives?”

A keystone of the state’s coastal program is the $2.3 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion: a gated structure, built into the levee system downriver from New Orleans, that will allow river water and sediment to flow back into the delta. According to the 2023 draft update to the master plan, the diversion could build 21 square miles of new land over the next half-century. “That will serve to protect everything inland,” says Kelly Sanks, a Tulane University sedimentologist. “From a protection-of-New-Orleans standpoint, it’s good and lots of people want it,” including a coalition of large environmental groups.

But the diversion will make flooding more severe for the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha in nearby Grand Bayou, and tribes like Grand Caillou/Dulac live too far from the river to benefit.

“So it costs billions of dollars,” Parfait tells me. “It only benefits people 50 years from now. And it does nothing to help the tribal communities.”

The state’s plan acknowledges that some places won’t survive intact. For those residents, it recommends voluntary property acquisition and relocation assistance. This is not a reassuring prospect for Native Americans who watched Jean Charles Choctaw Nation’s dispute with the state over resettlement. “[It] indicates to these communities who are on the frontlines that people have given up on them,” Parfait says.

The chief understands that land loss might continue to force the tribe inland. But he wants the state to invest more in slowing down that loss—“buying time” to prevent citizens from dispersing helter-skelter as his family did after Hurricane Rita. “If you were to do coastal restoration projects to save the land now, and have that community stay there and develop a plan, you have a better chance to save culture, to keep the community cohesive, and to keep families together,” he says.

Topping Parfait’s priority list: seeing those oil-and-gas canals backfilled with the piles of dredged material that run parallel to them. This, some researchers say, could help restore the hydrology the canals wrecked decades ago. The tribes have consulted with R. Eugene Turner, a coastal ecologist at Louisiana State University who calls backfilling a cheap, fast, and effective way to rebuild wetlands. Those wetlands, he says, would in turn provide habitat for the seafood and game that make up the traditional Indigenous diet.

Stuart Brown, the state official who oversees the plan’s development, calls backfilling “one of many tools in the toolbox, not a panacea.” But after meeting with Turner and tribal leaders, he added one sentence to the 2023 draft endorsing the practice. “Now,” he says, “those seeking funding for it can go to the master plan and specifically say, ‘Look, it’s consistent with the plan.’”

When Parfait saw the draft update, he initially had mixed feelings: happy that backfilling got mentioned at all, and saddened by the brevity. “It is kind of an asterisk,” he says.

But he has moved past his disappointment and now views that sentence as a potential pipeline. “It feels like they’re saying, ‘Hey, connect,’” he says. “And that’s exactly what I’m doing.” His calendar is filling with meetings, and his head with strategies. He has met with local officials about a potential backfilling demonstration project that, if it comes about, would be managed by the parish government with tribal input. If that project succeeds, Parfait hopes it will nudge backfilling higher on the state’s priority list.

Parfait often thinks in stories; he calls this a product of his Indigenous heritage. “When I leave this world, what story do I want my life to represent?” he asks. “I don’t want to move forward into a world where we have to be constantly displaced, where we have to be constantly worried about our next meal, where we have to be constantly worried about land loss.” He thinks about his 8-year-old self, fleeing the bayou without his Zoobooks, and all the upheavals he has experienced since. Those memories remain close, guiding his plans for the future.

Austin Wall was attending an environmental law conference at the University of Tennessee not long ago when, during a discussion of natural gas pipeline projects, a map appeared on the screen and gave him a surprise.

“I’m like, hold up, that Google Maps looks really familiar to me,” the 25-year-old law student said. “I could find my family’s farm on that map.”

Wall’s family lives in rural Dickson County, and its ranch lies within a 10-mile “blast zone” of a pipeline planned for north-central Tennessee. That got his attention. A pipeline exploded in that area in 1992, scorching more than five acres of forest, and a similar disaster could decimate the family’s livelihood raising cattle. But what really dismayed him is why the Tennessee Valley Authority wants to build the project: It plans to replace two coal-fired power plants with natural gas facilities.

The TVA is the nation’s largest public power provider, serving a wide swath of seven southern states, including most of Tennessee. Its fleet of 29 dams, 14 small “solar energy sites,” and 25 power plants generates the electricity that it sells to 153 regional utilities. The agency once boasted 14 coal-fired power plants, including one that was for much of the 1960s the world’s largest. Today just five remain, and the agency wants to replace two in Tennessee, one in Cumberland and the other in Kingston, with gas-powered plants. Doing so all but commits its customers to fossil fuels for the next 25 to 30 years, obliterating the utility’s chance of reaching any national or international, or even its own, climate goals.

Despite that, the TVA argues that building the capacity for solar and wind energy takes too much money and time to allocate all at once. Its officials insist that methane burns cleaner than coal, and they echo a common argument in claiming that it provides a tidy bridge between coal and truly renewable energy. Some, including the Environmental Protection Agency, oppose the plan for climate reasons, arguing that, in addition to carbon dioxide, the plant will emit methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas. Others worry about how the pipelines needed to serve the new operations will impact their communities.

Wall joined other opponents of the plan who gathered earlier this month in a cavernous middle school gym in Norris, Tennessee, for a TVA board meeting. Together, they told the agency exactly what they thought of the plan. Wall sees the plant slated for Cumberland as part of a history of exploitation throughout the rural South.

“It’s rich people coming in and stealing our stuff and then leaving,” he said. “And I think that when you look into it, it’s a cycle that TVA has the opportunity to stop or to break.”

The TVA bills itself as a proponent of sustainability, and the meeting was thick with branding proclaiming that. A video clip playing on a screen near the podium celebrated a utopian vision of the agency’s past and present: happy workers, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, and glittering solar fields. “We made clean energy long before anyone asked us to,” the narrator intoned over the sound of an acoustic guitar.

Yet just 3 percent of the TVA’s energy portfolio comes from wind and solar alone. If you count hydropower and nuclear as clean energy sources, as the TVA does, that number bumps up to about 50 percent. Gas supplies another 22 percent. “I want the word sustainability to be synonymous with TVA,” Lyash said during the meeting.

It’s hard to square that position with the agency’s plans for the Cumberland and Kingston power plants. Each is a juggernaut. Cumberland, the largest remaining coal plant in the TVA’s fleet, generates enough power for 1.1 million homes each year, according to the agency, and Kingston, about 700,000. These two plants burned coal for decades, exposing the surrounding low-income, rural communities to carbon, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants. In Kingston, mismanagement of the plant’s massive coal ash landfill resulted in a notorious billion-gallon spill in 2008. Each is reaching the end of its service lifespan, and, combined with federal pressure to reduce emissions, no longer make economic sense to repair and run. Though bulldozing the units remains an option, the TVA believes a conversion to methane may give these plants a new life and benefit the climate.

“Replacing retired coal units with natural gas will reduce carbon emissions from coal chains by nearly 6 percent and accelerate the retirement of that coal,” Lyash said of the plan.

Of course, replacing those plants with renewables would reduce carbon emissions even further. The TVA is taking a step in that direction by replacing a coal plant in Paradise, Kentucky, with an operation that will combine solar and natural gas.

The agency considered a solar buildout for the Cumberland coal plant, but ruled it out on the grounds that it would require too much time and money. It also weighed distributed solar development as an alternative for the Kingston plant, but drafts of the plan indicate gas remains the preferred alternative there, too. This comes after years of slashing solar incentives and disinvesting in energy efficiency programs.

The favoritism mirrors a regional trend as Tennessee doubles down on natural gas. State lawmakers are pushing a bill that reclassifies it as clean energy. This follows years of other fossil fuel-friendly legislation, like a bill that explicitly blocks some local governments in the state’s majority-Democratic urban areas from fully decarbonizing. As usual, the argument follows these lines: You can’t see the sun for twelve hours a day, but gas plants can run anytime you need them.

The Biden Administration disapproves of the TVA’s plan for Cumberland and Kingston, noting that the only way it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 would be to institute expensive carbon capture technology, which the TVA did not factor into its math, or bring the plants offline early, leaving them a stranded asset. However, the EPA  did not challenge the decision.

Some commenters thanked the TVA for keeping the lights on, but others challenged the gas buildout, saying the agency reached a crossroads, took a look each way, then picked the wrong direction. Some called on it to immediately change course and cancel its plans.

“If you don’t move now, this will not happen,” one commenter told the board. “We are taxpayers who contribute to every TVA salary.”

That isn’t actually true, although it’s easy to see why people might think it is. Tax dollars do not support the TVA, though they once did, at its outset under the New Deal. Today the agency is a corporation run by the United States government, with leadership recommended by the President of the United States, and confirmed by the Senate, to serve five-year terms. Its board meetings are open, and decisions subject to public comment. But lately, some believe its decision-making has been less than democratic, and that TVA no longer feels beholden to those it serves.

“It’s a corporation clothed with the power of government,” said Amanda Garcia, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center. The Center, with other regional organizations like Appalachian Voices and the Tennessee Sierra Club chapter, has thrown its energy into pushing TVA away from methane. Part of the difficulty, she said, is the TVA is not regulated by the state Public Service Commission – it’s essentially an unregulated monopoly. That exempts it from the sort of oversight experienced by, say, Dominion Energy, which saw the South Carolina Public Service Commission reject its long-term plan in 2020, citing a need for lower-carbon options in its energy mix. Furthermore, utilities under TVA jurisdiction have negotiated what are called “never-ending contracts,” or perpetual power supply agreements that are difficult to exit. That lack of accountability and flexibility appears to be keeping the TVA on the fossil fuel train, Garcia said.

“I think there’s a fair amount of, just, institutional inertia going into planning for the future,” she said. “And a desire to continue to be able to control the electric system in a way that is inconsistent with really where we need to be moving from a climate perspective.”

Garcia and other climate activists believe Lyash, whom the board named CEO in 2019, holds outsized power over decision making. President Trump, who fired two of the board’s nine members over their pay and other issues, threatened to fire him for the same reasons. He relented, and the remaining board members voted in 2022 to hand Lyash the final call on a wide range of matters, including the last word on the gas plant buildout. After President Biden appointed four board members, the panel in May took back that authority, but ditching coal for gas in Cumberland and Kingston remains the official position. The TVA has refused to make board members available for comment, leaving that task to Lyash. TVA did not respond to an additional request for comment by the time of publication.

In an interview, Lyash told Grist that he wants the plants to eventually serve as backup energy sources, in the form of blackout-preventing “peaker plants,” that would provide power during high demand as the agency brings more renewables online. “If you wait for the perfect, you’ll be waiting a long time,” he said.

He also cited his oft-repeated mistrust in the reliability of wind and solar in defending the plan.

“If we could build 100 percent solar and operate a reliable, affordable system, we would have no reason not to. But we can’t. But that isn’t to say that doesn’t diminish the role of a solar bill on the portfolio,” he said, referring to the proportion of gas and solar in the energy mix. “The gas bill, you can’t take it in isolation. You have to think of it as part of the overall system.”

Tennessee’s larger cities, though, don’t think they have the time to wait on TVA’s creeping energy transition. Memphis Light, Gas and Power recently backed out of its “never-ending” 20-year contract with TVA, citing a desire to integrate more renewables and lower residents’ utility bills. Nashville Mayor John Cooper personally urged the TVA to scrap its Cumberland gas plant idea and start over.

“Even if TVA decides to retire the gas plants early and switch to renewables, they will pass the cost of the plant onto Nashville customers, consolidating the cost of a decades-long investment into customer electricity bills over just a few years,” Cooper wrote in a public comment addressed to the TVA. “Leaving Nashvillians on the hook for further pollution is unacceptable, whether the plants operate for years or are retired quickly.”

Climate activists and community leaders hope the conversions to gas are not a done deal. The Kingston plan was only just offered for public comment, and a lot can change before it is finalized in the spring of 2023. The Cumberland gas plan was wrapped up in January, but environmental advocates hope increased agitation over the planned pipeline could delay or even kill it, since that project requires an EPA-approved plan. A few bureaucratic steps remain before the future of the two power plants is set, and the public can still weigh in on it.

Austin Wall doesn’t want a gas plant, but also doesn’t want to see the TVA leave Cumberland. On the contrary. The plant provided 265 well-paying union jobs. But the 35 permanent positions expected from the gas buildout feels like a pittance in comparison, not to mention the public health hazards it will bring. Wall would rather see the agency support his community with renewed investment in energy efficiency and home upgrades, along with the construction of solar and wind infrastructure. That, he says, both help rural ratepayers and provide more opportunity for carpenters, electricians, and others in skilled trades.

A recent report by nonprofit organization Appalachian Voices suggested that as many as 739 direct, long-term jobs could be created in Cumberland and the surrounding area with investments in decarbonization, particularly in the energy efficiency sector.

“We’ve given up a lot of our land and a lot of our health and well being for this coal plant,” Wall said. “And we’d like to see a little bit of it in return.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Replace fossil fuels — with more fossil fuels? That’s one major utility’s plan. on May 19, 2023.

Several of these stories are part of “Adrift,” a three-part series byEnvironmental Health News, and palabra, a multimedia platform of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, on pesticide use in California that finds rural communities of color and farmworkers are disproportionately exposed to some of the most dangerous chemicals approved for use in agriculture. Voices […]

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EXPOSED was first posted on May 18, 2023 at 7:30 am.
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Growers and water managers in the Tulare Lake area have been moving mountains of dirt to beef up levees and build entirely new ones as they brace for snowmelt this summer. 

A string of storms in March battered the region, blowing out levees and overwhelming infrastructure as flood water plowed through homes, dairies and crops. The mad scramble to move dirt is in part to repair that damage but also to fend off future damage in the face of an historic snowpack that’s already swelling valley rivers.

“It’s turning into ‘Whoever has the biggest berm wins,’” said Craig Andrew, manager for Sandridge Partners, one of the largest landowners in Kings County. 

Sandridge built a large berm around its raisin facility about a mile southeast of the tiny community of Stratford on Highway 41, he said. Other farmers are taking dirt from Sandridge to build berms around their farms and dairies. 

Berms are going up all around the Stratford area as locals fret about the South Fork of the Kings River potentially going above its current flow of 2,500 cubic feet per second. In fact, water is already standing against the levees that protect Stratford.

Growers are spending, “millions of dollars,” building berms to protect themselves, confirmed Mark Grewal, a water manager in Kings County. 

“These levees are gigantic,” said Grewal. “They’re million dollar plus levees.”

It’s mostly private companies and landowners doing the levee building, he said. 

Vahid Salehi has been building up levees to try and hold off increasing flows from the Kings River. Salehi is the president of Pistacia Global, which manages about 8,500 acres of almonds and pistachios throughout Kings, Tulare and Fresno counties. 

The problem areas have mostly been on properties next to the North Fork Kings River, said Salehi. There, multiple sections of crops have been inundated with water. Salehi and his workers have been excavating and moving dirt so they can bring in pumps to redirect the water. 

While it hasn’t cost the company millions, it’s still expensive, said Salehi. He estimates costs from roughly the last month of labor and equipment at about $50,000. 

“There’s a lot of issues and maybe budget-wise infrastructure problems,” said Salehi. “There’s just all sorts of problems.” 

Pistacia Global’s Kings River properties are within the jurisdiction of the Kings River Conservation District, which oversees river infrastructure and flood operations, among other things. 

For the most part, Salehi is able to do what he wants when it comes to moving dirt. But there have been some instances where KRCD has stopped construction, he said. 

Salehi was moving dirt on the river trying to build up some of the lower parts of the banks when KRCD told him to stop. The construction would put pressure on other parts of the river, KRCD staff told him. 

“We have a good relationship with them, we try to be friends with everybody. So we haven’t tried to challenge it so much,” said Salehi. “The river has its own rules and they try to enforce those rules.”

KRCD staff have also been moving dirt building up levees. The district manages 140 miles of levees on the Kings River that start upstream of Highway 43 and run through the main river channel, the North Fork and the South Fork down to the town of Stratford. 

Landowners are allowed to do what they want on their own property, said Charlotte Gallock, director of water resources and chief engineer for KRCD. But the district has jurisdiction on anything within 15 feet of the river levee, she said. Any work in those areas needs to be coordinated with the district and permitted by the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, she said. 

There are three locations where levees have been sloughing dirt and have had to be rebuilt, said Gallock. Two were on the main river channel near Lemoore and the third was on the South Fork, she said. 

The biggest area of concern is the South Fork, said Gallock. The district has already raised some sections of levees, in one area by about three feet and another by a foot. There will probably be more levee raising to follow. 

“We’re moving forward with those projects in those areas of concern and we anticipate those will be done pretty swiftly,” said Gallock. 

Kings County and the Office of Emergency Services have helped to get levee building materials down to the district, she said. 

KRCD has seven workers patrolling the levee system during the day and eight patrolling at night. It’s a 24 hour surveillance system, said Gallock. 

“They’ll look to see if there’s water somewhere where it shouldn’t be,” said Gallock. 

The berm building frenzy has sometimes run afoul of Kings County rules.

“Some berms have been placed in the public right of way, we are either removing the berms if they create a safety issue or if acceptable, we work with the property owner to secure an encroachment permit,” wrote a Kings County spokesperson in an email.

Meanwhile, the Tulare Lake, once the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi until it was drained more than 150 years ago for agriculture, continues to refill. Flood water is creeping close to Stratford and Corcoran where it’s being held back by the Corcoran levee. 

The state is paying $17 million to raise that levee. 

But managers at Westlake Farms five miles south of Stratford are taking matters into their own hands. The company hasn’t taken any water yet but workers are building a levee around its headquarters, said Ceil Howe III, COO of Westlake Farms. 

The company owns about 2,000 acres of pistachios, olives and field crops. 

The levee building is, “just a precautionary practice,” said Howe III. 

“We just have to take care of ourselves,” said Howe III. “It’s just tough times for everybody. It’s just unfortunate. Mother Nature wins and it’s just a tough deal.”

The post Battle of the berms: Farmers build maze of levees to protect land as ‘Big Melt’ heads for Tulare Lake appeared first on Fresnoland.