Sludge

Almost a year after a massive flood of mud began, the Indonesian government is set to pay a share of the massive bill, pledging at least $275 million to repair the damage from the disaster that just won't stop. Thick muck has spewed over hundreds of families' homes as well as their rice fields, factories and roads since May, when a natural-gas drilling project went wrong in Sidoarjo, which, like Jakarta, the capital, is on the island of Java.

Home Depot agreed Friday to pay nearly $10 million to settle a civil case filed by state and Los Angeles County prosecutors over the retailer's failure to properly store and transport hazardous sludge. The case stems from the explosion of a 55-gallon drum at Home Depot's Marina del Rey store in 2004 that caused a fire and forced the evacuation of customers and employees. Investigators discovered that chemicals were mixed together into an explosive brew. State Atty. Gen.

Voters in Kern County have moved toward slamming the door on the city of Los Angeles' practice of trucking its treated sewage sludge to farmland it owns in the rural county, forcing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to consider waging an expensive campaign or pony up millions more to truck the stuff to Arizona.

It's a typical day at Green Acres: Rippling fields of wheat await harvest, a cat scampers after field mice and workers unload 750 tons of processed human waste from Los Angeles, fertilizing a quiet revolt in rural Kern County. Fearful of deteriorating air and water quality, many folks in the New Jersey-size county have about had it with the daily parade of trucks dumping sewage sludge onto their fields.

Tons of chemicals in antibacterial soaps used in the bathrooms and kitchens of virtually every home are being released into the environment, yet no government agency is monitoring or regulating them in water supplies or food. About 75% of a potent bacteria-killing chemical that people flush down their drains survives treatment at sewage plants, and most of that ends up in sludge spread on farm fields, according to Johns Hopkins University research.

Los Angeles appeared to win a round Monday in its legal battle to keep dumping 250,000 tons of sewage sludge every year on farmland near Bakersfield. U.S. District Judge Gary Feess said he planned to issue a written ruling within a few days granting a preliminary injunction in favor of the city and its co-plaintiffs, including the sanitation districts for Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Ten years after activist Erin Brockovich swept through this high-desert town and helped force Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to pay a multimillion-dollar settlement for allegedly polluting the town's groundwater, residents say they're facing another serious health threat.

Los Angeles has a plan for getting rid of some of the city's sewage sludge that nobody wants in their backyard -- bury it a mile below Terminal Island in a sandstone formation. In what is believed to be the first project of its kind, the city has won federal environmental approval for a five-year experiment to inject as much as 400 tons of treated sewage sludge a day into a depleted oil field deep in the Earth.

The Port of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Conservancy and a Long Beach firm have agreed to put on hold their dispute over the fate of a 38-acre site that operated as a full-service shipyard until 2005. The site, known as the old Southwest Marine facility, is deep inside the Port of L.A. and is where the port plans to put sludge it dredges from the bottom of the harbor to deepen the shipping channel. That would enable the port to accommodate the next generation of giant cargo ships.

A holding tank broke at a Caterpillar facility in Joliet, spilling about 65,000 gallons of oil sludge and contaminating a three-mile section of the Des Plaines River, officials said. The substance was reported to be hydraulic and cutting oil, said Maggie Carson, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. "It is being contained, and there is no evidence of a fish kill or harm to waterfowl," Carson said in an e-mail. Most of the sludge spilled on land, but 6,000 gallons seeped into Des Plaines River water, U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer William Mitchell said.