PLYMOUTH, Maine — When Michael Seavey walked into the woods near his property to see what was happening at the secretive waste processing plant nearby, he got a snootful of answers.
Soil Preparation Inc., the private Plymouth-based company that owns the plant, was bringing in out-of-state sludge and local waste to process into farmland fertilizer. It had placed standpipes with sprinkler heads throughout the woods between its and Seavey’s properties to disperse the wastewater it had squeezed out of the sludge, a mixture of human, food and other waste that was about 80 percent liquid.
“You never knew when these things were going to come on,” said Seavey, a resident of Plymouth who taught OSHA standards for more than 30 years before retiring. “I wanted to investigate, and all of a sudden those things came on.”
During his outing two decades ago, Seavey received an up-close view of what was happening in the town where he has lived for 55 years. In addition to spraying wastewater onto its property, the company also spread sludge on some 200 farm fields across Maine. Testing has shown it contained harmful chemicals and heavy metals in addition to organic nutrients.
Today the plant is no longer accepting sludge. But residents of the small town of 1,300 people are left wondering about the possible contamination of the soil, wells and waterways, and frustrated that the state has not done more to investigate. They believe the town’s environment will suffer in the long run, and Soil Prep’s owners, who stood to profit from the business, will face few long-term consequences.
When the Bangor Daily News asked a series of questions about possible contamination and remediation to Soil Prep President Philip McCarthy Jr., he said the company lawyers have advised him not to comment because “these questions relate to matters that are the subject of pending litigation.”
Nine plaintiffs from nearby Fairfield who own property contaminated by per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, filed a 116-page l awsuit against Soil Prep and 10 other defendants last March in Somerset County Superior Court. The defendants are mostly paper companies including Sappi North America, Huhtamaki and Pixelle Specialty Solutions, and one other waste processor, Pine Tree Waste.
The lawsuit alleges that the defendants committed “intentional, knowing, reckless and/or negligent acts and omissions in connection with the discharge, distribution, disposal and/or spraying of PFAS substances and their constituents.” The suit claims plaintiffs were injured and their property and drinking water supplies were contaminated.
Once deposited on the ground, PFAS chemicals are “all but certain to migrate” through the soil to groundwater and aquifers and through runoff to nearby lands and waterways, the lawsuit said, “poisoning the water, the soil, the animals, the plants, and ultimately, the people therein.”
The plaintiffs are asking for a jury trial and awards to cover PFAS abatement on their property and water, and for personal injuries and duress.
It started with the stink
Complaints about Soil Prep began with the smell. In the late 1990s, a new waste processing system was installed that emitted a strong odor from the facility, located on Valley Road, a private lane a half-mile from populated areas along Routes 7 and 69. Residents said processing the septic waste, which involved the company aerating it in large concrete tanks and spreading excess wastewater on its land, caused them to flee indoors and shut tight their windows. Many worried about possible health effects.
Seavey said if the odor was emitted on a day he and his wife had hung out laundry, they would have to wash it again.
“It smelled like a mouse had died and someone had taped it to my upper lip,” said Norm Viger, a former assistant professor of engineering technology at the University of Maine for 39 years who helped Seavey and others in the town try to get state regulators to notice the problem.
Two decades later, the plant is quieter, and the odors are gone. But tests by town advocates and regulators during its operation showed high levels of PFAS and other chemicals around the plant. Frustrated residents want to know whether there are lingering chemicals in the ground that have spread, creating health and environmental problems.
“At this point the town is kind of in a holding pattern to see what the company is planning on doing,” Seavey said.
Any time companies deal with sludge, it should be in a lined basin, not oozing off into the surrounding area, said Jean MacRae, associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Maine in Orono. The company kept its license despite numerous violation warnings from the state, including a Maine Department of Environmental Protection notice in 2017 for failing to collect, contain and treat wastewater.
“It sounds like it wasn’t a well-run operation,” she said. “I would be worried,” she said of the people living in Plymouth.
The company is not currently processing waste on the site, but it is using it as a depot to repair and dispatch its trucks. They haul waste to other disposal sites in Maine, such as Juniper Ridge in Old Town, on weekdays, McCarthy, Soil Prep’s president, said. The materials include construction waste, lobster shells, farm animal manure, and surplus from municipal waste and water treatment operations.
“We are not actively processing materials at the site,” McCarthy said in an earlier email to the BDN. “The trucks for the most part leave and return empty to the Plymouth site daily.”
Soil Prep is still paying licensing and annual report fees to the state, according to the Maine DEP. Its license to operate is in “active status,” DEP spokesperson David Madore said. It is not clear whether the company will resume waste processing operations in the future.
Fighting back
Part of the problem at the Soil Prep site was that it took in more waste than it could handle, according to DEP records. Ever-growing piles of waste are a challenge statewide. With the closure of trash plants in Hampden and Orrington and a law restricting the spreading of sludge on farm fields, Maine landfills are filling up more quickly.
Critical waste system issues have garnered attention from municipal and state officials. But small towns like Plymouth, with ample and cheap open land for waste facilities, have been particularly at risk of falling through the cracks when the state decides how to distribute its limited resources to investigate potential contamination.
The state has prioritized testing for PFAS at sludge-spreading sites near homes, but there’s an open question about what it will do to test where there’s a more general environmental concern.
“I’m not sure that the DEP is doing as much as they could do and that they’re totally responsive to the town’s concerns,” Seavey said.
Plymouth residents began reporting nuisance odors to the Maine DEP in July 1998, after the company installed its Phase II composting process that allowed it to handle sludge from other locations that already had most of the water removed. The DEP confirmed the odors at various residences, and, in August 1999, it issued a warning to the company.
Soil Prep, which is a regional business of GottaDo Contracting of Jordan, New York, received subsequent fines, and paid what residents considered a paltry amount to the state of $20,000 for water violations in 2010 and $15,000 for solid waste violations in 2016 that included a failure to process sludge stored outside within 24 hours. The DEP said it has no records of violations since 2019.
Soil Prep responded to odor complaints in 2000 by pilot testing a process called N-Viro, which used lime to stabilize and rapidly dry the dewatered sewage. Odor complaints dropped for a while.
From that time until Soil Prep stopped storing sludge in October 2018, the company delivered N-Viro soil to some 200 farms in Maine plus others out of state, according to information obtained by the BDN through Maine’s Freedom of Access Act. Some of the spreading was done on farms in the DEP’s high-priority PFAS investigative sites, including in Albion, Benton, Corinna, Corinth, Canaan, Fairfield, Knox, Thorndike and Unity.
But in September 2000, when Soil Prep resumed the Phase II compost process, odor complaints rose, and the department issued a violation.
Contamination at the site was first discovered in 2011, when the state ordered the company to dig wells on its property and test for pollution. But complaints from residents to the company and the state, along with groundwater and other environmental tests and fines, did little to protect the town, Seavey said. Ultimately, the town’s people began meeting to share information and plan a strategy.
Soil Prep’s license called for it to process septage and wastewater treatment plant sludge in an enclosed building. Incoming septic waste was to be screened and stored in two large concrete tanks. About 80 percent of the water would be removed by adding polymers and pressing the septic waste. That wastewater was to be treated and sprayed onto the land.
Soil Prep processed biosolids from Massachusetts and Maine communities including Kittery, York, Wells, Kennebunk, Ogunquit, Belfast, Brewer, Bar Harbor, Boothbay, Boothbay Harbor and Veazie. It accepted septic waste from Plymouth residents for free. Soil Prep also dewatered liquid sludge from the U.S. Naval Security Group in Winter Harbor, and the sewer districts of Corinna and Orono.
The processed sludge was temporarily stored on an asphalt pad adjacent to the building before being put into composting bins and cured for at least 45 days before being sold to local municipalities and farms as a soil amendment.
However, residents including former selectman Wade Richardson, complained in a letter to the DEP in 2004 that Soil Prep had overproduced its product and stored a sizable amount unprotected from the elements, increasing odors. Richardson, who was writing to oppose a Soil Prep contract revision that would allow the company to process waste from Rockland, Massachusetts, also expressed doubt that all of the contaminants could be removed or neutralized without some groundwater contamination.
One of the challenges is the odor was intermittent, and discerning its potency was impossible without a quantifiable measurement, said Kenneth Fredette, a lawyer and former Republican lawmaker from Newport who represented the town in the Legislature. He sponsored a bill in 2013 that would require the DEP to devise a measuring system rather than just relying on people’s noses and timing.
Some residents went to Augusta to meet with regulators and former Gov. Paul LePage.
“The town was frustrated by the lack of willingness and lack of response to more thoroughly investigate the situation,” Fredette said.
LePage reportedly had someone drive him to the town the next day, but the air was clear, Fredette said.
“I have been there and smelled it. It was disgusting,” Fredette said. “And the government response to dealing with that was wholly inadequate.”
Also to the townspeople’s dismay, the odor limits proposed by the state in 2014 in response to the bill Fredette sponsored came in six times higher than the initial goal.
In March 2016, Plymouth decided to fight the situation on its own, adopting an ordinance in March 2016.
The ordinance required new and existing waste operations, including Soil Prep, to apply for a facilities permit with the town within 90 days. The company fought the new requirement in court, but the judge ruled in favor of the town’s authority to require the new permit. The ordinance allows the town to regulate disposal of septic waste and sludge to standards it finds reasonable, provided they are not stricter than the state’s Solid Waste Act or the DEP’s rule, the court said.
Starting on June 1, 2016, Soil Prep voluntarily discontinued accepting new sludge and septic waste for processing. However, sludge had piled up. DEP documents show it still had about 55,000 cubic yards of N-Viro soil, or the equivalent of more than two football fields, in May 2017. The DEP told the company it needed to remove the N-Viro soil by June 1, 2018.
The DEP inspected the facility on June 5 of that year and still found about 30,000 cubic yards of N-Viro soil stored there. The DEP issued a notice of violation on June 6, 2018, but no fine.
No waste material is now being stored at Soil Prep’s facility in Plymouth, Madore of the DEP said.
Soil Prep was not receiving waste at the time Maine banned the spreading of sewage sludge in 2022 to prevent the spread of PFAS.
However, in October 2022 the department sampled two piles of Soil Prep’s N-Viro soil that had been stockpiled in Fairfield and Corinna, with both of those showing high levels of PFAS: with perfluorononanoic acid, or PFOA, levels of 54.7 and 40.5 parts per billion. New federal guidance for PFAS limits in water are in the parts per trillion, a far more sensitive measure.)
A pile in Corinna was removed by the property owner and disposed of at a lined landfill, Madore said. The pile in Fairfield is still present on private property, he said.
A sordid history on the land
Waste-spreading at the Plymouth location began well before Soil Prep bought the property. In the early 1990s, then-owner Robert Tenney had a license to spread septic waste on his land, according to state documents. Seavey used to hunt near the property, and he said trucks that had pumped household septic used to drive around Tenney’s fields with a valve open and human waste littering the fields, including tampons and condoms.
Tenney sold the land to Larry Frost in 1995, who set up Frost Septic to handle the waste. Frost sold his company several years later to Soil Prep, which expanded the operation. That’s when the problems began, according to Seavey. The BDN could not reach Frost for an interview.
Several former workers at Soil Prep shed light on the early operations in town documents the BDN received in a public records request. One, who was employed in the early 2000s to operate equipment, told of digging a hole about 40 feet wide by 200 feet long by 20 feet deep near a former grove of apple trees. The material needed to be dried and then blended with a fly ash and lime mixture. Instead, he and his colleagues filled the hole to bury it.
Another former employee told the town in a written report of how he and his co-workers buried up to 16,000 yards of raw sewage across from the office building and other locations. The company did not have enough ash to mix and prepare it properly and ended up dumping some of the waste into the woods.
The DEP reviewed its available electronic records for the Soil Prep facility and did not find information about illegal burial of waste or complaints about it, Madore said.
Under a 2010 Administrative Consent Agreement issued to Soil Prep, N-Viro soil was being stored in two locations off of the licensed storage pad. The DEP required the material to be relocated onto the paved storage pad.
Intermittent odors that assailed the senses have cost the town. Joe Mousseau and his wife had moved to Plymouth from Arizona to retire around 2014, but they soon found the smells so pungent they decided to leave. They ended up selling their new home for a loss of $20,000, real estate records show.
The same happened to Danielle McGrath, who had built a dream home near the plant with her family in 2000 because she loved the tranquil town and its sense of community. Located on the shores of Plymouth Pond, the downtown has a church, repair garage, village store, fire station and childcare within walking distance of each other. People get together for picnics and other events, McGrath said. But she and her family ended up moving away because of the smell and worries about the spread of pollution and the effect it might have on her daughter.
“I grew up in Palmyra around cow and horse smells,” said McGrath. “But this smelled like human s***. You couldn’t go outside or have a party at your house, it was so pungent.”
There is little appetite among civilians for more regulations or for paying more public servants to test for contamination, MacRea, of the University of Maine, said.
“The outcome is that it is sort of a flawed system,” she said. “DEP goes out and inspects all of the places they permit, but not that often.”
Contamination could potentially get to nearby waterways two different ways: by traveling in the groundwater system and by runoff, MacRae said.
A water sample taken in December 2022 near Plymouth Pond by a local citizen’s group showed high levels of two of the six PFAS chemicals tested in Maine’s interim drinking water standard: PFOA and PFHpA, or perfluoroheptanoic acid. They are two of the six PFAS chemicals the state tests for in drinking water, and together added up to a level of 42.5 parts per trillion.
The group, the Plymouth Ponds Association, shared the results with the DEP in Bangor, which reportedly said the levels were not high enough to act on, because the tests were of surface water and not ground drinking water.
The human health effects of exposure to low levels of PFOA in the environment still are not known, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said exposure to the man-made chemical is widespread in the United States. In laboratory animals, large amounts of PFOA can affect growth and reproduction and injure the liver, the centers said. PFHpA can cause similar effects in large doses, according to the Health and Environment Alliance.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed new contaminant levels in drinking water that would decrease the maximum allowable PFAS level from 20 parts per trillion to 4 parts per trillion. Once they become effective, the DEP will likely “review existing PFAS monitoring data and offer filter systems to additional households,” Madore said.
Regarding food, the state has not issued any “do not eat” advisories for animals hunted in Plymouth as it did in 2021 for white-tailed deer and wild turkey harvested in portions of Fairfield and Skowhegan when high levels of PFAS were discovered.
The N-Viro soil product previously produced at the Soil Prep facility was marketed and distributed as an agricultural liming agent similar to how sludge-amended compost was distributed in Maine. Madore said the DEP is compiling a list of the Soil Prep customers and their locations and will be adding them to its list of spreading locations to investigate for PFAS.
He said the DEP is unable to determine the scope of the problem with other waste treatment facilities throughout the state until the department finishes its investigation underway now at sites near homes where sludge-spreading took place. It expects to test more than 400 sites.
He did not reveal the possible locations, but casting a broader net may help smaller towns like Plymouth in the future. For now, the town can only wait for results of the testing, and the lawsuit.
“It was a smaller project in a smaller town and therefore was paid less attention,” Fredette said. “The entire community in central Maine lived with this problem for a decade.”
Lori Valigra is an investigative environment reporter for the BDN’s Maine Focus team. She may be reached at [email protected]. Support for this reporting is provided by the Unity Foundation and donations by BDN readers.
