"Ryan Dunham heard his eleven-year-old daughter’s scream from his living room. He bolted up the stairs to the bathroom where she was taking a shower and couldn’t believe his eyes. The water flowing from the faucet was brown, and it smelled like 'decay, rot and death.'”
It was the same smell he noticed coming from his neighbor’s farm fields across the street just days earlier. Dunham has lived in New Scotland, a rural town in upstate New York, for more than 20 years and is accustomed to the smell of manure. But this smell was different, it was so bad he couldn’t open his windows and his kids didn’t want to play outside in the middle of summer.
After that day last spring, Dunham discovered his neighbor was spreading sewage sludge — a biosolid made up of decomposed human and industrial waste — as fertilizer on the fields. That waste was seeping into his home’s water supply, putting his family’s health at-risk.
“I connected the dots that my kids were literally taking showers in human sewage,” Dunham said. 'How can this happen in the state of New York? How can this happen legally in the United States of America? It boggles my mind.'"
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