The State, SC
05-07-06
Suit puts poultry farms in spotlight
S.C. woman says farm near her home is causing health problems
By SAMMY FRETWELL
KINGSTREE — For decades, Carmen Covington has lived with the smell of
fermenting chicken manure from a farm next door.
The odor sometimes is so strong Covington stays in her house — even on pretty
days. Her family has complained to the state health department for years.
But when she began coughing and a mysterious rash turned her hands lobsterred, Covington said it was more than she could take.
Last fall, Covington filed a lawsuit against the mega-chicken farm near her
house, claiming airborne toxins from the chicken houses have made her sick.
Her lawsuit is believed to be the first of its kind in South Carolina.
It’s also the latest skirmish between the state’s booming poultry industry and its
neighbors.
More than 800 permitted chicken and turkey farms dot the landscape across the
state, raising more than 215 million birds annually. The growth of the poultry
business has turned broiler chickens into South Carolina’s top cash crop.
State lawmakers are expected to loosen regulation of factory-style chicken farms
sometime in the next month.
To Covington, that would be a mistake.
“We need to get the word out that these farms are not the benign things they are
made out to be,” said Covington, 65, who has lived next to the farm since the
1960s.
Covington said she wants stricter regulation for poultry farms, particularly rules to
better separate them from homes.
Wayne McCutchen, the farmer Covington is suing, denies in court papers that his
poultry farm made her sick
S.C. Farm Bureau spokesman Reggie Hall questioned whether air pollutants
from poultry farms could threaten human health. Hall, whose group is seeking
looser rules for poultry farms, said he has never heard of an air pollution suit like
Covington’s in South Carolina.
“We have more than 30,000 family farmers in South Carolina,” Hall said, “and I
don’t know of a single case where any of them has become unhealthy because
of air quality around their farms.”
Long known for strong odors and water pollution threats, giant chicken farms also
can be sources of potent air toxins. Researchers have traced airborne ammonia,
tainted dust, and poisonous gases to chicken, turkey, hog and dairy farms. These
contaminants can irritate people’s lungs or burn their eyes.
Scientists across the country are on the lookout for outbreaks of the deadly avian
flu at poultry farms. So far, it hasn’t been detected anywhere. Covington does not
mention avian flu in her lawsuit.
The effect of air pollution from poultry farms depends on the exposure a person
receives, said Jerry Gibson, director of disease control for the S.C. Department
of Health and Environmental Control.
At poultry farms, air pollution often comes from fecal matter and animal dander
blown out of huge chicken houses through vents. If the material lingered inside, it
could sicken or kill the thousands of birds being grown for market.
Public health officials and scientists “need to learn an awful lot more about what
the effect of large agricultural operations are on the people who work in them and
the people who live near them,” Gibson said.
LIVING PROOF
Covington, who does not smoke, said she is living proof a poultry farm can
endanger its neighbors.
Her October 2005 lawsuit said she is plagued by sinus disease, a hyperexpanded lung and heart enlargement from breathing air polluted by the farm.
The 174,000-bird farm, which contains seven chicken houses, is less than a
quarter-mile from her home on S.C. 261. She is seeking unspecified damages
from the chicken farmer.
She wears a mask to protect her from the air pollution from the farm when she
ventures outside to walk her dogs through the open fields and deep woods
around her home.
On a recent trek through the cotton field she leases out, the scent of chicken
manure wafted around her. The odor came from the vented chicken house on
her neighbor’s property and settled over the freshly plowed field she owns.
“Sometimes, the smell is very faint,” she said. “But sometimes, it about knocks
you out.”
Covington’s health problems flared up several years ago. That’s when an itchy,
scaly rash broke out. Photographs of her hands show that her tan skin had
turned bright red.
Allan Lieberman, a North Charleston physician who examined her, said in a 2004
letter to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control that chronic
exposure to the chicken farm had caused chemical sensitivity and sensitivity to
molds. It did not elaborate. The letter called Covington’s case a “sad situation.”
Covington’s ailments “were consistent with her history of chronic exposure to the
products and byproducts of the chicken farm adjacent to her property,”
Lieberman said in the letter. “The problem of pig and poultry farming is they are
unacceptable in areas of residential exposure.”
Attempts to reach Lieberman were unsuccessful.
Covington’s lawyers, Tom Pendarvis and Gary Poliakoff, said they would not
discuss other doctors’ statements about her condition.
“This lady has suffered significant health problems,” Poliakoff said.
CHICKEN FIGHT
The target of Covington’s lawsuit, a high-school classmate who farms chickens
for an agribusiness, says he had nothing to do with Covington’s illness.
If Covington has gotten sick, it’s her fault or the fault of someone else, farmer
McCutchen says in court papers. McCutchen has had the poultry farm since
1965.
McCutchen’s attorney, Preston Dawkins of Florence, declined comment.
Columbia lawyer Bob Guild, one of the state’s most active lawyers in chicken
farm cases, said he routinely argues about the air pollution threats when fighting
new animal farm permits in court. But Guild, a Sierra Club member and chicken
farm critic, said he has not heard of a lawsuit over farm air pollution making
someone sick in South Carolina.
Covington’s neighbors along S.C. 261 have mixed thoughts about the threat of
the chicken farm to their air.
Franklin McCray, 41, lives just down from the chicken farm but said he rarely
smells much of an odor.
Harriett Fulton can see — and smell — the McCutchen farm across the street
from her house.
“At times, the smell can be unbearable,” said Fulton, 57, who has an energysapping blood condition. “I wonder sometimes if it hasn’t induced my conditions.
The farm is too close if you can smell it.”
AIR WARS
A 2004 report by the University of Delaware said pollutants called endotoxins in
poultry house dusts can cause fever similar to the flu.
People can have headaches, nausea, nasal irritation and chest tightness if
exposed to the material in sufficient amounts, the study said. It also noted that
ammonia from poultry houses can affect people’s lungs.
A recent report by researchers at the University of Iowa and Iowa State
University said the general population is at risk from farm air pollution because
the country has so many large factory farms.
“These exposures now have the potential to affect larger numbers of individuals,
including members of the neighboring community not involved in agriculture or
related industrial livestock production,” the report said.
But Al Heber, an agricultural engineering professor at Purdue University in
Indiana, questions that assertion.
“I find it difficult to conclude that the smell from a livestock facility some distance
away is the cause of a respiratory problem,” he said.
Michele Merkel, a former federal Environmental Protection Agency lawyer, said
the issue of air pollution from factory farms intensified nationally after her agency
began enforcing air pollution laws against farms about six years ago. Until that
point, much of the attention had focused on water pollution, she said.
Because of questions about animal farms everywhere, the EPA is launching a
national study to measure air pollution from hog, poultry and dairy farms.
“You are seeing more and more studies documenting the adverse health effects”
of air pollution from big animal farms, Merkel said.
Reach Fretwell at (803) 771-8537.