Last night, Ferdinand Waste Water Superintendent Roger Schaefer, presented the Ferdinand Town Council with a letter describing the reasons why the Indiana Department of Environmental Management is expecting a response regarding some of the requirements from the department that were not being met due to a criminal investigation caused by an outside source.
Ferdinand Town Council President, Ken Sicard, elaborates on the events that have led to an ongoing criminal investigation that first took place in August of 2015.
Sicard continues by noting that the actions have cause major problems in the town’s sanitary sewer plant. IDEM has placed the plant as not compliant due to the report the town sent them and IDEM notified the plant of the violations.
Material samples were then collected and sent to labs. In their discovery the results showed a range of waste such as Brines (or type of salts), petroleum waste, polymers from a DAF system, which is a type of treatment that uses a floating polymer to treat animal waste and treatment for petroleum waste facilities.
Another significant discovery was the types of filamentous bacteria. This is a distinctive case due to the fact that a Micro-biologist told Ferdinand officials that this type of bacteria is hard to kill and is the worst that she has come across in her 30 years of work in the field.
This unwanted bacteria affects the plant and it needs to be killed off before they can get rid of waste that is being held up with previous biosolids or also know as slosh, which was among the violations placed by IDEM for keeping it in place.
Among the current steps is to respond within 30 days from receiving IDEM’s letter of violation and plan a state of action.
Simultaneously, the department is working with local, state, and federal agencies to determine who is responsible for illegally dumping the waste. So far it has been known that dumping was cause by an outside source from out of town based upon results from labs that determine the waste is not from around the area.
