- OSCAR MAYER, PART II
- OSCAR MAYER’S INSECTICIDE EXPERIMENTS AND MANUFACTURING
- OSCAR MAYER INVESTIGATIVE & REMEDIAL REPORTS
- MEJO’s COMMENTS ON CITY’S OSCAR MAYER SPECIAL AREA & BUS BARN PLANS
Oscar Mayer polluted Starkweather Creek, Yahara River & Lake Monona for over 100 years
Government agencies aided and abetted—or looked the other way
Note: This is an excerpt from a much longer piece. All statements in quotation marks are from written sources. The citations are removed for ease of reading. If you want sources for particular points, or have comments/questions/ corrections, please contact Maria Powell at mariapowell@mejo.us
Part 1 (through 1960)
By Maria C. Powell, PhD
Oscar Mayer & Co. was founded on Madison’s north side in 1919
In 1919, the wealthy Oscar Mayer family, which already owned the successful Oscar Mayer & Bro. meat-packing plant in Chicago, purchased the Farmer’s Meat Packing Cooperative on Madison’s north side. The Farmer’s Cooperative was founded in 1914 to compete with big Chicago meat packers. The cooperative failed after a few years due to financial difficulties and labor unrest. (Photo above: Oscar Mayer in 1931)
The new company was dubbed Oscar Mayer & Co. (hereafter, “Oscar Mayer”). It grew rapidly and played a central role in the development of the city’s industrial northeast side. In time, Oscar Mayer did much more than raise and slaughter animals and produce processed meat products. Early in the 1920s, the company sank its own deep water well and started a thriving ice business that continued for decades. In 1929 the company started its own “research bureau” at the plant that included, according to the Wisconsin State Journal, “a laboratory for experimentation in new food and medicinal products, package product research, utilization of wastes, and chemical control, including analysis of ingredients used in the processing of meats.”
As it expanded and became a global leader in processed meat products, Madison’s plant became a mini-city in itself, with its own Madison police officer, worker showers and cafeterias, an onsite coal-fired power plant, incinerator, landfills, a wastewater treatment plant, and several of its own deep water production wells. In onsite laboratories, company scientists developed new types of processed meats, pharmaceuticals, insecticides, and spices.[1], [2] Oscar Mayer scientists also developed and produced first-of-a-kind plastic packaging that was used for its products and sold to other meat companies.[3]
Oscar Mayer was considered a leader and innovator in food packaging and processing (and more) and eventually became Madison’s largest employer. It was well known and liked by people here and all over the world–everyone remembers the famous jingle, “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener” and most have heard about (or seen) the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, which still travels around the country today. The company had a huge amount of political and cultural clout in the city, state, and beyond.
Oscar Mayer’s wastes quickly outstripped Madison sewerage treatment capacity—helping to create “Madison’s Hog Wallow”
While many people know about Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobile, few are aware of the challenges the company faced in disposing of its huge amounts of animal processing wastes—and how Madison’s north side and our lakes became depositories for these wastes for decades.
The original Farmers Meat Packing Cooperative that Oscar Mayer purchased in 1919 was purposely built just southwest of the city’s new Burke sewage treatment plant so the plant could handle its wastes, along with other east side sewage. Built in 1914, the Burke plant was also purposely designed so effluent overflow would go into Starkweather Creek, which flows into Lake Monona. (Photo above: Old Burke sewage plant tanks with city “piggery farm” behind them)
Unfortunately, the plant wasn’t built to handle meat-processing wastes and had problems from the start. By 1918, when it was receiving wastes from the Farmers Cooperative and the east side (but before Oscar Mayer began operations), an expert declared the Burke plant “defective” and admitted that raw sewage was still entering Lake Monona. The odor was described as “almost unendurable,” and meetings of “east-end” residents were called to “take action on the lake nuisance.” In 1919 Madison’s assistant city health officer declared that “every known method will be used to eliminate the odor from Lake Monona” and “a ton” of copper sulphate was on its way from Chicago for an “open war on Lake Monona odor.”
Opinion columns in Madison papers during this time were colorful and passionate. “Madison once had four lakes—now it has three and a hog-wallow,” William Newton Nichols, a Monona lakeshore homeowner, wrote to The Capital Times in 1919, “and unless prompt action is taken to stop at once all further pollution by its so-called sewerage-disposal plant it will have a pestilence and three cesspools to advertise its ‘kulture.’”
Nichols’ comments about the new Burke plant were sarcastic and scathing. “As though the builders of the filter beds feared something might not reach the lake,” he wrote, “they dug a moat of earth outside and lower than the concrete, one that receives the flow from the filter beds, and connected this across the marsh eastward to the Starkweather drainage ditch—so that all leakage from the cracked beds goes straight into the head of the lake and this leakage produced the horrible conditions at the Starkweather bridge….” Because of this design, he wrote, “all the concentrated and consecrated filth of the whole city is poured out of the Yahara and Starkweather and deposited along the beach” on the east side.
“This is no accident,” he continued, “it is by a deliberate design, for the connection with the Starkweather was installed at the time of the building of the sewerage-disposal plant, but it did not become so offensive as now until the beds and walls began cracking, because of their being built in a morass.”
Photo: The “golf ditch” going through Bridges Golf Course now—the same ditch that drained the Burke sewage plant from the time it was built
Oscar Mayer’s greasy wastes overwhelmed the sewage plant and worsened lake pollution; East side residents took action
Oscar Mayer’s opening in 1919 dramatically worsened lake pollution problems. The company grew quickly right from the start. Slaughtering and processing wastes were sent to the Burke sewage plant (just a few thousand feet to the northeast) and city sewer pipes, where they immediately began cause problems due to “immense amount of grease,” according to city officials.[4],[5]
Residents on the east side near Lake Monona—mostly shoreline homeowners—had complained for years about pollution in the lake by the time Oscar Mayer opened. When animal-processing wastes from Oscar Mayer worsened Lake Monona’s condition, their organizing ramped up. In 1924, a group of these residents formed a “citizens committee,” that packed city meetings complaining about algae, stink and scum in the lake, and demanded immediate improvement.
Meetings were heated. At one, attended by hundreds of citizens, a resident brought Lake Monona and Yahara River water and scum samples to demonstrate the problem to officials. He pointed to city sewage and wastes from manufacturing plants, demanding that the city “stop all sources of pollution” to the lakes. A local attorney working with the group urged the city to “stop using the lakes as cesspools” in order to preserve the beauty of the lakes.
Oscar Mayer was repeatedly named by residents and city officials as a key culprit. Oscar Mayer’s superintendent A.C. Boltz was incensed at the public charges, saying it wasn’t their responsibility, but the fault of the engineers who designed a faulty sewage plant at Burke. Because the Burke plant proved inadequate to handle all its wastes, the company constructed a ditch that sent “refuse” from the plant directly to the Yahara River. This open ditch, visible to residents, reeked. But Boltz defended the company, saying it was “doing all in its power to rectify the situation,” including treating the ditch with chlorine and funding the construction of a new sewage treatment plant onsite that was to be completed in two months. (It was completed that year, but quickly proved to be inadequate).[6]
Not mollified, citizens accused city officials of “failing to make any attempt to stop pollution of Monona” and not carrying out recommendations of independent scientific consultants (not affiliated with the city) in 1919 and a special committee report in 1921. Responding to citizens’ charges, the state sanitary engineer admitted that “the condition of the packing plant is deplorable” and that “during heavy rains when the sewage disposal plant is shut off, raw sewage is dumped into the lake to relieve the plant.”
More dredging and toxic chemicals…
In June 1925, following recommendations of the rivers and lakes commission, the board of health issued emergency orders to address Lake Monona stench, especially around Starkweather Creek, the focus of most resident complaints. Ongoing copper sulphate applications in the lake had apparently not been effective, so officials proposed buying a bigger chemical sprayer to broadcast more copper sulphate in shallow parts of Starkweather Creek where it enters the lake—and further dredging of the east shore of the lake, using dredged materials to create the park that citizens and public officials wanted there (which eventually became Olbrich Park).
In 1926, William Newton Nichols wrote a detailed letter to the State Journal editor saying that Lake Monona could not be “de-odorized” by dredging alone—because of the overflow from the Burke plant. First, he wrote, “there is the cement overflow at the sewer plant that dumps sewage into a ditch leading to Starkweather Creek. As long as this is permitted, there will be stench on hot days along the eastern and northern shores of the lake.” Much of this waste came from Oscar Mayer; that year, in fact, the city had approved a “separate force main” from Oscar Mayer to the Burke plant to better handle the company’s growing amounts of greasy animal wastes.[7]
The first unit of the Nine Springs sewage plant was finally built in 1927, but wasn’t big enough to handle the increasing amounts of wastes coming its way as the city and industries grew. So the Burke plant stayed in operation and handled most of the east side wastes, including Oscar Mayer’s. According to city officials, even though they knew the plant was inadequate, it couldn’t be shut down until the Nine Springs plant could be expanded adequately.
In 1927, a special “Lake Monona Dredging Committee,” a subcommittee of the rivers and lakes commission, recommended that chemicals be used to treat the east end of Lake Monona near Starkweather Creek instead of dredging. The Common Council approved this, and more chemical treatments of copper sulphate and arsenic compounds commenced. But in 1928, a city health officer said treating the lakes with chemicals would produce “no permanent results” as long as “debris” continued to flow into Lake Monona from Starkweather Creek—noting that the effluent from the sewage plant on the west branch of the creek is “turned into the stream.”
Lake algae and stench continued, and increasing amounts of chemicals were thrown at the problem. At a fall 1929 meeting of the rivers and lakes commission, officials reported that from 1925 and 1929, a total of 535,730 pounds (almost 270 tons) of copper sulphate were dumped into the lake, most of it near the Starkweather Creek outlet. This continued for decades.[8]
1930s sewage wars; Burke plant continued to spew sewage into Lake Monona
In 1931, town boards from four townships around Madison’s lakes– Blooming Grove, Madison, Dunn and Pleasant Springs—met in Blooming Grove to discuss what to do about the sorry state of the lakes. About a hundred property owners and citizens attended the meeting to protest the lack of city action to clean up the lakes—calling their efforts a “call to arms” and threatening lawsuits. They eventually called themselves the “Clean Lakes Association.”
Testimonies were heated, and most of the ire was directed at the City of Madison. Robert Nickels, former alderman and member of the rivers and lakes commission, called the condition at the outlet of the Yahara River “deplorable” and William J.P. Aberg, former president of the Izaak Walton League, called the Burke plant discharge “criminal.”[9] “The city of Madison,” he charged, “is operating a plant at Burke which would be a disgrace to any city in the state…putting into Lake Monona effluent only 30 percent treated, filled with nitrates which encourage growth of weeds and containing some sewage that is almost raw.” He sarcastically called the chemical treatment of the lake “aspirin treatment,” as opposed to a permanent cure, and recommended, among other things, eliminating the Burke discharge.
A week before the meeting, an investigative committee outlined suspected causes of Monona’s sorry state. Burke effluents were named as one of the top culprits, and the committee recommended eliminating this source as soon as possible.[10],[11] At a meeting a month later, the rivers and lakes commission agreed on several steps to address the problems, including a drainage district that would raise the lakes in attempt to reduce algal and weed growth. Nobody felt that this would be enough to eliminate the pollution, however.
Dr. L. H. Tyerne, a scientist working with the Clean Lakes Association group, said as long as Burke effluents continued to go into Starkweather Creek, the lake would be polluted. Debates about the best solutions were heated, but most agreed that the Burke sewage plant must be abandoned. City engineer Parker explained, however, that “the city is financially unable to abandon the Burke plant. The only solution is to turn over the system to the metropolitan sewer district, which, with its unlimited bonding powers, could enlarge the plant.”
A month later, over 100 people attended a meeting organized by the Clean Lakes Association and held at Lowell School on the eastside. Alexius Baas, a well-known local singer and Lake Monona shoreline property owner who had become one Madison’s staunchest lake defenders, reported the group’s recommendations, which included abandonment of the Burke plant.
In his sarcastic style, Mr. Baas reported that, “because the city chemists have a tendency to whitewash the situation,” the group had hired its own scientist to test effluents from the Burke and Nine Springs plants. Dr. Tyerne presented the Chicago chemist’s results, which pointed to the Burke plant as the chief culprit for Lake Monona’s pollution. “The sewage at the Burke plant,” he explained, has been changed in character to some degree since the plant was built. The Oscar Mayer plant discharges waste containing hair, blood, animal tissue, etc., into the sewers, and the plant may require some modification in construction and operation to produce satisfactory results in the course of purification of sewage.” Moreover, Dr. Tyerne said, he believed that the Burke plant was violating state codes because if the plan was overloaded or broke down, raw sewage would go into Lake Monona. (He later investigated and discovered that at 2 am every day, a man would go to the plant and open a gate that released raw sewage and untreated waste directly into the river).
Mr. Baas’ comments about the city’s role in creating (and ignoring) this situation were scathing. “The city spends $15,000 to $20,000 yearly in chemicals dumped into Lake Monona. Outside of that, a few men work with a scoop and scrape some of the muck out of the east end of the lake onto the roadside…”[12] In other words, he continued, “the Burke plant empties 5,000,000 gallons of filth into Lake Monona every 24 hours and the city employs a few men to take it out.” Piling on the criticism, another attendee added that the first thing that should be done is to clean up city hall. “We’ve got a mayor up there,” one said, “whose only interest is in perpetuating himself in office—and there are some aldermen like him. They find enough money to create jobs for ex-aldermen and ex-chiefs of police, but they are always broke when it comes to a proposition like this.”
East-west sewage sludge class divide
While more educated and privileged Monona lakeshore owners had the knowledge, time, and resources to protest the increasing degradation of the lake, voices of working class and poor people living on the industrial east side—likely too busy working and trying to survive to be activists—were not mentioned in local papers. However, some of the privileged east side activists spoke on behalf of workers, highlighting the obvious east-west cultural and class divides in sewage decisions and resulting lake pollution. Their comments illustrate the fact that even though Lake Monona shoreline owners were privileged, many on the west side were even more privileged and powerful in comparison. It was also not lost on east side activists that wealthy Maple Bluff residents, including Governor La Follette, had much more clout than they did in making their voices heard about lake pollution and odors affecting them.
In his 1919 opinion column in the Capital Times, for instance, William Newton Nichols explicitly accused the city of perpetuating the class divide built into the Madison Compromise in their sewerage decisions. “The same political power that denies the Sixth ward its proper share in the government of the city also decreed the dumping of the filth of the “cultured” part of the city upon the section where the workingmen live. There are marshes to the west of town—marshes to the south, and if it is proper to build a filter plant in a marsh, let us build one at the head of University bay and another in the marsh above Lake Wingra—then let each section of the city wallow in its own filth—but don’t let the ignorance and insolence of the snogacracy outrage law and decency any longer by dumping the sewerage of the non-producing west side seven miles to dump it on the toilers of the Sixth ward!”
In fact, city officials had originally planned to direct Burke plant discharges to Lake Mendota, but Maple Bluff residents successfully fought it, so effluents were instead directed to the Yahara River and Lake Monona. Later in the 1920s, when Middleton planned to build a sewage plant that would discharge to Lake Mendota, the metropolitan sewerage district was created to avert this when wealthy Mendota shoreline owners put up a huge stink.
In a radio speech printed in the newspaper in 1934, a Madison attorney explained why the sewerage district was created: “Sewage and waste has been dumped into Lake Monona as far back as I can remember,” he said, “and although there was considerable agitation, nothing was done about it, until Middleton proposed to dump its effluent into Lake Mendota. Then we had prompt and vigorous action by wealthy and influential citizens owning property on Lake Mendota. A petition was circulated, a hearing was held and the Metropolitan Sewage district created. The sewage from Middleton is carried in a pipeline to the Nine Spring Marsh Disposal plant. That protects Lake Mendota. How about the other lakes?”
This class and power divide played out for years to come. In the early 1920s, Maple Bluff residents began complaining about odors from the Oscar Mayer and the Burke sewage plant. In 1923 a complaint was referred to the city board of health by then Senator La Follette, who lived in Maple Bluff, and the city worked hard to address it in various ways in later years (described elsewhere).
What did workers and poor living near Oscar Mayer and Burke experience?
If Maple Bluff residents could smell the Oscar Mayer and Burke odors from a few miles away, it was undoubtedly far worse closer to the plant. Strong odors must have wafted far and wide from the slaughterhouse and the Burke plant, where solids remaining after being processed in a digester were spread on the wetland east of the plant.
In the years after Oscar Mayer was established, small inexpensive homes for workers were platted in the areas closest to the plant. These workers, including many immigrants, must have endured the worst of the odors, along with the sounds of thousands of screaming hogs going to slaughter, noise and pollution from trains going in and out of the factory 24-7, and a slew of other environmental and public health onslaughts. Inside the plant, the smell was so bad that in 1922, Oscar Mayer made plans to install a “chlorine gas ventilating system” as a “disinfectant and perfumer,” to improve the environment for workers, and especially the few women the company hired during the war (who company leaders said carried out their duties “better than men”).[13]
By the 1930s, with the depression raging, some areas around the Oscar Mayer plant had become slums for workers. A 1933 newspaper article titled “Socialists Criticize Housing Conditions of Needy in City,” noted that areas of Madison that “are in special need of attention today” included “near the Oscar Mayer plant where there are several hundred families needing homes convenient to the plant but unable to afford homes of their own…” Slum districts, the article continued, follow “along the railroad rights-of-way for varying distances” and “have developed in many cases through no fault of the people living there. There is usually some undesirable factor such as railroad smoke which makes people who can afford higher rentals move elsewhere.”
City leaders, meanwhile, were in denial about the negative consequences of its growing industries on the north and east sides—and especially the disparate health and quality of life impacts on low income people and factory workers who didn’t have the power and political capital of the wealthy residents of Middleton and Maple Bluff to fight the pollution or move away.
Reflecting this purposeful ignorance, a 1928 article, “1927 Smiled on Madison,” included a large aerial photo of the Isthmus, inlay photos of some eastside factories, and this caption: “Madison is an example of the fact that the direction of the wind has a direct influence on the growth of a city. The north and south winds which usually prevail keep the smoke of the industrial section of the city away from the residential sections.” Apparently, people living right next to these smoke-spewing industries, and often also working in them, weren’t considered residents.
Oscar Mayer’s decades of sewage “experiments” began…
Oscar Mayer’s onsite sewage plant proved inefficient and inadequate, especially as the plant’s wastes grew enormously. In May 1933, city engineer E.E. Parker admitted to city officials that “grease and other waste matter” from Oscar Mayer “congeal upon entering the Burke plant, clogging screens and other equipment.” In August 1933, a written “protest” from officers of the village of Maple Bluff was presented to the Madison Common Council. It stressed that the plant was operating over capacity and asked that the offensive odors be eliminated.
A special sewage committee was appointed to meet with Oscar Mayer officials. A week later, after sewerage district commissioners and Maple Bluff officials conferred with Mayor James R. Law about the situation, the city announced that it would work with Oscar Mayer on “experiments to determine the best method for disposal of waste” from the factory.[14] The city sewage disposal committee recommended that $3,000 be allotted to hire a Milwaukee bacteriologist to develop a method of waste treatment. Some aldermen, however, felt that the city’s biochemist Dr. Bernard Domogalla should lead the study because it would cost less. Eventually, the council approved $500 for a study lead by Domogalla, with an advisory committee of several university, state lab and Oscar Mayer scientists and engineers, and the superintendent of Nine Springs sewage plant—with $500 from Oscar Mayer and the same amount from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).[15]
The Capital Times said that Domogalla’s research, “if successful, will be of nationwide importance.”[16] Dr. Domogalla, champion of chemical fixes for the lake algae and stench problems (e.g., treating them with copper sulphate and other chemical compounds) decided to try a similar approach for Oscar Mayer’s sewage. In 1934 he told the Capital Times that his experiments aimed to find “a chemical which will reduce the packing plant waste to the same quality as domestic sewage so that it can be efficiently treated at the disposal plant.” The city finance committee approved $750 for these efforts and Oscar Mayer said it would contribute the same amount.
In the midst of these experiments, in the early 1930s, the city located one of its “public health gardens” at the Burke sewage site. The Burke gardens were called “sludge gardens” because they were fertilized with Burke sludge. The “sludge garden” land had formerly been used to grow food for animals at Vilas Park zoo, but according to the State Journal “its fertility is now being utilized for the benefit of needy humans.” The city incinerator was also located on the Burke site, and was leased as an “oil reclaiming facility” that would take used oil from the city. People living and gardening near Burke were inhaling emissions from this incinerator—which were also depositing onto garden soils.
Domogalla says solution is near! City wants to patent chemicals he used, but won’t say what they are
At the end of 1934, the Capital Times reported, Domogalla announced that “the problem of disposing of industrial waste, thoroughly and economically, is about to be solved” and the experiments were nearly completed. Domogalla and his Oscar Mayer collaborators had tested 400 different types of combinations of chemicals. Chemical companies from all over the country were querying Domogalla, and even visited the Oscar Mayer plant, to find out the secret formula he had developed “to perfect the handling of plant waste on a large scale.”
In early 1935, before he was to share details of his chemical waste treatment formula to the city council, city officials expressed concern that because laws prohibit cities from patenting “formulas, discoveries, or inventions,” another entity would do so and the city and Oscar Mayer would have to pay royalties for the use of their own discovery.[17] A few months later, when he had deemed his experiments successful, Domogalla announced that he would in fact apply for a patent based on the city attorney’s advice. When presenting his findings to the city sewerage committee, Domogalla wouldn’t share what chemical or chemicals were used “pending granting of the patent,” but assured the committee that his experiments produced an effluent equivalent to that discharged now from the Nine Springs plant.
Dr. Domogalla also told city officials he was working with Oscar Mayer engineers “to determine what commercial use can be made of the solids extracted from packing plant waste,” and that Oscar Mayer planned to sell sludge as fertilizer. The city later approved $300 for study of how the sewage could be used as fertilizer, with Oscar Mayer again contributing the same amount. The city and Oscar Mayer had begun drawing up plans for another sewage treatment plant at the Oscar Mayer site, designed by Domogalla.
Less than a week later, The Capital Times announced that “efforts to remove sewage effluents from Lakes Mendota and Monona will be victorious before the end of the year.” Adolph Boltz, vice president and manager of Oscar Mayer, said their preliminary treatment plant would be completed by the end of the year and would permit abandonment of the Burke plant. In addition to financially contributing to the cost of the treatment experiments, he said, Oscar Mayer had paid for the initial “experimental” treatment plant and “rearranging pipes in its plant to permit isolation of the concentrated waste matter.” [18]
Nine Springs plant superintendent John Mackin assured that chemicals used in treating the packing plant wastes “would not be injurious” to the operations of the sewage plant.[19] At the end of 1935, the city issued a permit for Oscar Mayer to construct a plant onsite that would treat all the company’s waste before discharging it into city sewage mains and the Burke plant. In early 1936, the city approved more funds to complete “investigation of the sludge” and “official tests of the treatment plant,” but the specific chemicals Domogalla patented for the treatments of Oscar Mayer wastes were not publicly disclosed.[20]
Burke would not be shut down, but officials claimed that no more effluent was going into Monona
City officials told the Capital Times that as of December 1st 1936, the flow of sewage effluent from the Burke plant into Lake Monona had been stopped, and all Madison effluents were going to the Nine Springs plant for treatment. The Burke plant, however, would remain in operation to handle Oscar Mayer’s growing amounts of wastes. Without use of the Burke plant, officials explained, the onsite Oscar Mayer treatment plant would be inadequate to handle all the company’s wastes. The plant was built with a capacity of 600 gallons per minute, but business had increased so much that 1,000 gallons per minute were leaving the plant during peak daytime periods.[21]
Herbert O. Lord, chief engineer at the sewerage district, told the Wisconsin State Journal a slightly different story: “We are making an experiment by sending all sewage to the Nine Springs plant. It may not be necessary to turn any effluent back into Lake Monona in the future but we do not know positively at this time. In case adjustments or repairs are necessary, we may need to use the Burke plant again temporarily.”
Variations in the news stories notwithstanding, clearly the Burke plant would not be abandoned, as citizens had demanded for at least two decades. For the time being, city officials assured that the plant’s effluent was no longer going into Lake Monona and the lake’s condition would be greatly improved.
Domogalla’s experiments were not a glowing success
Contradicting glowing reports from Oscar Mayer and city officials, in November 1936, the “lakes investigation committee” of the Dane County Board had sewage plant effluents analyzed by a lab in Milwaukee, and reported that both the Burke and Nine Springs sewage plants’ effluents were contaminating the lakes with nitrogen-rich sewage with high bacterial levels. The report deemed the Burke effluent, in particular, as “putrid” due to disintegrated organic matter. The water where the Burke discharge went into Lake Monona was called “both unfit and unsafe for bathing” and the dissolved oxygen levels not sufficient for fish life. “The analysis of the Burke plant effluent,” the report said, “indicates that the raw sewage is not being properly and sufficiently treated” and “It is our opinion that a continuous flowing of this effluent into an inland lake would eventually impair its fitness for bathing or fishing.” The Nine Springs plant was declared “more efficiently operated” than the Burke plant.[22]
In fact, a 1937 memo by James Mackin, Superintendent of Operation at the Metropolitan Sewerage District revealed that Dr. Domogalla’s experiments in treating Oscar Mayer’s wastes were not as successful as he and the city told reporters. According to the memo, in fall 1936, when effluent from Oscar Mayer’s onsite treatment plant was sent to Nine Springs, it was not “up to the standard prescribed by the Commission”—there was “excessive grease, a high solid content and a high BOD” (biological oxygen demand) that were characteristic of raw sewage. Oscar Mayer effluents improved after MMSD began monitoring Oscar Mayer more closely, but were still not up to district standards.
A big part of the problem, Mr. Mackin wrote, was those who designed the Oscar Mayer pre-treatment plant (which included Dr. Domogalla) ignored his questions about how sludge would be handled. So when the one small sludge tank at the Oscar Mayer treatment plant quickly proved to be inadequate, the company discharged “a great volume of sludge into the marsh areas” around the Burke plant. To better handle this problem, the district allowed Oscar Mayer to store sludge in a series of tanks at the Burke site. These tanks were also quickly filled, so the district gave them permission to use more tanks there. Mackin suggested that Oscar Mayer sewage effluents might be improved after better facilities were installed at Oscar Mayer and Burke for handling and disposing of sludge and “equalizing the flow of the strong fraction to the treatment works.” So from 1937 to 1942, when the Department of Defense took over the Burke plant, Oscar Mayer stored large quantities of the plant’s sludge in tanks there.
1940s: Military took over Burke plant and Lake Monona’s condition degraded further
The purported elimination of the Burke sewage effluents into Lake Monona did not eliminate algae and odor problems in Lake Monona. In August of 1937, the rivers and lakes commission reported that they had expected the closure of the Burke plant to lessen the need for chemicals, but “instead, a scum has formed on Lake Monona during this month which requires additional treatment.” Increasing amounts of funds for chemical treatments were approved in the next few years.
Intense debates about lake pollution continued, especially as downstream communities repeatedly protested the pollution coming from Madison. Leading up to World War II, Oscar Mayer expanded production for the war, as part of the National Defense Program. With growth and expansion came more wastes, and by 1942, with the U.S. in the war, the factory contributed 17% of the wastewater going to the Nine Springs sewerage plant.
Photo (Arthur Vinje): View looking up towards the banner above the main entrance at the Oscar Mayer and Company on Commercial Avenue. The sign reads, “Our Job is More Meat, It’s Fightin’ Food.”
In 1942, the U.S. military took over the Madison municipal airport to build the “Army Air Forces Technical School.”[23] The military also quickly reconstructed the defunct Burke sewage plant for their use. “We’re doing in six weeks what usually is done in about six months,” the lead engineer told the State Journal. He assured that it would be an efficient and effective plant, despite the rushed reconstruction. “When that liquid comes out of our filtration chamber, and is ready to be piped into Lake Monona, it’ll be just about clean enough to drink” he said.
But Starkweather and Lake Monona pollution and stench problems got much worse after the military took over the airport. In June 1943, the county “special lakes and streams committee” found black scum “several feet thick and hundreds of square feet in area” with “surprising amounts of solids coming into Lake Monona from storm sewers” and “surprisingly heavy flowage” at the west branch of Starkweather. The chairman of the county board charged that raw sewage was Truax military wastewater bypassed into Starkweather Creek. Military officials adamantly denied the charge.
Mayor Law and the city engineer went to observe the Burke plant, but reported to the State Journal that Truax Field officials refused to allow them to enter the base or take samples of Starkweather Creek water and they “were unable to disclose their observations because of military secrecy.” The day after their tour, however, Mayor Law changed his story. “Effluent from the plant,” he told the Capital Times, “runs in an open ditch through Truax field and causes no odors.” This is the same ditch that currently runs from the old Burke plant into Starkweather Creek (the “golf ditch” that flows through Bridges Golf Course–photo above).
Later that year, in a study commissioned by the governor, scientists from the University of Wisconsin and U.S. public health service released their findings from a two year study of lake pollution problems. The study concluded that “[t]he amount of pollutional and nutritive material entering Lake Monona from the sewers of Madison is large” and “Monona also receives as much nutritive material in the effluent from the Truax field sewage treatment plant.” The scientists concluded that “the largest amount of inorganic nitrogen in Lake Monona came from the storm sewage and industrial wastes.” Further, referring to nitrogen and phosphorus, they wrote: “During the month of May and June in 1943, Starkweather creek became the greatest contributor of both these fertilizing elements. This marked change was caused by diversion of the Truax field sewage effluent from the outfall sewer emptying into the lake near the mouth of the Yahara River to Starkweather creek starting on May 9 and continuing through the remainder of the survey.”
It isn’t clear what Oscar Mayer did with their wastewater while the Burke treatment plant was commissioned by the Department of Defense during the war, but the report indicated that it was re-routed to the Yahara River. The scientists observed that flow from the Johnson Street sewer into the Yahara River had “all the characteristics of raw sewage.” Investigating further, they discovered “a drainage ditch below the Oscar Mayer packing plant which drained into a special storm sewer inlet at the junction of Pennsylvania and Commercial Avenues.”
The report, commissioned by the governor and finished in 1944, concluded that “Raw sewage was by-passed on numerous occasions from the pumping station at Johnson and First streets into Lake Monona via Burke outfall sewer.” Also, it noted, “Lake Waubesa organic nitrogen totaled 291,818 pounds during the year, representing a 50,000 pound increase over the first year due to acceptance of Oscar Mayer Co. waste, increased population, and to changes in sewage plant operation.”
Burke sewage plant was still used after WWII, sewage continued to spew into waterways
After the war ended, the Truax military base continued to rely on the Burke plant, which discharged to Lake Monona. In August 1947, the Madison Metropolitan Sewage district announced that it would construct a new main to take about 50% of the sewage from Oscar Mayer and send it to Burke for treatment, to provide relief to the overloaded Nine Springs plant. The MMSD engineer explained that “when the present system becomes overloaded, raw sewage goes into the old Burke outfall sewer and then enters the lake.” He assured that the Burke plant could handle the increased amount of sewage and that this strategy would relieve the overload until another new main could be constructed around the east end of Lake Monona to the Nine Springs plant.
The plan to send Oscar Mayer’s sewage—yet again—to the Burke plant to be discharged into Lake Monona prompted immediate outrage among residents near Lake Monona. Eastside residents circulated a petition against this plan and 475 people signed it. On August 23rd a “peace-making” conference on “the perennial problem of pollution of Lake Monona” was convened by state, county, and city officials, including members of the county lakes investigation committee, the sewerage district, and the state water pollution committee— to iron out petitioners’ “misunderstandings,” the Capital Times reported.
In their efforts to make peace, officials explained to angry residents that under the current circumstances, because Nine Springs was overloaded, raw sewage from Oscar Mayer was by-passing the channels to Nine Springs and flowing into Lake Monona untreated. The Nine Springs plant would be enlarged, they said, but it would take between three to five years “and we can’t have that overflow of raw sewage funneling into Lake Monona during all of that time.” They claimed they were not aware of this problem until very recently (though they clearly knew raw sewage had been going into Lake Monona during the war and in subsequent years).
Lake activists were not convinced by these “peace-making” assurances, and their cynicism was well-founded. Later that year, Capital Times columnist Alexius Baas wrote that his trip up the west branch of Starkweather Creek “hit a sour note when I got to Truax field and saw a big sewer spilling filth into the creek.” This was the sewer from the Burke plant.
Fishermen said sewage sterilized the lakes
In 1948, a front page State Journal story featured a photo of a child fishing on the east side at the Yahara where it flows into Lake Monona. Near where he fished, the paper reported, an “[u]nderwater pipe spewing raw sewage and effluent into the lake” created “a milky grey liquid that set up a pattern stretching far into the lake.” That week, a total of 1,860,000 gallons of “sewage, effluent, and stormwater” had entered the lake from this pipe, which received effluent from the Burke plant. The reason, he explained, was failure of a pumping motor at the sewage main installed near Oscar Mayer to divert the sewage to the Burke plant. When the pump failed, more sewage went to the pumping station on E. Johnson, and sometimes “the lines to Nine Springs would hold no more” so they had to send part of the Oscar Mayer wastes into the line carrying Burke plant effluents to the Lake Monona outlet. “The situation was further aggravated,” he added, “by the heavy rains of that period, which found rain water infiltrating into old sewer lines laid in swampy territory near the packing house to increase the flow while diluting it.” Officials assured that the nearly two million gallons that went into the lake that week were diluted—but “[a]s for the effluent which comes from the Burke plant through the lines as a matter of course, day in and day out, that’s another story.”
The child fishing there was unsuccessful in catching anything. By this time, anglers had been complaining for years about the declining (and some said destroyed) native fishery. “Fisherman of the city,” the State Journal wrote, “have a definite feeling that Lake Monona has been ruined as a fishing lake by the effluent, rich in plant food, which has been put into the lake from the Burke plant during its earlier years of operation and since its reactivation during the war and later operation by the sewerage district.” In 1948, one fisherman told the reporter, “[n]ow the lake is almost sterile.”
Later that year, H.O. Lord, director of MMSD, assured angry anglers and downstream Yahara lakes residents that a new addition would be built on the Nine Springs plant “within 18 or 20 months,” if bids were acceptable and construction was started within a reasonable period of time. In the meantime, he said sewage “the effluent has to go someplace, and its disposal is going to be a costly affair if the lakes aren’t used.”
MMSD continued to resist 1943 state law
On July 16, 1948, the state health officer and state committee on water pollution ordered the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District to terminate sewage discharges into lakes Monona, Waubesa, and Kegonsa by March 1949, in accordance with a 1943 state law (the Lewis Act) that resulted from the years of advocacy by Waubesa and Kegonsa lakeshore residents. The law was specifically aimed at Madison and was to go into effect one year after World War II, but in 1946 MMSD refused to comply with it, calling it invalid. The law said that no raw or treated sewage “from a city or metropolitan district comprised of 45,000 persons or more shall be discharged directly into or through any stream, or through any drain, into a lake of more than two square miles and less than 6 square miles in area, located within 10 miles of the system or plant.”
In 1948, a newly-formed group, the Southern Wisconsin Anti-Pollution Federation, began advocating for enforcement of the Lewis Act, leading to the state’s order. Again, the sewerage district commission argued that the law was invalid–and also that it was “class legislation.” Commissioners voted to petition for the state to review it. The act, they argued, “would impose upon the taxpayers of the city of Madison…an unjust and heavy tax burden running into millions of dollars” that would “approximately doubt the annual charges” for sewage treatment for residents in the district. “The order singles out the Madison area and requires the Madison metropolitan sewerage district to take action which is not required by any other municipality in the state.” All the districts plants, commissioners assured, were “modern, up to date, and efficient” and the district “had spared no expense to assure that treatment facilities “produce the best possible effluent.” Moreover, they argued, “there was no reason to believe that pumping the sewage south of the lakes would fix the algae problem.
Scientists and experts debate sewage diversion; expert says it won’t entirely fix the problem
The state agreed to review the order to divert the sewage, and another round of expert and government official debates ensued during a three-and-a-half day hearing before the state water pollution committee and the state health officer.
Dr. Clair N Sawyer, a professor of sanitary chemistry at MIT who had worked on the “governor’s committee” report on sources of Madison lake pollution from 1942 to 1944 (when he was a graduate student at UW-Madison) was called as a witness by the Southern Wisconsin Anti-Pollution federation and Dane County, to support their call to divert Madison’s sewage south of the lakes.
Sawyer supported sewage diversion to the Rock River. Pointing to the 1942-1944 report, Sawyer asserted that the Nine Springs disposal plant was contributing 75 per cent of the soluble nitrate and 87 percent of the phosphorus that flowed into Lake Waubesa. “Monona is fertilized as heavily, and Waubesa and Kegonsa 12 and 7 times as heavily as farm lands.”[24]
Sawyer warned, however, that it would be “foolish” to divert the sewage downstream but “leave loopholes upstream.” There are “quite a number of complicating factors that need correction” in addition to sewage plant effluent—including “manufacturing wastes” and “nitrates leeching from agricultural lands.” Farmers should be taught how to properly apply manure and reduce manure runoff from their fields, which washes into the lakes. The public should be educated not to use the lakes as dumps. Sawyer also argued that even though the public often demands it, eliminating weed growth in the lakes is a mistake, because these weeds take up nutrients, leaving more for algae (so they thrive when weeds are removed).
He also cautioned that even with sewage diverted elsewhere, Lake Monona would still be a “relatively rich source of nutrients” from industrial wastes and bottom deposits accumulated in the “‘deep bowels of the lake’ since the city started to use it as a reservoir for wastes.” Among the industrial pollution contributors, he cited Oscar Mayer, which he said “was diverting part of its waste into an open ditch leading to a storm sewer.[25]
Expert and government debates about sewage diversion alternatives and costs dragged on. At the end of 1949, the State Water Pollution committee ordered MMSD to divert sewage effluent from the Madison lakes by June 1, 1951. Comments made by the district engineer, H.O. Lord, however, indicated that raw sewage would still sometimes go into the lakes. He reported that in the previous two years, 16,280,000 gallons of raw sewage went into Monona, 1,177,000 into Wingra, and 67,000 into Mendota. Raw sewage bypassed the Nine Springs and Burke treatment plants, he explained, “because of equipment failure, power interruptions, or excessive flows resulting from heavy rains.” He assured, however, that this raw sewage was diluted by storm water.
Oscar Mayer continued to send toxic wastes via a ditch to the Yahara, more Oscar Mayer “experiments”
In May 1950, MMSD announced that all the sewage from the Burke plant had been diverted to Nine Springs via the new interceptor put into operation the previous month. However, as had happened for years prior, special arrangements were made for Oscar Mayer. The sewerage commission agreed to let Oscar Mayer do a 3-month experiment at the Burke plant “on methods of handling its packing plant waste.” One key reason the company wanted to avoid sending wastes to Nine Springs was to save money on sewage disposal costs.
The effluent from the experiments, the newspaper said, would go to Nine Springs—but a portion of Oscar Mayer’s wastes still discharged to a ditch into the Yahara River. In November 1950, H.S. Roth, drainage basin engineer for the state board of health, and a member of the state water pollution committee, reported that tests he did on the Yahara River indicated that several industrial plants on Madison’s east side, including Oscar Mayer, were polluting the river with wastes via storm sewers.[26] The state water pollution committee had ordered the tests after several bad fish kills in the Yahara which were “presumably due to industrial pollution via city storm sewers.”
Oscar Mayer’s “conservation engineer” John Eckstein admitted that a “bad condition” had occurred with the plant that led to “a small volume of highly toxic waste going into the Roth St. storm sewer,” but that it was diluted by “other discharges.” Also, he said, a “plumbing error” resulted in “another heavy waste discharge” that were detected by Roth’s tests, but has since been corrected. He agreed that Oscar Mayer would begin regularly sampling the wastes.[27]
Oscar Mayer’s “three month” sewage experiments at Burke went on for many years
Oscar Mayer’s sewage “experiments” at the Burke site did not end after three months, per the initial agreement in 1951, and runoff from the experiments went directly to Starkweather Creek. In August 1951, MMSD entered a permanent contract with Oscar Mayer to continue to use the Burke plant for $10,000 per year to treat company wastes before sending them to Nine Springs. Under the radar, Oscar Mayer’s experiments began in 1950 on a small scale and expanded in subsequent years (continuing for years to come).
In 1955, T. E. Englebert, a UW soils specialist in charge of the experiments, explained the goal of his experiments to the Capital Times. The people of Madison and Wisconsin, he said, should find ways to use sewage sludge on farmlands instead of sending it down the drain into the Yahara Lakes, Rock River, and then the Gulf of Mexico—essentially sending thousands of dollars down the drain (he listed various impressive dollar amounts for what this sewage fertilize was worth). “What should be a blessing in fertility is creating our nuisance,” Englebert opined. Further, the “effluent output of Madison each day,” the paper explained, “contains enough of the elements to make up five tons of 0-10-30 fertilizer, the same as farmers use on grain and hay fields, 950 pounds of muriate of potash, and more than three tons of ammonium nitrate, used on the farm for higher corn yields.”
These same elements, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, he admitted, cause algal blooms on the lakes, but he proposed that heavier soils of Dane County, if irrigated with nutrient-rich sewage plant effluents, would retain the nutrients and not release them into the leachate and runoff. His pilot tests using Burke effluents for irrigation showed that “the liquid that perculated (sic) through the soil had only minor amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium in the outflow.” Reed canary grass was planted on the irrigation plots and thrived there, with higher growth where the effluents were used for watering.
In the 1950s through some time in the 60s, Oscar Mayer scientists did mosquito control experiments on the Burke land in collaboration with the City of Madison Health Department and the University of Wisconsin Entomology Department. A paper about this research says that the Burke areas used for the experiments “drain by percolation through the soil to Starkweather Creek. [28] The irrigation and insecticide treatment areas were directly adjacent to the sewage plant drainage ditch that flows into the creek.
Despite Oscar Mayer opposition, Madison sewage was finally diverted downstream of lakes in 1957-58
In 1955, Oscar Mayer appeared before a joint state legislative hearing on the 1949 law requiring Madison’s sewage to be diverted downstream of Lakes Waubesa and Kegonsa. The company offered instead to contribute $15,000 a year for five years to explore “other alternatives.” In letters to the chairmen of the Senate and Assembly committees, Oscar Mayer argued: “we do not believe that diversion is the answer to alleged pollution, as it does not either destroy or remove the nutrients that foster the growth of algae. Diversion would in all likelihood merely transfer the alleged pollution to other bodies of water, including creeks, rivers, millponds, etc., causing possible expenses to the District from those areas.”
Also, their letter pointed out, as the largest customer of the sewerage district, Oscar Mayer would have to pay from $25,000 to $35,000 a year as its share of the diversion costs. (Of course, the company would also have to pay a portion of the costs for any strategy pursued by the District, so it was in their interest to argue for the plan with the lowest costs.) A bill to delay sewage diversion for 15 months was later introduced, but was killed in Assembly.
In May 1957, the sewerage district finally began to build a pipe to drain its effluents to Badfish Creek (though people there also resisted and protested for years).[29] With its battle against the sewage diversion lost, Oscar Mayer began to lobby the sewerage district, the Public Service Commission and other decision makers to pay as little as possible to the sewerage district for receiving and treating its wastes—and to find other, less costly solutions to their waste disposal problem.
Environmental injustices continued: Truax Field became Oscar Mayer’s waste dump, Eken Park neighbors continued to endure stench
Though the Madison sewage diversion debate was settled, Oscar Mayer continued to grow and expand, creating more and more animal and processing wastes that it had to send somewhere. To cut sewage disposal costs, with the city’s permission the company continued to dispose of a good portion of its wastes in the neighborhood (at Burke) rather than sending it to the Nine Springs sewage plant.
Oscar Mayer also had a solid waste disposal problem, and in 1955, the city proposed a contract for Oscar Mayer to operate the Truax public dump to take some of their garbage and animal parts (it was later approved). In 1956, Oscar Mayer constructed more sludge lagoons at Burke to store sludge from the factory, and the sludge irrigation experiments continued. In 1957, the University of Wisconsin and Oscar Mayer expanded to “large scale irrigation” experiments on plots constructed on Air Force controlled land.[30]
Not unexpectedly, odors in the neighborhood worsened. In August 1954, the city health department sanitarian visited the plant past midnight, after residents on Myrtle, Coolidge, North, and other nearby streets complained about stench. Oscar’s sanitary engineer told him they had just completed a new aeration system at the onsite treatment plant, which used dissolved induce flotation of greases and solids. They thought they “had the odor problem pretty well licked,” he told the health department official, but if necessary they would add more chlorine. He also, oddly, suggested that perhaps people were confusing “packing house odors” for “sewage odors.”
More complaints were received, but upon inspection, the city biochemist didn’t detect sewage odor and suggested the smell was due to humid weather. The city health commissioner told upset residents that the city has “only limited power” to correct the problem, unless they come from a source that is a public health hazard, in which case the city could bring court action. In this case, he explained, the odors fell under the category of “private nuisances” so the city had no legal right no interfere and offended persons would have to “seek their own redress in the courts.”
Maybe cows can take care of the problem?
Oscar Mayer continued to try new experimental approaches to deal with their over-abundant sewage. A few months after the odor complaint, the company petitioned the city to re-zone a 40-acre tract near Burke as agricultural so they could eventually graze cows there. Oscar Mayer’s sanitary engineer John Eckstein said the zoning change was to extend “an experiment the company has been conducting for several years in use of sewage effluent to irrigate and fertilize farm land.” Eckstein claimed that the experiments had been very successful, demonstrating that 50 to 75 per cent of the soluble nutrients left in sewage effluent after secondary treatment can be removed by using such crops as rape and canary grass they planted there.[31] The next step in the experiment would be to pasture cattle on these crops for “final disposal of the nutrients.” Eckstein admitted that the smell was bad in the neighborhood when the effluent is sprayed into the air, but the company was now using a “ditch and furrow” system, which eliminated odors.
Residents, including state Assemblyman Joseph Bloodgood, who lived on Myrtle Street, vehemently disagreed and turned out in force at a City Council meeting to oppose the re-zoning and cow grazing plans. Oscar Mayer dropped the plan shortly thereafter.
Adding to the stench, a very deep, open sewage ditch still connected to the Burke sewage plant went through the Eken Park neighborhood. In 1956, an Oscar Mayer worker saw a dinner pail “floating in a 14-foot deep sludge ditch of the Burke sewage disposal plant” and called the police. Police dragged the ditch, at the corner of Packers Avenue and Roth Street, and found a pail with sandwiches and coffee, which they speculated “probably fell off a passing car or truck and bounced into the ditch. They dragged the ditch further, but found nothing.[32]
Starkweather Creek–a sewage and garbage ditch
During the convoluted sewage saga described above, Starkweather Creek received treated and untreated sewage and other filth and debris from Oscar Mayer, the Burke sewage plant, the airport and military base, and many other sources flowing to it via stormwater and overflowing sanitary sewers. The city grew dramatically during this period, and new neighborhoods were platted near the creek—which required more storm and sanitary sewers, further exacerbating the amounts of polluted water draining to it.
Not surprisingly, the creek—basically a drainage ditch at this point—had to be dredged and “cleaned” countless times in the decades after it was first dredged and channelized in 1911.[33] Burke sewage plant effluents, as described earlier, still discharged directly into the creek via the ditch that was built in 1914 for plant overflow. Runoff from the Oscar Mayer-UW sewage irrigation and other experiments begun in 1950 also oozed into the creek.
In 1951, an eastside angler reported to the Cap Times fishing column “Hook, Line & Sinker” that bluegills he caught in the creek tasted like oil and “weren’t fit to eat…even the dog wouldn’t eat them.” The city biochemist in charge of “stream pollution studies” for the rivers and lakes commission investigated and traced an “‘oil slick’ upstream to Truax field, where mosquito control work had been underway.” In 1952 another angler wrote that “[t]he effluent from the entire Truax Field area,” he wrote, “enters the Starkweather creek at the edge of the field and eventually the effluent ends up in Lake Monona.”[34] In 1954, after residents reported a “heavy layer of green scum” along Lake Monona, the city biochemist told the Capital Times it was due to “a flow of diluted raw effluent” into Lake Monona, along with “considerable oil infiltration” from Starkweather Creek.
Many people living near the creek observed these and other industrial discharges into the creek, and had to endure the odors. In 1958, the Capital Times ran a photo of the stagnant west branch of the creek with a cartoon image of “Mr. Fixit,” holding his nose, super-imposed over it. The caption said residents living nearby said its smell is “not pleasing at all” and “neighborhood complaints have brought an occasional spraying by the Health Department.” Residents “claim that the creek is contaminated by factory wastes.”
The creek also still received raw sewage regularly. In 1959, anglers and boaters complained of raw sewage flowing into Lake Monona from the creek; MMSD purposely pumped it there because it was backing up into neighborhood basements. One neighborhood resident, Harold Starkweather (descendant of the family the creek was named after and past president of the Dane County Conservation league) said this had happened regularly during the past few years. “Most of us have found our basements flooded with upwards to two feet of raw sewage,” he said. The city engineer said the problem was the result of “a gradual settling of the sewer in the marsh-filled area.”
In 1960, a letter to the editor called Starkweather “another bad ditch” that “is a breeding place for mosquitoes, other insects, and rats” and “[o]dors from the ditch are terrible some days.” He pointed blame at many sources. “Some businesses and filling stations dump oil and refuse into the creek”–killing fish, he said—and “[p]eople along the creek dump some stuff into it.” The refuse settles to the bottom and had formed a layer of junk and mud three feet thick, with oily water above it, which drains down to the swimming beach at Olbrich Park. Not surprisingly, several fish kills in the creek were documented in the late 1950s and at times Monona beaches were closed due to pollution.
(c) 2021 Maria C. Powell
TO BE CONTINUED…
What happened after 1960?
Did things get better? How long did Oscar Mayer wastes continue to pollute Madison’s waterways?
By 1960, there was much more than grease and nutrients in the Oscar Mayer animal processing wastes and Burke effluents that discharged into Starkweather, the Yahara River, and Lake Monona—including PCBs, chlorinated solvents, pesticides, plastic compounds, petroleum chemicals, heavy metals, PFAS, and lot more.
Why, when and how were these pollutants discovered (or not) at Oscar Mayer and Burke? What was done about them? Were they ever cleaned up?
Learn more in subsequent installments…
Oscar Mayer, Part II
[1] Oscar Mayer eventually produced and held patents on several insecticides and sold their own brand of spices.
[2] In 1966 or 1976 (dates in stories conflict), Oscar Mayer created an entity called Scientific Protein Labs (SPL) in Waunakee, northwest of Madison, to manufacture “pharmaceutical and chemical products from byproducts of processing operations.” According to Wikipedia, in 2004 SPL was acquired by Arsenal Capital Partners for $81 million, today. In 2014 it was acquired by the Chinese company Shenzhen Hepalink Pharmaceutical.
[3] For some time, through at least the 2000s, less-than-perfect (dud) plastic packaging produced at Oscar Mayer was sent to MGE to be used as part of the fuel mix along with coal.
[4] Although originally Oscar Mayer harvested ice from Lake Mendota, it eventually began making and selling its own “artificial” ice made from a deep Madison well onsite. The ammonia needed for refrigeration and ice production also leached into lakes in various ways—and ammonia is a potent contributor to algal growth in freshwater.
[5] Around this time, the city began discussing the construction of yet another sewage plant (or even sending its wastewater to the Wisconsin River.
[6] Even in the midst of ongoing citizen complaints about odors from their plant, Oscar Mayer officials bragged “Sewage disposal as well as offal is taken care of by an up-to-date plant that permits only a stream of water absolutely without odor to flow away.”
[7] He also proposed a lock at the outlet of Lake Waubesa to control lake levels.
[8] From article: 113,280 pounds in 1928, 125,275 in 1927, 85,075 in 1926, 107,200 in 1925. Between 1925 and 1960, over 1,545,000 pounds of copper sulfate were applied by the City of Madison to control algae in Lake Monona.
[9] Mr. Aberg later became a city attorney—and a major northside street abutting Oscar Mayer was named after him.
[10] A county surveyor said “Pollution of Lake Monona is partly due to 43 storm sewers discharging into the lake, to overloading of the Burke plant and the Madison Gas and Electric Company which discharges some objectionable wastes into the water.”
[11] Some residents at the Blooming Grove meeting argued that instead of damming—which the board had proposed to decrease algal and weed growth– dredging was needed to “remove accumulation of fertile slime” and “remove bars that impede free movement of waters.” Dams, they argued, would also flood adjacent farm fields, which farmers had paid to drain
[12] Often these men were work-release prisoners and/or WPA workers (in the 1930s).
[13] Worker injuries, and sometimes deaths, were frequently reported in local newspapers.
[14] Some council members at this time said that constructing a separate plant to treat Oscar Mayer wastes wouldn’t eliminate the odors near the plant because a large portion of the odor was from killing and dressing 2,400 hogs a day at the plant; the odors “rise into the air and are blown around by prevailing winds.”
[15] Two alders opposed using city money for this study, arguing that city taxpayers shouldn’t fund this–Oscar Mayer should pay for it.
[16] University authorities warned the city and Oscar Mayer officials that to date no scientist had found a “satisfactory” methods of treating packing plant waste, even after studying the problem for years, and that many packing plants had spent “great sums of money” attempting, unsuccessfully, to dispose of their wastes without causing pollution, odor, and other problems
[17] On May 11, 1935, the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District sent a sent a letter to the Common Council ordering the city to construct a “preliminary treatment plant” at Oscar Mayer to reduce the plant’s packing waste before a new addition was completed at the Nine Springs plant. The letter was deferred to the city’s sewage disposal committee. This would be the 2nd sewage treatment plant built at the factory.
[18] Many of these old pipes remain onsite today and are pathways for toxic chemicals in soils, groundwater, and vapors at the site to travel throughout the site and offsite into homes, businesses, and waterways.
[19] To date, the cost of the Oscar Mayer experiments had been $3253, with the city contributing $1250, Oscar Mayer $2410, and CWA $593 through the board of health.
[20] A March, 1937 MMSD letter suggests that chlorination was part of the treatment
[21] The company was considering building a large storage tank to store “excess sewage” that to “prevent the overloading of the company plant during the day.”
[22] The analyses found Lake Mendota water low in bacterial content and free of sewage contamination, indicating a “high degree of purity” and deemed it very suitable for bathing. Lake Waubesa water, it concluded had “a slight amount of sewage contamination” and though it was not safe for drinking, it was fine for swimming. Oxygen was sufficient for fish life. Kegonsa water showed no sewage contamination and no bacteria, and was safe for swimming and health for fish life with sufficient dissolved oxygen.
[23] The State Journal described the flurry of demolition and construction at Truax field, with work WPA did in the 1930s “ripped to pieces” so the military infrastructure and Army school—basically a city unto itself—could be entirely rebuilt.
[24] In 1949, an anti-pollution bill passed by sent and sent to assembly, but key provision with would have required new industrial plants that might cause pollution to have their disposal plans approved by the state water pollution committee before construction. The bill provided funding for a full time director of the State Water Pollution committee and funding for the committee, required the committee to hold a hearing within 90 days after a petition is filed and report findings within 90 days.
[25] He also mentioned waste water from the Madison Gas and Electric Co. plant, Fauerbach Brewery, and others.
[26] Other plants he named were: the Celon Co. the Chicago and North Western railroad roundhouse, Block System Inc., Community Dry Cleaners, Northern Plating Co., Berntsen Brass and Aluminum Foundry Co., Gisholt Machine Co., and E.A. Collins Transfer and Storage Co.—a long with some service stations in the area sending oil wastes to the storm sewers.
[27] The city biochemist Thayer W. Burnham announced that the city was embarking on a project to tests wastes from all plants in the city that are connected to storm sewers “to make sure that their discharges aren’t harmful to the river or lakes,” and then some wastes would be shifted from storm sewer to sanitary sewer disposal.
[28] Roger P. Scovill (Oscar Mayer & Co., Madison , Wis.) 1963, Mosquito Control in an Industrial Waste Lagoon. Journal Water Pollution Control Federation, 35 , 663–68.
[29] In 1954, Governor Walter Kohler being was presented with a 147-foot petition bearing signatures of 5,000 area residents seeking to ban the diversion of sewage from the Madison Metropolitan Sewerage District into Badfish Creek.
[30] The city piggery garbage farm also continued to operate just north of the Burke plant—with hog wastes sloshing into the creek.
[31] Reed canary grass is now considered a problematic invasive species and is found all over this area; the city uses pesticides to treat it.
[32] It’s not clear whether this ditch drained sewage from Burke south into the Yahara or whether it connected Oscar Mayer’s sewage to the Burke plant.
[33] In the first few decades, dredged materials from the creek and lake were used to cover the city landfill at Olbrich Park and also to expand the park further into the lake and create a marina.
[34] H.O. Lord, head engineer at MMSD, disingenuously assured that the entire Truax Field area (which includes the Burke plant) was connected to the sewerage district.
(c) 2021 Maria C. Powell
