good neighbor or bad ? cont.

Good neighbor or Bad (cont.)

 city owned land in the distance

       The condition of the creek continued for years as daily we would ride our school bus over the concrete bridge heading into East Sparta and hardly ever do I believe when I was growing up, you could ever see the bottom of the creek. This was the norm for almost forty years and the sad part was it was not always coming from the farm instead from the city of Canton’s new sewage plant in North Industry that was pumping raw sewage into the creek at times of high water to clean out there tanks or for whatever insane purpose they decided it was necessary. The Nimisilla Creek was Cantons dirty little secret and for years they abused it and the wildlife that depended on the creek with reckless abandon. Knowing full well if that creek was running like that through Monument Park surely they would be moved to find the culprit. For some reason oddly, our area accepted it as the norm. Never complaining much as it was something we grew up next to and felt I guess we were helpless when it came to complaining about something like effluent runoff.

       I guess we were helpless when it came to depending on our Stark County Health Department who must have turned a blind eye to the problem for years as well as to a lot of other violations that surely would have landed the ordinary individual into hot water now. Or maybe they just lacked the power to do anything about it. Not sure and pointing fingers at past administrations is a lot like running out of toilet paper so to speak. You can sit and cry all day on the pot but if no one hears you still have a mess to clean up and fortunately the EPA(Environmental Protection Agency ),  a larger and more powerful governmental body stepped in and handed Canton a roll of toilet paper metaphorically speaking and told them to clean up their act.

      At this time the city had workers who would tend ditches and these ditches stretched from one end of the farm to the next and at times would extend on to other farms including ours. Along these crap ditches they would cut openings with a shovel and allow the raw sewage in most cases to flow over the hills until it would head for a stream then they would close it off, if they didn’t fall asleep in one of the many shacks they would use to sleep or read their dirty books in. We knew as we would visit those shacks and also check out their dirty books also when they were not there. That was their job to tend the ditches. At times I wondered what they had done in their life to get such a glorious job. When seen working they never moved very fast or became excited about to much but instead just plodded along oblivious to the obvious smell .

     When my grandfather purchased this property in 1943 they were doing the same thing as they were in 1968 , twenty five years of pumping sludge all over that farm. When Grandpa and Grandma moved in a city truck followed them in the lane and told them not to drink the water as it was contaminated by run off from their sewage operations. In the more than a quarter of a century of spreading their sludge over their farm and grass growing up through the sludge , it  created  ground so soft your legs would ache from walking over it.

       One day  somewhere up on that hillside ,  maybe someone  lying on that soft grass smoking a cigarette  after a good ditch cleaning and smoking a cigarette,  or maybe it was set on purpose as it was never determined, but anyhow, who ever and whatever happened  there was a fire that started over the hill and raged out of control over fields that had repeatedly been doused with crap and then would grow again and soon an area of about ten acres was completely an inferno and raged so bad that they had to hire a dozer to come in and build a fire wall completely around the area to prevent the neighbors from losing their properties as the local fire departments were completely helpless to extinguish the fire. This fire burned out of control for at least a week and subsided into a smoky but more manageable fire as it was burning all the crap that they had placed there in the over thirty years they were doing this. Like buffalo chips human waste will burn and it burned for over 6 months as this happened in the summertime, and when me and my brother visited it in the winter it was still burning and it looked like a lunar landscape and could have easily been the place that NASA used for their staged moon walk if you believe the conspiracy theories. My brother and I would walk out across this ashen landscape and would sink to our waist in the resulting ash piles as the crap apparently had been that deep and burned to that depth and it only made you wonder just how much of that stuff was really placed there on that farm.

      No matter where you went on that farm you had to watch what you were doing as hazards of the worst kind may befall you. The worst part may be that you live to tell about it. Open lagoons of crap existed everywhere and ditches filled with crap and were often hidden under lush vegetation.

       Once when I was young , Carl Poole , a friend of our family ,  was hunting coon with us and I tired from walking through the lush vegetation, and it was dark ,  I was  quite young so he lifted me on his shoulders and as we were walking along with my brothers when all of a sudden we almost ended up in a sewage lagoon . In the dark knight with the black of the crap looming even darker below that edge of the pond , Carl weebled and he wobbled on the edge of that lagoon but he didn’t fall down and I was glad because I would have landed face first in that mess. And surely would have died a horrible death as no one in my family would have jumped in to save me. Maybe it’s a wonder I am still here to tell you any of this.

Part 2

The clean up

      The EPA sued the City of Canton and stopped all building permits until they dealt with the overflow problems of their overused sewage system. This was a tragedy to the developers of the Belden Village and other areas around Canton that depended on Cantons city sewers to dispose of waste.

       Not permitting any additional building or attaching anything to the sewage system was an economic down fall to the City of Canton. Also they had to construct an emergency reservoir to hold temporarily the excess sewage that was formally being flushed down the Nimisilla creek till it could be properly processed.

    These actions required the City of Canton to construct a large six acre lake of crap formerly called by the locals Lake Cmich, in honor of the City of Cantons then mayor. I as a youth was involved in the daily going events, as again the City of Canton saw fit to build this lake on their property in Pike Township or the City of Canton farm which our lane was right next to and I passed daily for years afterward to get on the bus. My brother and I had secured jobs with the contractor W.G.Lockhart for the cleaning of cleaning the tracks of the equipment when they were constructing the resulting structure or levee built under contract to the City of Canton.

     Daily both my brother and I would go to their work trailer and learn the technical aspects of such a huge project and in fact it was both my brother and I who alerted a local official about two of the deficiencies of construction that resulted in delaying Canton’s newest waste project. One was that they were starting to pump sewage prior to even finishing the lake. The earth work was barely four feet out of the ground and Canton was already pumping sewage into it. The second problem was that Lockhart construction hampered by severe cold weather had turned to placing four foot high frost balls in the levee as a fill, which when thawed would create voids that could possibly lead to a levee failure. Just what you want a six acre lake of crap rushing across St. Rt. 800 to the Nimisilla creek. After informing the official of this, work was halted at the site and my brother and I  were finally singled out as the source of information causing delays and our jobs as track cleaners were eliminated .

     The frost ball did cause damage and eventually that area of levee had to be repaired. Work resumed after us and eventually they were allowed to resume pumping waste while they added capacity to their plant. Another set of ponds was built by Beaver Excavating, and these were supposed to work as settling ponds and the waste in the final pond would then be sprayed onto the surrounding hillsides through irrigation equipment. It seemed all the effort of the city to eliminate a problem only tended to exacerbate the problem instead as apparently the powers in charge were never satisfied with allowing something to work the way it was supposed to or the crap was backing up and they needed to have a place to go. This resulted in them spraying one area till the crap was dripping off the trees and was running down the hillsides and ending up in the ditch going to Nimisilla Creek as again they found a way to again pollute the creek. Finally the lake was finished and they filled the lake and then the ditch cleaners were given a new job and that was riding around on a pontoon boat and spraying for gnats over the top of that six acre lake.

      We would kid each other as we would say we thought we saw them fishing in the lake as they trawled around. Geese would winter over in the winter time and ducks soon found homes there year around as wildlife tended to accept the temporary lake. Or so Canton called it. originally it was only supposed to be there ten years but instead ended up being there over twenty five years and still exists on Google maps as evidenced by clicking on my website at kevscarvings .com and looking at the map you will see a blue outline of a lake so big that in absentia it is still located on a major map. It is called the city of Canton sludge pond, and it is  just what you would use to describe your location.  The city of Canton was in no hurry to flush their crap instead letting it linger in that six acre bowl until it underwent a metamorphism and transformed itself into a wildlife sanctuary of sorts.

     People could be seen actually fishing in the water and as well as hunting around the lake. Thankfully though someone figured out that they needed to finally live up to their word and eventually it was drained and then the resulting effluent was hauled to a landfill and the area was reclaimed and is now an open field where it is nothing to see turkey or deer running wild through it. The migrating geese have found other ponds and creeks to land on and most traces of anything that Canton used to do, as far as pumping of effluent over the hills has been discontinued thankfully and the area was allowed to restore itself naturally except for the daily dumping of waste from the screens which eventually was also discontinued and is now taken to the landfill as it should have been all along. Next came the raping of resources and the eventual cover up of some of the crappy remains of what they accomplished in an effort to receive the good neighbor award. (to be cont.)