Posted on 01/12/2005 10:04:55 PM PST by Dan from Michigan
Burning Manure Pile Has Neighbors Fuming
2 hours, 1 minute ago Strange News - AP
MILFORD, Neb. - A large pile of composting manure burning for almost two months has neighbors upset and state officials looking for a way to put it out.
Concerned about emissions, the state's Department of Environmental Quality will make its recommendation by the end of the week, said spokesman Rich Webster.
David Dickinson, who owns and operates Midwest Feeding Co. near this town about 20 miles west of Lincoln, said he has tried to spread the pile out and douse it with water but the weather has slowed his efforts.
Webster said Dickinson will have to do something to put the fire out.
From a distance, the fire looks like steam rising from the large cattle feedlot. But when the winds pick up, it's more than a vapor to neighbors, who can smell the result from as far as 9 miles away. At a restaurant one mile north of the pile patrons comment on the stench, said manager Wilma Roth.
"There's a lot of people who complain about it when they come in," she said.
The fire began, Dickinson said, when grass clippings spontaneously combusted. He had accepted the clippings from the city to continue the pile's composting. Dickinson knows it is troublesome and he wants to put it out within a month.
"The only way to put it out is to string it out, which takes an enormous amount of space," he said.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/peopleevents/pandeAMEX86.html
Within the camp were thousands of horses and mules that produced a stifling nine tons of manure each month. The accepted method of disposing of the manure was to burn it, an unpleasant task made more so by a driving wind. On Saturday, March 9, 1918, a threatening black sky forecast the coming of a significant dust storm. The dust, combining with the ash of burning manure, kicked up a stinging, stinking yellow haze. The sun was said to have gone dead black in Kansas that day.
Some, looking for a point of origin of the so-called Spanish influenza that would eventually take the lives of 600,000 Americans, point to that day in Kansas. Shortly before breakfast on Monday, March 11, the first domino would fall signaling the commencement of the first wave of the 1918 influenza...
What a bunch of crap.
Congress is in session.
BTT!!!!!
My roses consider this the very best gourmet food. I can imagine burning it would make for an unpleasant stench though.
spontaneous combustion....heh heh
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