By William Harless, California Watch
California’s next big step in recycling – composting its meat scraps, broken egg shells, coffee grounds and other detritus of eating – is straining the state’s ability to effectively manage the ever-growing and sometimes dangerous industry.
In October 2011, 16-year-old Armando Ramirez and his brother, 22-year-old Heladio Ramirez, died of poisoning after Armando had been cleaning out a stormwater drain at the Community Recycling & Resource Recovery composting facility near Bakersfield. Heladio had gone down a hole and into the drain to rescue his brother.
The two undocumented workers inhaled hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas that sewage can generate. According to county documents, the facility near Lamont used discharged sewage water from an adjacent utility district to moisten its composting piles.
The brothers’ mother, Faustina Ramirez, filed a lawsuit in January against Community Recycling & Resource Recovery seeking at least $25,000 in damages, including funeral and burial expenses. She said she believes the company should have hired a professional service to clean the stormwater drains.
“What happened with my children was negligence – because they didn’t give them protection and because they knew what was going on in that site, and they sent them,” she said in an interview.
Read the complete story at California Watch. California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team, is part of the independent, nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting. For more, visit www.californiawatch.org.
