POTTERVILLE – When Alexis Rosenbrook and her husband Dillon moved out of the manufactured home they were leasing last June, she said their son Clayton, then 2, was chronically sick.

His seizures and breathing issues started in 2017, after they moved into Independence Commons, Alexis Rosenbrook said, and ended abruptly as soon as they moved out.

Clayton Rosenbrook’s doctor wrote a letter in June stating he believed a “series of mysterious respiratory and neurological problems over the course of (Clayton's) short life” were caused by “sewer workers disease” and connected to the family home’s proximity to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.

The plant's property sits upwind at the edge of the roughly 400-home manufactured housing community’s border. The facility’s open-air lagoons, which hold sewage as it's being treated, can be seen from the fence line that separates the two properties.

Two weeks after the Rosenbrooks left Independence Commons, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality cited Potterville for numerous violations at its wastewater treatment plant. DEQ officials said the review of the facility, and two on-site visits by their staff, were prompted by odor and health complaints residents living nearby made.

The violations date back two years and include two unauthorized discharges of treated wastewater into the Thornapple Drain and the city’s failure to submit monitoring reports for discharges it made for six months in 2017 and 2018.

Potterville hadn’t submitted an adequate groundwater monitoring plan to the state, according to the DEQ violation, and the city didn’t have a properly certified operator overseeing its wastewater treatment plant.

The violations are being addressed, said Charles Bennett, acting district supervisor for the Department of Environmental Quality’s Water Resources Division in its Lansing District Office.

The plant is not a health hazard, he said, and DEQ officials did not notice a strong odor at the property during the two site visits.

The Rosenbrooks and two other families filed a lawsuit Jan. 9 against the city of Potterville and Independence Commons. It alleges the families were exposed to water contaminated by fecal bacteria as well as contaminated air when they lived at Independence Commons. They say the contamination caused seizures, loss of consciousness, shaking, rashes, irritability, runny noses and fatigue, and neither Potterville nor the company that owns Independence Village addressed their complaints.

Alexis Rosenbrook said her family left their manufactured home at Independence Commons because they believed the environment and the water there were making them sick.

“We knew it was making us sick,” Alexis Rosenbrook said. “We knew it was making our children very sick. We ended up deciding we’re not staying here anymore no matter what the cost is.”

Lawsuit alleges contamination

Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Timothy and Katie Buchanan and their two children and Justin Schilling and his wife, Marissa Schilling, and Justin Schilling’s father, Joshua Schilling, and his wife, Jennifer Schilling.

All of the plaintiffs were residents of Independence Commons during the time of the allegations, Jordan Vahdat, an attorney representing them, said. Two of those families, the Rosenbrooks and the Buchanans, no longer live there, he said.

Rosenbrook said during the 17 months her family lived in Independence Commons, both her children suffered from rashes that appeared all over their bodies after they were given a bath at home or played in the yard, and just a week before the family left Independence Commons, Olivia, then less than a year old, stopped breathing during a bath and emergency medical technicians were called their house.

Independence Commons supplied its residents with unsafe drinking water that was tainted with coliform, the lawsuit alleges, a “direct violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) and the City of Potterville Code § 38-55.”

Coliform is a bacteria found in feces.

Through that code the City of Potterville “delegated full authority” to Independence Commons for treating and distributing drinking water within the community, the lawsuit said, and as property owners Independence Commons was responsible for maintaining service pipes to homes there.

The lawsuit alleges the city pursued policies and practices that directly caused violations of the plaintiffs’ “constitutional rights.”

When contacted Friday afternoon, Potterville’s Acting City Manager Brad Boyce declined to comment.

Messages left Friday and Monday with Independence Commons Manager Lisa Martinez, and with Lauretta LaMothe, regional vice president of operations for Home First, the company that owns Independence Commons, weren’t returned.

Vahdat said testing was done in the Independence Commons community that indicated the drinking water was contaminated with coliform.

When coliform bacteria is found in a drinking water sample, that sample is deemed unsafe, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency's website.

"The presence of coliform bacteria in tap water suggests that there could be a problem with existing equipment or treatment systems, contamination of the source water or a breach in the distribution system that could introduce E. coli contamination," according to the EPA website.

“At this time we don’t know how it was contaminated,” Vahdat said. “All we know is that we have evidence that proves that it’s positive for coliform.”

In August, shortly after leaving their home in Independence Commons Alexis Rosenbrook told a reporter the water there was “disgusting.” It affected everything from their dishes to their laundry, Rosenbrook said.

Rosenbrook also said at various times during the spring and summer there was a strong odor of raw sewage in the air at Independence Commons. She notified the city and the community’s management about her concerns numerous times, she said.

Potterville’s Department of Public Works Superintendent Don Stanley, who's been at the helm since 2017, said a resident made two phone calls to him about the plant’s odor last spring. Stanley said the plant’s odors are stronger in the spring when micro-organisms from the bottom of the lagoons tend to come to the surface as the water thaws.

“We did have some odor,” he said. “It was nothing too major. It was pretty standard.”

Stanley said the resident never voiced any health concerns to him.

The DEQ's Bennett said municipalities are responsible for monitoring the condition of a plant’s lagoons and a facility’s odor.

In an email Bennett wrote to Audrey Schwing of the DEQ’s Lansing District Office on May 9, 2018, he detailed a complaint regarding the plant’s odor from a resident of Independence Commons.

“The complainant lives downwind and in close proximity to the plant…,” Bennett wrote. “She is concerned about the odor affecting her children and is tired of the general unpleasantness of it all. I declined to give her healthadvise (sic) about odor (referred her instead to her local MD and HD).”

Bennett said he doesn’t have “any knowledge” of the letter Alexis Rosenbrook received from Clayton Rosenbrook’s doctor indicating he was ill because of his home’s proximity to the wastewater treatment plant.

State Senator Tom Barrett, R-Charlotte, said he reached out to the DEQ last summer after his office received complaints about the odor at the city's wastewater treatment plant. He said DEQ officials told his staff the odors weren't overly strong, and weren't cause for concern.

Barrett was not aware of the treatment plant's violations, he said.

Stanley said the DEQ violations the plant was cited for June 28 addressed “procedural” issues. None of the violations indicated health hazards, he said.

In a letter Stanley sent to the DEQ in response to the violations, he wrote that former Potterville City Manager Wanda Darrow, who was fired in August, had been responsible for filing the city’s discharge monitoring reports. She had neglected to do so, Stanley wrote in the letter to the DEQ that the State Journal obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Stanley told the State Journal that during the time frame when reports weren’t submitted to the DEQ, he was still making sure discharge samples were tested and within the allowable limits for safety.

Potterville’s Groundwater Monitoring Plan “did not include adequate information to determine if existing groundwater wells are suitable to conduct the required monitoring activities,” according to the DEQ’s violation notice.

In an email to the State Journal, Bennett said the city “has obtained a consultant and submitted a plan for groundwater monitoring. This information is being reviewed by DEQ groundwater permit staff.”

Stanley said the plant’s license classification was adjusted by the DEQ from a “lagoon 2 plant” to a “C plant."

Bennett said the "C" classification describes larger, more complicated water treatment facilities. Potterville's plant was classified with the designation “sometime in the last five years," he said, and the DEQ notified the city when it was raised.

"I think our engineers felt that the operators they had were not properly trained to handle the complexity of the system," Bennett said. “Basically, it was an effort to try to get a more sophisticated operator in there.”

Bennett said he didn't know why Potterville wasn't cited for lacking a plant operator with the right certification before last year.

"The person who was the compliance person (within the DEQ) for that facility had left," he said. “We do have limited resources. We do the best we can with the resources that we have.”

After DEQ issued its violation notice, Stanley said the Michigan Rural Water Association began serving as operator at the city’s wastewater treatment plant. He is in the process of obtaining certification for the plant’s new classification by this fall, Stanley said.

“Everything from the violation notice was addressed to the state’s satisfaction,” Stanley said.

Bennett said the city has responded to the violations, and they are being resolved.

History of odor complaints

Complaints about odors near the Potterville wastewater treatment plant are not new.

In 2015, the city received as many as 30 complaints about the plant’s odor, Jeff Bussard, the city’s deputy mayor, said. The lagoons, established in 1979, were cleaned last year for the first time in 37 years, he said.

Bussard said the lagoons’ care had been neglected by previous officials, but city staff couldn’t clean them until last spring, after securing federal funding to pay for the more than $600,000 cost of draining the lagoons and dredging the sludge.

Bussard ran for City Council in 2008 because he wanted to address odors from the plant that wafted to his residential neighborhood nearby and the city’s aging water system.

In the last decade the city’s wastewater treatment plant has been through an estimated $7 million overhaul, he said, but when he took office 11 years ago it and the water system were “in terrible shape.”

Bussard said the city’s water pipes were losing up to a million gallons of water into the ground a year in 2008.

City staff have since replaced every water main in Potterville older than six years, and sewer lines throughout the city have been sealed, Bussard said.

“We rolled up our sleeves,” he said.

Bussard said the DEQ has inspected the city’s wastewater plant numerous times since 2008, but never indicated the plant presented a danger to nearby residents’ health.

“They have been involved in every square inch of what we’ve done,” Bussard said. “The DEQ at no time said, ‘You’ve got to shut this down. It’s a health hazard.’ At no point did that happen.”

There are no guidelines or regulations regarding how close homes can be built to wastewater treatment facilities, Bennett said, and while odors can be “obnoxious,” he’s been told they are not a health risk.

But Jean Bonhotal, director of Cornell Waste Management Institute in New York, said the health of residents living close to and downwind of wastewater treatment facilities can be affected by bioaerosols from the plant’s lagoons that reach them via wind and precipitation.

“Nobody should be living that close to a wastewater treatment plant,” she said.

Vahdat said one of the strongest cases for concern is the letter from Clayton Rosenbrook’s doctor.

“You have a doctor giving that kind of diagnosis, that’s clearly from an environmental source and not genetic, that’s huge for a physician to go issue that kind of diagnosis,” Vahdat said.

Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology with University of Michigan’s School of Public Health said while “sewer workers disease” isn’t a diagnosis he’s familiar with, there is some evidence that suggests sewer workers might test positive for different bacterium, virus, or other microorganism that can cause disease, but respiratory issues and seizures aren’t usually symptoms known to occur as a result.

Eisenberg said the clinical symptoms Clayton Rosenbrook suffered sound “undefined,” but he said if they stopped when the family moved out of Independence Commons it could point to an environmental issue.

“I would say that’s certainly compelling evidence that there was something in the environment the child reacted to,” he said. “I think one case like this could potentially warrant a more thorough investigation, but it’s hard to make any conclusions about this one case.”

“Whether or not the proximity of the water treatment plant has anything to do with it, with the water in Independence Commons being contaminated, we don’t know,” Vahdat said. “We can suspect it, but that’s something that, through the course of discovery, we’re going to need to figure out.”

Contact Rachel Greco at 517-528-2075 or at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ.