There’s an eerie quiet on the Mulberry Fork more than three months after a wave of chicken sludge seeped into the waterway, killing an estimated 175,000 fish back in June. Now, the fish are scarce. Gone also are the splashing sounds of turtles dropping into the water as boats approach and the squawking of great blue herons from the shallows where they stalk fish.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall visited the scene himself on Saturday, along with his chief counsel, Katherine Robertson, State Rep. Connie Rowe, R-Jasper, and two residents of riverfront areas impacted by the massive wastewater spill from the River Valley Ingredients chicken rendering plant in Hanceville, a plant owned by Tyson Foods Inc.

It’s unusual for an attorney general to visit the site of such an accident, but this was one of the largest documented fish kills in state history. And Marshall’s visit comes as the state continues to negotiate a potential settlement with Tyson over the damage done to the river.

The River Valley Ingredients facility (it was renamed after Tyson purchased it in 2018), has been described as the largest poultry rendering facility in the country, taking blood, feathers, innards and other parts of chickens that aren’t valued for human consumption, boiling and melting them into protein-based products that can be used to create animal feed, pet food or other products.

The wastewater that spilled into the Mulberry Fork contained the leftovers from the leftovers, the last bits that could not be boiled, melted or congealed into a usable product. After the wastewater entered the river, bacteria counts shot off the charts and oxygen levels plummeted to essentially zero.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall visits the Mulberry Fork on Sept. 21, 2019. The area was impacted by a June 6, 2019 wastewater spill at a poultry rendering plant that killed an estimated 175,000 fish.Courtesy Connie Rowe

The Mulberry Fork converges with the Sipsey Fork, and later the Locust Fork to form the Black Warrior River. It flows through Cullman, Walker and Blount counties north of Birmingham.

Fish and other animals that need oxygenated water to survive died by the thousands, creating several missing links in the Mulberry Fork food chain. Air-breathing turtles and birds could move elsewhere but nearby residents say they have been slow to return since the fish they feed on are no longer in abundance.

Martha Salomaa, one of the residents who accompanied Marshall on the trip, said the river is very different since the spill occurred on June 6.

“If we had gone down through there in May, you would hear turtles jumping in, because you’ve come up on them. You’re likely to see the blue herons going back and forth, you’ll see fish jump,” Salomaa said. “It’s just not that way anymore. There were a few fish [Saturday], but before there was just so much.

“It’s like a death. It’s like witnessing the death of something that I don't know if I realized it could be killed.”

How much will it cost?

Salomaa and other residents want Tyson to pay a “substantial” penalty for the incident.

“They should be fined enough that it hurts them, so that it's painful enough that they don't do it again,” Salomaa said.

Lance LeFleur, director of Alabama Department of Environmental Management, has expressed a different philosophy when it comes to industry compliance.

“Industry has a job, their job is to comply with the permits,” LeFleur said. “We have a job, and our job is to make sure that they comply with the permits. They don't want to pay penalties. We don't want them to pay penalties. We want them to comply.”

LeFleur said that the department in most cases relies on inspections and informal enforcement, rather than fines, to ensure compliance with environmental laws.

“We often get criticized by different folks that we are not aggressive enough in our penalty assessments to the violating entities,” LeFleur said. “I don't like to use the dollar amount of penalties as a measure of performance.

“I think it's old school thinking to say we want penalties to be higher and higher and higher all the time. We want penalties to be lower because we want compliance.”

He also said that large companies like Tyson are often motivated by factors other than fines.

“With the big industries, if the plant manager gets even a warning that can jeopardize his bonus,” LeFleur said. “The environmental stuff that they have to do to stay in compliance is this much [of the total operation]. They don't want to close down their operation because somebody screwed up on an environmental piece that was a minor, minor piece of what they do overall.”

Tyson: Fish kill is ‘unacceptable’

In an open letter posted on Tyson’s web site, River Valley Ingredients senior vice president Shane Parks said the spill resulted from a failure of temporary piping installed by a sub-contractor. Parks said the company was pumping wastewater from one treatment pond to another.

“We understand that events like this are unacceptable,” Parks said in the letter. “We strive to be good stewards of the environment and we take that obligation seriously.”

Parks said the fish died because of the oxygen depletion and not because of other chemical contamination in the river, and that those oxygen levels “returned to normal within a short time of the incident.”

“We continue to have discussions with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, and Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources about the incident and its impact,” Parks said. “We are actively assessing conservation and community projects that we may undertake to further our efforts in the area of the release and in Alabama generally.”

Is there a precedent?

It’s hard to find a comparison when trying to gauge how much Tyson might ultimately be fined for the spill.

In 2014, Tyson was sentenced to a $2 million criminal fine and forced to pay $500,000 toward ecological restoration after an event that killed an estimated 108,000 fish in Missouri, but the circumstances surrounding that incident were different.

The company experienced a leak in a tank containing a highly acidic feed product. The leaking material was moved to another Tyson facility and discharged into a sewer where it went to a municipal wastewater treatment plant. The acid rendered the wastewater treatment process ineffective, causing the massive fish kill. The $2.5 million penalty was handed down by a federal court rather than a state environmental agency.

LeFleur said the Hanceville plant and Tyson Foods have had violations in the past, but ADEM could not hold Tyson accountable for past acts in Missouri.

“If we don't have a history of them being bad actors, then it's problematic for us to use somebody else's history of them supposedly being bad actors,” LeFleur said. “We don't know what went on in any of the enforcement actions that they took, except whatever is public information.

“If we have history, then that goes into the calculation. If they have history outside of the state, I don’t know that we have a mechanism to ding them for what they’ve done elsewhere in the world.”

Marshall hits the water

Rowe, who represents the Jasper area in Montgomery, said she organized the boat trip after conversations with Marshall about the spill.

“He implied to me during one of our conversations that he would like to have a first-hand look at it, and I invited him to come at his earliest convenience,” Rowe said. “We were on the water for a couple of hours, went up the Mulberry Fork, from the forks of the [Black Warrior] river and went a good distance up that way and back and just observed the area."

Marshall’s office confirmed the visit but declined to comment further on the Tyson incident or whether he was involved in the settlement negotiations, which are primarily being handled by ADEM.

Rowe said she was less familiar with that portion of the river than the locals who accompanied them, but it did appear that there was less activity on the Mulberry Fork upstream of the convergence than downstream.

“There were signs of wildlife there, but it did seem to be diminished to me,” Rowe said.

Salomaa said she was glad Marshall came to visit the area impacted by the spill.

“He’s the first person really in the state government, aside from Connie Rowe, that’s like, ‘Yes, let’s talk about this,’” Salomaa said. “He has shown real concern, genuine concern.”