According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, the owner of a dairy farm in northwest Iowa was sentenced to pay the state more than $36,000 for a huge manure spill that occurred last year and killed about 100,000 tiny fish in a nearby creek.
When a worker at Rock Bottom Dairy, close to Lester, forgot to turn off an irrigator that sprays manure into an adjacent field one night, there was a manure leak in April 2021.
The next morning, it was determined that there had been an overflow of around 200,000 litres of manure into Mud Creek and a nearby tributary. According to the DNR, there were contaminated areas 13 miles downstream with high levels of ammonia and E. coli bacteria.
The dairy has roughly 3,800 animals, and in the last 20 years, the DNR has recorded four prior manure leaks there.
One of them, in 2009, killed approximately 1,400 fish and similarly contaminated the streams with roughly 100,000 gallons of excrement. According to DNR documents, the leak was triggered by a clamp that broke free from a hose being used to move manure about the site. The dairy received a $6,000 fine.
According to Scott Wilson, manager of the DNR field office there, the reasons for the leaks varied in each case.
Regarding the most recent leak, Wilson stated, “This is unfortunate. It was obviously a mistake, and we anticipate that they will develop policies or some other kind of fix to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
The DNR’s maximum administrative penalties for the most recent incident was $10,000, and dairy owner Bernard Bakker agreed to pay it. Along with the expenditures associated with the DNR investigation into the fish kill, he must also reimburse the state for the estimated 96,168 fish that were destroyed. That came to almost $26,100.
