Texas Campaign for the Environment: News

Marble Falls Highlander, August 14, 2012 By James Walker

Plans to dump waste aborted

A Marble Falls businessman who planned to dump treated human waste on his property in the Fairland community said Monday he has abandoned plans to do so after neighbors and others became angry with him.

Robert Childress, owner of Childress Outhouses, LLC, said he sent a written request to Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) officials requesting that they pull his application for a permit for the operation even though commission officials already have approved it.

"There were too many people mad at me and I don’t want people mad at me,” Childress said Monday afternoon.

Childress’s decision to tell TCEQ officials to pull his permit application came after about 50 people, many of them fellow Fairland residents, attended a meeting last Tuesday in Marble Falls and expressed their concerns over his plan.

The Fairland community is just north of Marble Falls and Childress planned to spread the lime-treated human waste from his septic pumping and portable outhouse businesses on his 30-acre coastal Bermuda field off CR 121. Childress’s property is near a quarry that has penetrated an aquifer and residents, environmentalists and others are fearful the waste would end up in one or more of the area’s aquifers.

For the rest of the story, see Tuesday’s Highlander.