New cemetery a mess

Town officials are investigating an allegation that sludge, tree stumps and manure have been dumped in areas around the site of the new still-unfinished town cemetery.

At Wednesday night’s Board of Selectmen meeting in the town offices, Planning Board Chairman Helmut Busack said he found two large piles of manure dumped in the middle of Rufus Colby Road earlier in the week that would make it impossible for even emergencies vehicles to pass through.

But Busack was even more concerned about two piles of an unidentified material he called “sludge” that was close to the four-acre lot that was recently cleared to make room for Sanbornton’s first town cemetery.

If the material contained some elements that would be dangerous to humans, it would be fairly easily for them to seep into the water table with the recent hard rains, he said. The area “is saturated with underground springs,” and with the trees removed to make room for the cemetery, the grounds seemed to be turning into “a swamp,” he told the board.

If there are any harmful materials in the “sludge” and it got into the underground water table, houses that are downhill could have significant problems with their water for years, Busack said.

Busack even brought a small vile of the brown, watery material to the meeting and handed it over to Town Administrator Bruce Kneuer. Busack then volunteered to cover the two piles with tarps Thursday morning to keep any rain from driving the materials deeper into the ground, and the board agreed to the idea.

On Thursday, Kneuer verified that the town paid $70 for the tarps and by evening the two piles were underneath them. Busack could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

Although Busack used the word “sludge” to describe the material – and the word is frequently associated with water and sewage treatment processes today – “sludge” does not necessarily mean polluants. The dictionary defines the word simply as “muddy or slushy mass, deposit or sediment.” Those kinds of materials would not be rare in town after the recent hard rains.

In fact, when examined by Laconia Daily Sun editor Edward J. Engler Thursday, the material under the tarp appeared more like compost or potting soil than anything harmful.

Wayne Elliot of the town’s Department of Public Works (DPW) echoed that sentiment, saying that what he saw was “not exactly sludge. It looks like it’s wood ash that come from your power plants. That’s good fertilizer.”

Just as mysterious is the appearance of the manure on the Class VI Rufus Colby dird road. Elliot said that when he examined the area Thursday, it looked like 10-to-12 yards of what appeared to be horse manure was in the road, but not in a large pile. “It looked like someone had pushed it to the side.” The effort was apparently not entirely successful however and Elliot finished the job. “It could be the intent there was to put it in the cemetery to grow grass,” Elliot said.

However none of the town’s newly chosen cemetery trustees could verify to knowing anything about a planned delivery of fertilizer. Chairman Peter Hibberd and member Millie Shaw were unavailable Thursday. Hibberd, who helped spearhead the cemetery project could not be reached by town officials either. The only other trustee, Earl Leighton, said the trustees have been meeting regularly for months and he had no knowledge about any fertilizer. “I’m not aware of it being authorized.”

In fact, Leighton said the new cemetery’s land, which was formerly part of the town forest, is far from being ready for fertilization.

“The lot being extremely wet right now, it’s not an appropriate site,” he said. “The water table is higher than it should be. In fact, in the beginning of April I took my four-wheel backhoe up there and it was all I could do just to get it around the lot. It’s wet.

“And the other concern is that this is a self-supporting entity,” he added. “You sell plots then use the money from the sales of plots to create the operational budget which is paid from a trust.”

As for the stump dump on the opposite side of the road, town officials are guessing that they come from the area cleared for the cemetery.

“I’m not sure but at some point they need to be disposed of,” said Elliot of the DPW. “The DES doesn’t like that because they can rot and make the area swampy. They’re not that wet now and they’re on private property. But at some point they’ll probably be taken to the landfill where they’ll be chipped up. It’s a good-sized pile. I’d say there were a couple of hundred of them in there anyway.”

Town Administrator Kneuer said the new town cemetery grew out of a strong community spirit. “Last year volunteers worked to create this cemetery area. It’s the town’s first-ever town cemetery. All during the 1990s the town began appropriating money for a town cemetery. It’s an all-volunteer effort, and the Board of Selectmen and the proponents, the people who’d been championing this case for a decades found the volunteers, reworked the land and created this cemetery area.”

But now town officials are “stumped” about what to do with the sudden appearance of manure on the road and a mystertious “something” beneath two tarps.

“I don’t even know who to call,” Kneuer told the selectmen Wednesday night. “Do I call the police and ask them to investigate manure in the road? Do we get DNA to find out if its horse or cow manure? How can we find out who dumped this? How do we handle this?”

Board Chairman Patsy Wells thanked Busack for brining the issue to town’s attention and said officials would be looking into it in the days ahead.