SLUDGE VICTIMS

violently ill, to her mother's house in the middle of the night. His vomiting would end as they left the Elkton area.

During a three-month stretch in early 1994, the family spent perhaps three nights in the house because of the odors, she said.

The stench was so bad the Bakers bought a wood furnace because their oil furnace brought in offending odors from outside..

Patti Baker said a five-story-high white haze of foul-smelling gases migrated from the sludge site to their property.

The sludge problems the two families cite began in 1992.

That's when the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources approved the reclamation project in a one-time strip mine northeast of Elkton in Elkrun Township.

The project came about after the Ferris Coal Co. of East Palestine went bankrupt. The state ordered the reclamation.

Bio Gro started hauling sludge to the 1,300-acre site from New York City, Pittsburgh and four sewer districts in New Jersey.

Wheelabrator is the company that wants to haul as much as 50,000 tons of sludge from the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission in Newark, N.J., to 16 counties in Ohio. That includes Summit, Stark, Wayne and Portage counties.

That project has been halted, at least temporarily. The Ohio Environronmental Protection Agency has revoked its permit for the project, citing a technicality. It has ordered a second review that includes public input, which the first review did not include.-

What is proposed for the Passaic Valley sludge differs from what happened in Colurmbiana County. Far more sludge can be applied on reclamation sites -- up to 65 tons an acre -- than on farmland, a maximum of five tons an acre.

The strip mine site was permitted to get as much as 237,000 tons of sludge. That is an amount nearly equal to the sludge all of Ohio's sewage plants produce annually.

No one agrees on how much sludge was spread. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimates 458 acres were reclaimed with 17,216 tons of sludge. Some of that acreage got as much as 65 tons an acre, equal to a layer 4 inches thick.

But the Bakers and Hunts contend that far more sludge went down. More than 70 trucks a day often headed for the reclamation site and nearby private farms, they say, There are places on the reclamation site where the sludge is