CHICAGO _ Walking the Iroquois County streams his family had fished for decades, Leland Ponton was nearly brought to his knees by the stench of Beaver Creek.
"It looked like ink, the water. It had fish all over the place, dead. It wasn't fit for nothing. Not even a wild animal could drink out of it," said the 75-year-old retired farmer.
Government officials quickly assigned culpability for the deadly discharge: a waste spill from Hopkins Ridge Farms, a hog confinement operation where more than 8,000 pigs are raised to market weight before being trucked to slaughter.
The July 2012 spill polluted more than 20 miles of Beaver Creek, wiping out 148,283 fish and 17,563 freshwater mussels, according to reports from state biologists. Four years later, the creek's aquatic life has only begun to recover.
Authorities also have yet to collect penalties and cleanup costs from the confinement's influential owners _ agribusiness executives who operate facilities in Illinois and Indiana that house tens of thousands of pigs. They deny responsibility.
As hog confinements like Hopkins Ridge spring up across Illinois, producing massive amounts of manure, a new pollution threat has emerged: spills that blacken creeks and destroy fish, damaging the quality of life in rural communities.
The lagoons that hold pig manure until farms can use it as fertilizer sometimes crumble or overflow. Leaks gush from the hoses and pipes that carry waste to the fields. And in some instances, state investigators found polluting was simply "willful" as confinement operators dumped thousands of gallons of manure they couldn't use or sell as fertilizer.
Analyzing thousands of pages from state agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Natural Resources and the attorney general's office, the Chicago Tribune found that pollution incidents from hog confinements killed at least 492,000 fish from 2005 through 2014 _ nearly half of the 1 million fish killed in water pollution incidents statewide during that period. Pig waste impaired 67 miles of the state's rivers, creeks and waterways over that time.
Using either measure, no other industry came close to causing the same amount of damage.
Fish kills are an imperfect measure of the damage caused by businesses, as some Illinois waterways already are so contaminated that little if any aquatic life remains, and some pollution sources degrade rivers without sending multiple fish to their deaths on a single day. Still, the fish kills do provide a gauge of the environmental impact of the modern pig-raising facilities that helped make Illinois the fourth-largest pork producer in the U.S.
They also show how little state authorities can do to protect Illinois waterways from this poisonous surge.
Confinements with multimillion-dollar annual revenues often paid just a few thousand dollars in fines after causing massive fish kills. Many went to court to challenge authorities; since 2005, the state attorney general has filed or resolved at least 26 pollution lawsuits against swine confinements. Some operators polluted repeatedly. And the multistate pork producers who supply the pigs and profit from the confinements were rarely held accountable, the Tribune found.
The state agencies responsible for protecting waterways and aquatic life _ the EPA and DNR _ play limited roles in determining where new confinements can be located or assessing their potential pollution risks.
Instead, Illinois livestock confinements are granted permits solely by the Illinois Department of Agriculture, whose mission is to promote livestock agriculture as well as regulate it.
Under state law, the department cannot consider a confinement owner's environmental record when reviewing an application to build a new site, and officials have issued numerous new permits to operators with multiple infractions.
Illinois has only recently required hog confinements to register with the state EPA, and that agency knows where only a fraction of them actually are located, records and interviews show. In most other top pork-producing states, environmental regulators maintain detailed inventories.
With swine confinements growing in number and size across the state, the count of facilities inspected by the state EPA dropped from an annual average of 115 per year from 1999 to 2004 to 71 during the next six years, the most recent period for which the agency could provide data.
Still, state EPA officials argue the situation in Illinois is improving through a combination of government and industry changes.
"The hog facilities are run and designed much, much better than 10 years ago, and education is the way to ensure rules are fully followed," said Sanjay Sofat, who oversees confinement regulation as manager of the state EPA's Division of Water Pollution Control.
In 2010, Illinois' failure to monitor or regulate livestock confinements prompted the U.S. EPA to threaten funding cuts and decertification of the state EPA. Since then, Illinois has bolstered its inspections staff as well as documented and visited 236 of the largest swine facilities. That is fewer than half of the estimated 527 in the state and includes none of the additional 427 hog confinements with up to 2,500 animals.
