Sludge Busters
By Doug Martz, Saint Clair Channelkeeper

I live on Lake St. Clair, the most beautiful freshwater lake in the world. I was out on that lake spring, summer, winter and fall. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was an avid fisherman. It was my way of life…

One day in 1994, I was working on the Clinton River, childproofing my friend John’s backyard when a rainstorm hit. Rainstorms, of course, are pretty normal events, but I’ll never forget this one. The river turned dark brown and, two hours later, raw sewage, condoms and tampons were piled up seven feet thick along the boat tied up behind the house. The air smelled like rotten eggs and my eyes started watering. I couldn’t breathe.

It turns out a nearby sewage treatment plant had dumped 300,000 gallons of sewage into the river because the sewer system could not withstand the rains. Within two weeks, all that sewage had flowed into Lake Saint Clair. Seaweed sprouted like it had been sprayed with Miracle-Grow, inundating the shoreline. The stench was awful — rotting weeds and sewage.

I went to an emergency meeting in City Hall with hundreds of residents to find out what was going on. The official word from the Macomb County Commissioner was that the problem was the result of people throwing grass clippings in the river, and water quality’s biggest nemesis — birds. I couldn’t sit down any longer. “What about all the sewage that was dumped two weeks ago?” I asked. Finally, two state officials looked at each other and then said, “Oh yeah, by the way, during that rainstorm the city of Mount Clemens dumped 300,000 gallons and an Oakland County plant dumped another billion gallons of raw sewage into the river.” The audience listened in shock.

In the days that followed, the paper never mentioned anything about sewage overflows. I started attending more hearings, and the only support I had was from health department officials who handed me stacks of paper and reports on sewage overflows at wastewater plants on the river. They were scared to speak out, but they knew I would.

In 1994, the lake shoreline was closed to swimming for the entire summer. The seaweed was floating three feet deep. People would blow their engines trying to get through this stuff. It got so bad that the governor flew in and hired a crew with barges and cranes to scoop the muck up and haul it away. The project cost $3 million.

My friend John, whose yard I had been childproofing, worked his whole life to have a beautiful boat and home on the water. He had a wife and five kids and he loved where he lived, just like I love where I live. We would attend these meetings and hear the same old story — but nothing about the real problem. We were talking about what we could do to get the real story out to the public. Then it hit us. Each August our community has a parade of lights that attracts about 200,000 people. Residents turn their boats into all sorts of beautiful designs. We decided we would enter the parade in John’s 36-foot boat. Our design – a toilet.

We found a nursery that had 30,000 lights left over from Christmas. The owner of the store offered them to us for $1,000. We asked a welder to build a toilet frame on the boat. He looked at us like we were nuts, but when we got pictures of toilets out, he said, “Yeah I can weld something up out of chicken wire to hang lights on.” He welded the monstrosity over the top of the boat. But it didn’t look right. He said, “We need a seat.” He welded it and we added an additional 2,000 green lights to make it stand out. It took us ten days with the help of ten volunteers to hang all the lights. And when we plugged the lights into my 5,000 watt generator, they blew the generator right out. After consulting an electrician, we rented four more 5,000 watt generators and put all five in a Boston Whaler that we towed behind the boat.

Though the toilet looked spectacular, it needed some more life. John’s kids put on rain suits and gasmasks to dance inside the toilet bowl. We went to a funeral home and bought a casket, loaded it up with kids beach toys and fishing poles. We dressed up a friend as the grim reaper in a black suit and sickle. He stood on the back of the boat with that big casket. We chose the theme of Sludge Busters, after the popular Ghost Busters movie. We even redubbed the Ghost Busters theme music so it said, ‘Who you gonna call, Sludge Busters!’ and hooked up John’s stereo to the boat. We had a sign made that said Stop the Flow Before It’s Too Late. Now we were ready to register the boat for the parade.

When the parade managers asked us what our theme was, we told them it was a toilet. “We can’t let you in the parade,” they said. “It’s supposed to be a South Pacific theme.” I said that we would ride down the river no matter what, because legally, the river was navigable and open to the public. The parade officials gave in.

The night of the parade, when we fired up the Sludge Buster, it was unbelievable — 32,000 lights, music blaring and kids dancing inside the toilet bowl. We went down the river and people just cheered. Meanwhile, the township supervisor and the judges were appalled. But we ended up on all the TV stations and the front page of all the local newspapers. A few weeks later we entered the Sludge Buster in another parade in a community downstream. A marina owner hid it in his marina for a surprise appearance. We floated down the river once again, lights glowing, music pumping and kids dancing inside the toilet bowl with plungers in their hands. And to our surprise, out of the 110 boats in the contest, we came in third and took home a $1,500 prize.

We finally felt like we were making a mark, but the newspapers still ignored the sewer overflows. The shore still smelled like sewage. By this point, no one could go to a restaurant in the marina. The stench was hurting homeowners, boaters and everyone along the shoreline. We needed something more. We thought, ‘What did Ghost Busters have that we didn’t have?’ The answer, of course, was an ambulance.

So I bought a 1972 Cadillac limousine. When I pulled in my driveway it almost ran through my house because the car had no breaks. But we fixed it up, bolted a toilet to the roof, put plungers on the fenders, and made a sign for it that read — Fecal Front Properties, 444-sewer. The sign company loved the idea and donated all the signs for the car. We mounted flashing lights and sirens and put loudspeakers on top of the car. We would drive down the road and blast the Sludge Busters music. The car became my family car. We would drive it to church and the supermarket, and people would give me the thumbs up, turn on their lights and toot their horns wherever I went. We felt like the real Ghost Busters stars, Dan Akroyd and Bill Murray. And in just a few weeks we gathered 22,000 signatures on a petition against the dumping of raw sewage. But we still weren’t done getting the word out.

Every Labor Day, the Michigan governor walks the Mackinac Bridge. That year President Clinton was going to walk with Governor Engler. Since the opposite side remained open for cars to drive over, we thought we would drive over the bridge alongside the governor and the president in our Sludge Busters mobile. We drove the 300 miles to the Straits of Mackinac. When we got to a town, we turned on the lights and the sirens, and every car around us would come to a halt as we drove through downtown. Even the police pulled over.

When the Bridge Walk began, we paid the toll and drove over the bridge six times. We used four quarts of oil to get up there and four more to get back. It was really not an environmentally sound car, but we made our point. And it worked. People cheered and the National Guard and state police waved. I thought we’d end up in jail, but we made it into all the news coverage that day.

Back home in St. Clemens, I kept receiving data on sewage spills from public officials, despite being seen as a troublemaker, or maybe because of it. I handed this data over to Carl Marlinga, my county prosecuting attorney. One day, he took me to his office and asked, “Where did you get all of this? Did you make these papers up?”

I told him what it was and where I had gotten it. We found out that the sewage treatment plant in Oakland County that had dumped a billion gallons hadn’t had a Clean Water Act permit in 18 years. “I would like to sue Oakland County,” Marlinga told me. “But you will have to come with me to the Macomb County Board of Commissioners. I’ll need their permission.” The next thing I knew, I was at the county board meeting and the County Commissioner asked me what I had to say. I had always been the crazy bastard running around town in a rusty limo with a toilet on the roof. Now I was explaining the grounds for a lawsuit against the neighboring county. The 26 members of the Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to sue.

The county put together a Blue Ribbon Commission on Lake St. Clair with the Governor’s and Senator’s offices, Congressmen, mayors, state representatives and professors. And I got an invitation to serve on the commission addressed to Doug Martz, Sludge Buster.

The Blue Ribbon Commission met for six months and came to the conclusion that the problem was sewage. After three years of fighting, that’s what I was after. The commission made 100 recommendations, including a requirement that the Health Department check every tributary in the county so we knew where the sewage was coming from, and hire an environmental prosecutor to look at permits. The next step was to put together a Water Quality Board to advise the county as it implemented the commission’s recommendations. I figured my mission was over now that they admitted the sewage problem. I could go back to my normal life.

I received an application in the mail to join the Water Quality Board but I didn’t fill it out. But the next thing I knew, I received notification that I was on the board. Evidently, the county executive, the state prosecutor and a senator’s office each filled out an application for me and sent it in. But it didn’t stop there. At the first meeting of the Water Quality Board they decided they needed a chairman, and everyone pointed to me. I didn’t know what to do. They handed me a mallet and I went up to the podium. I just stood there for a minute and then I hit the gavel down and said, “Health Department, do you have anything to report?” They started reporting the data they were collecting. This was in 1998. I’ve tried to quit three times and they keep telling me I’ve got the job for life.

Around that time I was talking to Carl Marlinga, the county prosecutor. He said, “Doug, I’m not going to be able to sue some polluters because I’ll never get reelected. We need an independent group.” A professor I knew from Oakland University had read the book The Riverkeepers. This professor said, “I’ll fill out the application for Waterkeeper Alliance and send it in.” Before I knew it, St. Clair Channelkeeper joined Waterkeeper Alliance, and I was appointed Channelkeeper, giving me another powerful tool to clean up the lake.

Next we went after combined sewer pipes with illegal connections and no permits. In one pipe, our worst, we’ve permanently eliminated 70 million gallons of raw sewage each year from entering the St. Clair. We busted a city with illegal overflow pumps that dumped raw sewage into the river every time it rained. After we did that we sent a letter to the other cities in the county asking them to turn themselves in to us if they were dumping sewage. Six cities responded and took action to address the problem. Meanwhile the state saw what we did and put out their own letter to cities around the state — 213 cities turned themselves in. Sewage overflows were an epidemic. Each of these cities had to upgrade their sewer systems. It cost millions, but it has stopped many billions of gallons of sewage from reaching our waters every year.

Surely we were making progress. But unless you monitor the water, you can’t really tell what’s going on. I decided that we needed to give our watershed a complete physical. The price tag was $2.5 million. I took the plan around for five years and finally convinced the state legislature. The state of Michigan allots $3 million to monitor the waters of the entire state. We got $2.5 million just to monitor one county. But we monitored every tributary on the St. Clair River in dry and wet weather. And today we have data on sewage overflows that’s irrefutable. Now we know precisely what needs to be fixed.

This year, the current county executive, the previous county executive and I decided it was time to do a new Blue Ribbon Commission. The last one was only for Macomb County. The new one would be regional, and include Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair, Wayne Counties, plus the City of Detroit, Canadians across the St. Clair River and the Native People of Walpole Island. This new panel, with three nations and four counties, will start meeting this fall to develop new regional water quality plans to keep our Lake St. Clair open.

Our entire fight started with a group of friends who knew we needed to get the word out about pollution. We made a serious problem seem humorous so the public would know what was going on. And because of our efforts, Macomb County and the State of Michigan now take sewage very seriously. w