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A group calling for an end to the land application of sewage sludge is collecting stories from people who have been affected by the practice in their community.

Their stories will be submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which had planned to hold a hearing Thursday to look into the safety of land applying sludge. As of today, it's unclear if the hearing will still take place.

"We want the committee to hear stories directly from people who are being adversely impacted by land application," said Laura Orlando, a Boston University public health professor and member of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, a non-profit based in Boston that works on sanitation and water quality issues.

"We want them to hear from people out there who live near this, who smell these trucks, and who've tried to stop this practice. We want to get the story out there that people around the country are suffering from this practice of disposing sewage sludge on land."

The group wants Congress to declare an immediate moratorium on land application of sludge. They say new science on sludge shows that land application is not the safe practice that federal regulators say it is. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has promoted land application of sludge as the best disposal option for leftover sewage waste since it banned dumping the material into oceans three decades ago.

The Senate committee's investigation into sewage sludge was called for by Sen. Barbara Boxer, among others, earlier this year following several news stories that raised questions about the safety of the land application.

• In February, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a Georgia farmer whose land and animals had been poisoned by free sludge form a local wastewater treatment plant. In his ruling, the judge in the case raised questions about the reliability of data used by federal environmental officials to endorse the practice of land applying sludge, calling it "unreliable, incomplete, and in some cases, fudged."

• In April, the Associated Press reported on a government-funded study that spread sludge in the backyard of some low-income homes in Baltimore to test whether it was effective in protecting children from lead-poisoning in the soil. While questions existed about the safety of human exposure to sludge, the participants in the study were never informed of those risks, the AP reported.

As of Monday morning it was unclear if the hearing will still take place. The committee has not posted the hearing on its Web site. Orlando said the sludge industry has been pressuring some committee members not to go forward with hearing.

So far, my calls to the committee's office and to Boxer's office have not been returned.

I'll keep you updated on what I hear.