MILWAUKEE - There's nothing like a burger -- fresh off the grill. The sizzle, the smell.

But that meat could kill you.

The Cargill Meat Solutions plant in Milwaukee, also called Emmpak Foods, processes more than 100 million pounds of beef every year.

Susan Woodson says Emmpak meat gave her E.coli in 2002.

"I had such excruciating pain - I've had three children, and it was worse than any labor I'd been through," Woodson said.

Emmpak recalled nearly three million pounds of beef processed in Milwaukee in fall of 2002.

Susan sued Emmpak and settled out of court, but she still has some strong opinions about what happened.

"It's unconscionable for any manufacturer to put out unsafe product," she said.

So has Emmpak cleaned up its act?

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service found problems in one part of Cargill's big operation in Milwaukee.

Cargill says the building is used to store meat.

The USDA lists it as a processing facility.

In April of 2006, inspectors found a "scale well is filled with previous weeks of trash and debris." Inspectors also noted that "swinging doors are damaged (cracks), and covered with brown thick grease and other grime."

In August of 2007, inspectors noticed a "heavy odor." They checked out the main scale and found drains under the main scale were filled with "standing water, debris, and meat trash."

The documents also show in December of 2006, inspectors saw "pooled amounts of standing water, blood, and debris" on the covers over combos of meat. One of those covers "was ripped" "exposing the product inside."

We showed the documents to two people who closely watch the food industry.

Bill Marler is a lawyer who specializes in food borne illnesses. "It's a dirty, dirty business," Marler said.

He represented Woodson -- and has sued companies after people got sick.

"A lot of the problems that you see with respect to cleanliness, with respect to potential contamination problems, were things were not just something that happened on a particular day, but as you can tell from the documents that some of that - the problems were long standing," Marler said.

We also talked to Donna Rosenbaum, the executive director of STOP (Safe Tables Our Priority) -- a group that advocates for food safety.

"When that lack of sanitation happens, again, that's just prime for cross contamination," Rosenbaum said.

The wall of Rosenbaum's office has pictures of people who got sick from food illnesses.

"There are a lot of conditions that were written up in these reports that - where you can see how if there was product coming through the plant at any point, that was contaminated with something like E. coli, how it could get through to consumers because it wasn't being cleaned up properly," Rosenbaum said.

We asked Cargill for an interview. We also asked to go inside their facility. A Cargill spokesman declined -- but released a statement.

In the statement, Cargill's spokesman states that the records "demonstrate that when issues arise, they are documented and corrective actions are taken."

Susan Woodson just doesn't want anyone else to suffer the way she did.

"Why are we given a food supply that's unsafe?" Woodson asked.