Posted on 09/27/2003 4:51:00 AM PDT by snopercod
Federal environmental regulators have denied that the fine for a Penrose metal stamping plant, alleged to have violated hazardous waste rules, will reach $1.5 billion, as stated by the owner.
Officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday called the enormous estimate by American Carolina Stamping owner Steve McNabb absurd and said they had not yet figured what the company's fine could be for alleged hazardous waste violations stemming from a 1999 raid on the plant off U.S. 64 West near the Transylvania County line.
McNabb said earlier this week that according to a Sept. 4 complaint and compliance order he received from the Resource and Conservation and Recovery Act enforcement and compliance branch of the EPA, he would owe $1.5 billion.
He could not be reached for comment Friday afternoon.
Counts against the plant included failing to make a hazardous waste determination, receipt and storage of hazardous waste without a permit and disposal of hazardous waste without a permit.
McNabb has denied doing anything wrong with the waste in question, a solvent containing alcohol, hexane and methane called "ZEP ID Red Liquid."
The solvent, which is used to clean metal parts, is considered hazardous because it can ignite at 60 degrees Celsius or 140 degree Fahrenheit, the order said.
Some counts carried more than one violation each finable at $27,500 per day.
McNabb said the order would fine him back to 1994.
Ken Lapierre, section chief of the RCRA enforcement branch said they have not calculated the fines yet and were waiting to sit down with McNabb at an informal hearing.
"We like to have that meeting first with people to give them a chance to bring forward any information or to talk about any issues that might be related to the facts. Then we calculate a proposed settlement penalty," Lapierre said. "We find by doing it that way we come up with much better and more realistic penalties. ... so we don't just come up with this in a vacuum."
McNabb said he wants to bring members of the media and representatives from one or more elected officials to the hearing.
EPA officials, though, say the presence of media would negate the purpose of the meeting.
"We're not trying to hide anything," Lapierre said. "But the purpose is to have very frank discussions, and people just don't do that when you have people taking notes."
There are no federal statutes that say such meetings have to be open to the media, he said.
Whether or not the informal meeting occurs, an administrative hearing overseen by an administrative law judge will follow.
That hearing is not a criminal hearing.
The criminal investigations division of the EPA carried out the initial investigation against American Carolina Stamping, which makes wire forms, electrical contacts and metal stamping products.
Those agents raided the plant April 15, 1999. This is the first official response McNabb has gotten from the EPA in the four years since the raid, he said. Statutes of limitations say that charges have to be brought or the case dropped after five years.
McNabb tried to fight the investigation, enlisting the support of Brevard Republicans U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor and N.C. Rep. Trudi Walend, and spoke about alleged EPA abuses on a "60 Minutes" news program on that topic.
Lapierre said he did not know why there had been no criminal indictment in the four years.
The area supervisor for the criminal investigations division in Atlanta, Tyrone Hicks, could not be reached for comment.
Burgess can be reached at 694-7860 or by e-mail at joel.burgess@hendersonvillenews.com.
This case will be precisely what McNabb has always said it was. A potential case of some paperwork errors. But the Agency is claiming significant environmental impact. There is no environmental impact if someone simply fouls up some peperwork.
I anticipate the EPA will ultimately apply the tried and true formula that they have found so successful in the past: Figure out how much of a fine it would take to get the man to go out of business and fine him one dollar less.
Truly, the EPA meets the classic definition of a corrupt enterprise under the RICO statutes.
By the way, how does one impose a fine one oneself, and to whom is said fine paid? I don't understand.
McNabb makes some parts that have to be exceptionally clean. He uses virgin Zep on those, and saves the used stuff.
Then he uses that to clean other parts which just have to be visually clean. He saves the residue from that as well.
He may (I have no knowledge of this one way or the other) use that stuff for general cleaning around the shop.
In other words, he is being environmentally responsible by getting the most use out of the minimum quantity of solvent.
If I understand what I heard correctly, there is no hazardous waste to be disposed of at the end of this process. It has all evaporated.
They will define "treatment" as rendering any waste from a higher level of hazard to a lower level of hazard in order to facilitate disposal.
They will concede that the facility is allowed the use of the material first in one, high performance application, and then, subsequently in several, increasingly lower performance applications. They will tacitly acknowledge that this is a good and proper implementation of a pollution prevention technology.
But, in fact, the EPA only recognizes pollution prevention at all because Congress has forced them to. They really hate pollution prevention because it screws up their Accounting Principles 101 approach to regulation. They love the command and control approach to regulations and pollution prevention starts messing around with that.
The Agency will first claim that, at some point the solvent becomes unusable, even for the least demanding of the cleaning applications. Then they will claim that this otherwise unusable residue, therefore, by definition, has become hazardous waste.
At that point, they will say, the company must treat the material as hazardous waste and begin the paperwork chain to account for it.
Futher, they will claim that, even though the residue may not have manifested a hazardous condition at the time of its disposal, it was hazardous at the point that it became unusable.
Then, they will administer the coup-de-grace, as they demonstrate that evaporation of the solvent was a hazardous waste treatment method employed by the company, and, ipso-facto, they were treating the hazardous waste so they could didpose of it, at a reduced ignitability hazard, as ordinary waste.
The EPA is a criminal enterprise!
My friend, who makes his living in environmental compliance, thought that the EPA had absolutely no case on the waste dumping charge since there was no waste. He said they were setting him up on a "Title V" charge for the VOC evaporation, assuming that the quanitities were enough. Apparently, it doesn't matter how much solvent you actually used, only the "theoretical" amount that you "could" have used.
My friend rattled off all the applicable regulations, and frankly, my eyes glazed over. Example: It makes a difference whether you are wiping down a machine with a solvent for "maintenance" or "repair" or "some other use".
Cutting through all the BS, what we have here is a case of a bureaucracy making an example of what happens to a small business owner who doesn't show the proper respect. That's it, plain and simple.
If he is bringing in 1500 gals of solvent and processing fluids and sending out 300 gal of waste, there is a problem.
His self-imposed fine is two part:
1. He said he spent 250 thou on the lawsuit which was dismissed, appealed, and dismissed again.
2. Whereas most men in his situation would be doing everything possible to keep events out of the news, he did the opposite and the noteriety had a negative impact on his sales/profit.
So he pays a processor $350 to haul off that drum of waste. The processor distills the solvent out and sells it to a cement kiln as fuel where it is burned at 2000 degrees, just as it would in a hazardous waste incinerator. It has been thermally oxidized.
Now the processor has the sludge left. He will try to find a home for that. He could possibly find a roof coating mfg and give it away to be incorporated into the coating. Whatever he has left has to be sent to the Hazardous Waste Landfill.
Nonetheless, it is a HAP (Because the EPA gave Congress the list, and Congress unquestioningly put it into the CAAA of 1990, and President Bush signed the law. Now the EPA falls back on the "Congress created the HAP list, not us" fiction as they crucify industries under Title V and Title III).
Potential to emit (PTE) is calculated by the EPA, persuming an operating scenario of 24/7/365, at the worst possible operating secnario (in McNabb's case, he would thoretically be manufacturing the one part that caused him to use the greatest amount of the solvent conceivable in any one hour, times 24 times 7 times 365.
Now, if he had that PTE of 10 tons, but didn't ever or didn't conceive that he ever would, operate in a manner to achieve the 10 tons per year, then he had to petition the state to grant him a "Synthetic Minor" source permit. In this permit, he would presume legally enforcable limitations on his operation (hours of operation, throughput of materials, product mix, etc. Thue "synthetically" creating a legally enforceable set of restrictions to ensure he would never be a "major source" of HAPS) that would hold him below the 10 ton threshold.
But he would have had to have establish himself as a synthetic minor source prior to the deadline for Major Sources to have filed for their Title V permits. Because with a PTE of 10 tons he needed a Title V permit, unless he had already proven to the state (Fed EPA) that he really didn't need one in the first place.
Confused?
So were and are the states and so are all of the regulated sources.
And you have a bunch of people who have never made anything in their lives running around telling industries just what they are doing wrong, and giving then magically simple sounding solutions that have no practicality in the real world.
Just like the "He could possibly find a roof coating mfg and give it away to be incorporated into the coating." comment. What self respecting businessman could conceive of incorporating an raw material that has dubious origins, virtually unknowable constituent makeup and uncertain availability into their product.
It sounds like a utopianly simplistic solution but it lacks somewhat in realistic grounding in an ISO 9002 kind of world.
If the PTE limit is ten tons (20,000 lbs.) per year, then that works out to roughly 3500 gallons per year or 9.7 gallons per day. (using the specific gravity of the Zep I.D. Red = .68)
I think he's safe on the potential to emit.
When the local papers come out, there should be some real interesting letters-to-editor.
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