HISTORY A FACTOR IN HUGE FINE
HISTORY A FACTOR IN HUGE FINE
ERIC GERSHON; Courant Staff Writer THE HARTFORD COURANT
On Sept. 2, 2003, one day after Hamilton Sundstrand flushed tens of thousands of gallons of polluted wastewater into the Farmington River, an inspector with the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection paid a visit to the company's Windsor Locks plant.
It was a routine check. The inspector, Will Oros, left unaware of the Labor Day weekend discharge.
Nobody at the company mentioned it, nor did anyone mention numerous tests in the preceding two years showing excessive amounts of hexavalent chromium, a toxic form of chromium, in the wastewater.
Six months earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice had agreed to release Hamilton Sundstrand's parent company, Hartford-based United Technologies Corp., from a decadelong federal consent decree that resolved widespread environmental violations at UTC, some of them at Hamilton. Under the decree, UTC paid $5 million in penalties and millions more for extensive environmental audits that uncovered further violations.
Hamilton Sundstrand notified DEP of the Labor Day weekend violation in early October of 2003 -- a month after receiving test results that confirmed excess copper, according to the DEP and Hamilton. The company was supposed to disclose excessive pollution levels within two hours of confirming the violation.
Just before Halloween, Oros went back to Hamilton looking for "a good reason why they failed to report the incident," he said in an interview Friday. He did not find one, and the state reported the incident to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A criminal investigation was soon underway, and the EPA raided Hamilton Sundstrand in a search for evidence.
This month, on Feb. 8, Hamilton pleaded guilty to two criminal counts of violating the Clean Water Act -- including falsifying records -- and agreed to pay $12 million in penalties. It is the largest levy for environmental crimes in New England history, according to the EPA.
The criminal case remains open and individuals involved in the crimes could yet face prosecution, said Kevin O'Connor, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut.
Hamilton has fired one employee over the Labor Day 2003 incident -- a supervisor in its waste treatment operation -- and transferred another, the company president said Friday. The Hamilton Sundstrand vice president for environment, health and safety, who was in the job in 2003, has kept her post.
The violations that led to the guilty pleas do not appear to have caused lasting damage to the Farmington River or its ecosystem, according to river stewards and the DEP. And Hamilton's president, David Hess, insists that hexavalent chromium never reached the river -- a contention that environmental officials say they cannot prove or disprove.
Whatever its effect on the Earth, the history of violations by United Technologies and Hamilton Sundstrand was a major factor in this month's record-setting punishment.
Copper And Chrome
In admitting guilt, Hamilton acknowledged dumping tens of thousands of gallons of copper-rich wastewater into the Farmington River in 2003. It also admitted to omitting or altering records related to wastewater containing hexavalent chromium between 2001 and 2003.
The company, which makes aerospace parts, including space suits for NASA, reported operating profits of $832 million on sales of $5 billion last year.
In an interview Friday, Hess, Hamilton's president since early 2005, acknowledged that the company's environmental management system was inadequate in 2003. Hess said that improvements have been made in many areas, and that the company is hiring an additional executive to oversee compliance.
"There's no excuse for it. We learn what we can from it," Hess said of the violations.
Hamilton's vice president for environment, health and safety, Lisa Szewczul, was on vacation last week and not available to describe details about the company's pollution systems and training.
Hexavalent chromium has had a special place in popular culture's representation of corporate pollution since the 2000 film "Erin Brockovich," starring Julia Roberts. At high levels, it can cause lung cancer and crusted skin sores that heal slowly and leave scars, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Hess said that despite the company's guilty plea for altering records, no wastewater from Hamilton containing excessive hexavalent chromium ever reached the Farmington River. The tests showing violations of permitted limits were of samples that came from an intermediary wastewater treatment facility, he said.
"There was absolutely zero discharge of hexavalent chromium into the Farmington River" above permitted amounts, he said.
Connecticut environmental regulators say they cannot be sure whether hexavalent chromium made it into the river. Because the company failed to report the violations when they happened, as required, no one tested the river water at the time.
"We just don't know," said Yvonne Bolton, chief of DEP's Bureau of Material Management and Compliance Assurance.
Gina McCarthy, the DEP commissioner, said that the gravity of Hamilton's crimes lay in its attempts to hide them.
"Because they failed to report, it made it impossible for us to do any impact assessment," she said in an interview Friday.
Hess, while acknowledging the breakdown over Labor Day weekend in 2003, said that Hamilton Sundstrand is not a polluter.
"The water we discharge into the river is cleaner than the water in the river," he said. Journalists, he added, are welcome to call him on that claim, "if you want to come and take a picture of me in the Farmington River, standing at the outflow pipe."
Deja Vu
In 1991, as it was negotiating the consent decree, UTC hired a former DEP commissioner and EPA official, Leslie Carothers, to become its first vice president for environment, health and safety. The company pledged to take corrective action.
As part of the decree, UTC agreed to pay $5 million to settle a 1990 federal lawsuit and other charges alleging about 150 violations of environmental protection laws, mainly related to hazardous waste and clean water. The company spent millions more satisfying other terms of the deal.
The violations resolved through the decree occurred at several UTC divisions and at sites throughout Connecticut, including Hamilton in Windsor Locks.
Then known as Hamilton Standard, Hamilton violated rules related to the storage, labeling and handling of hazardous waste, as well as the Clean Water Act dating from 1988, the lawsuit alleged.
Through the decree, UTC further agreed to hire independent auditors to review the environmental management practices at all of its New England facilities over a period of years, and to improve its oversight of discharges into "navigable waters."
State and federal regulators were pleased with the settlement and with the company's apparent commitment to change. Previously, UTC had one of the worst environmental records in New England, a top EPA administrator then said.
"The reason we brought our original case, the one settled in '93, is that we had numerous small administrative cases against them," said Amelia Welt Katzen, a lawyer with the EPA in Boston who worked on UTC cases for more than a decade. "It seemed they were not getting the message. ... We were hoping that would make them pay attention."
Partway through the term of the decree, the EPA learned of more violations.
The auditors hired by UTC under the terms of the 1993 deal found more violations at company subsidiaries, including Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky and Hamilton. Among the violations at Hamilton were at least 15 occasions in 1996 and 1997 when wastewater contained greater than permitted levels of hexavalent chromium.
"Obviously, it didn't entirely work," Katzen said of the 1993 decree.
In a new 1999 agreement, UTC agreed to pay civil penalties of more than $150,000 and to undertake environmentally beneficial projects valued at more than half a million dollars. One project involved restoring Lord Cove, a Connecticut River tidal marsh in Lyme. The other was a "pollution prevention research project" to be undertaken by Pratt. It was intended to test alternative technologies for chrome plating.
Pratt completed the project, but with minimal success, Katzen said, and hexavalent chromium remains part of the manufacturing process.
Carothers, after overseeing UTC's compliance with the decree, left the company in 2002. In a brief interview last week, she said that she was not aware of violations at Hamilton after the 1999 agreement.
But she said, "According to the dates, some of this may have come up on my watch."
Carothers would not discuss the incidents that led to Hamilton's recent felony pleas or UTC's environmental protection policies in general, saying it would be "inappropriate."
"I'm not there anymore," she said.
Carothers now runs a Washington, D.C., group called the Environmental Law Institute, which describes itself as an impartial advocate for environmental protection. According to its website, UTC is one of its corporate members.
McCarthy, the current DEP commissioner, expressed optimism that the requirements of Hamilton's guilty plea will lead to long-term good for the environment and the Farmington River in particular. As part of the plea, the company has promised to stop discharging industrial wastewater into the river by as soon as 2009. When that happens, she said, just one company will still have a permit to do so.
As for whether the DEP is encouraging the prosecution of individuals at Hamilton, McCarthy said it was not a matter for the agency to decide.
"It will be entirely up to the U.S. attorney's office," she said.
Contact Eric Gershon at egershon@courant.com.