Ohio EPA Reaches Deal w/Hazard Waste Incinerator approved by Clinton Admin. Fine $34,000
The operators of the Heritage Thermal Services incinerator could face fines or civil or criminal penalties for the violations, detailed in a 20-page letter the agency sent the company in March.
Heritage operates a hazardous-waste incinerator in East Liverpool, a Columbiana County city of about 12,000 people on the Ohio River, about 160 miles northeast of Columbus.
The EPA found that the Heritage incinerator emitted gases that contained high levels of toxic chemicals into the air 195 times over 175 days from November 2010 through December 2014.
Those emissions happened through both mechanical failures and operators’ errors, according to the EPA’s findings.
The toxins, which could have been different on different days, likely included dioxin, which can affect reproductive and fetal health; cadmium, which can cause kidney disease and fetal malformations; chromium, which can cause cancer; and others, including mercury, lead and PCBs — the same toxins that once accumulated throughout Lake Erie.
“It is frightening,” said Alonzo Spencer, a lifelong resident of East Liverpool and president of Save Our County, an activist group that has petitioned state and federal agencies to revoke the incinerator’s operating permit.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/05/14/incinerator-violations.html
As required by Ohio EPA, Heritage took measures to prevent future incidents by intensifying screening, adding tighter restrictions on waste, performing more frequent inspections of solids within the secondary combustion chamber to remove and control buildup, redesigning the slag quench system, and cancelling problem waste streams. These measures will need to be added to the facility’s permit requirements.
In addition, Heritage agreed to pay a $34,000 civil penalty. A portion of the penalty, $6,800, will go to Ohio EPA’s Clean Diesel School Bus Fund. This fund helps retrofit school buses with pollution control equipment to reduce particulate emissions from diesel fuel engines to protect students who ride buses.
http://wkbn.com/2015/06/23/east-liverpool-incinerator-epa-reach-agreement/
More about how this was approved: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=edit&forum=1251&thread=1168609
