ANCHORAGE (AP) – The last of three federal defendants who pleaded guilty this year to Clean Air Act violations at a Dutch Harbor seafood plant was sentenced Nov. 25 to three years of probation, avoiding the maximum sentence of two years in prison.
U.S. District Court Judge Ralph Beistline also ordered Bryan Beigh, 48, to pay a $750 fine. The defense, according to U.S. Attorney’s Office Alaska Criminal Division chief Kevin Feldis, indicated that Beigh lacked the money to pay a more substantial fine.
In July, the government charged Beigh with a single count of Clean Air Act tampering. An investigation found Beigh encouraged others to falsify emissions records at a Westward Seafood Inc. facility. He also created a makeshift tool to alter the readings on water meters.
The case was filed July 30 in U.S. District Court, and Beigh pleaded guilty to the charge the next day.
Within two weeks, the government charged two other former Westward employees with the same crime. Both pleaded guilty as well. James Hampton, 45, the former assistant chief engineer for Westward Seafoods Inc., and Raul Morales, 53, former powerhouse supervisor, were sentenced on Nov. 12 to 70 and 45 days behind bars, respectively.
Feldis said it’s the first case he’s aware of in which defendants were sentenced to jail for failing to operate pollution control equipment under the federal environmental act.
Beigh was not as culpable, having played a lesser role in the scheme, the prosecutor said, but apparently committed the crimes under no duress.
“He acknowledged that it was just a way to make his job easier,” Feldis said of Beigh’s testimony. “It certainly required effort and energy to operate the pollution reducing systems, but it was not overburdensome.”
Westward is a subsidiary of Japan-based Maruha-Nichiro Holdings Inc., which maintains a headquarters in Seattle. It processes 254 million pounds of seafood each year.
Its Dutch Harbor facility produces its own electricity with three diesel-fueled generators. A Clean Air Act permit held by the company requires the use of air saturation systems, which decrease nitrogen dioxide discharges through the plant’s single smokestack, according to court records.
Those systems were scarcely used from August 2009 to August 2011 due to the actions of the three defendants.
As powerhouse supervisor, Morales was responsible for all aspects of the plant’s engine room, including the generators. Part of the job required reports that measured the saturation systems’ water use.
Instead of properly filling out reports, “defendant Morales used a preprinted sheet which he would consult to determine, based on how long the engine had been operating on any particular day, how much water the (system) would have used had it been in operation,” the records say.
To cover up the false entries, Beigh tampered with water meters so the numbers on the reports matched those being submitted to the company’s environmental compliance manager for review.
New meters were installed on the saturation systems around the time of the crimes. Water was not running through them. Beigh did not want anyone to see that the numbers on the meters — “especially when they were new and all indicated zero” — were inaccurate, so he used a drill press with a magnet on its end to cause the meter to spin, according to court records.
Beigh took it upon himself to make the meters match with the reports, Feldis said, without considering the consequences.
Hampton escorted an Environmental Protection Agency inspector around the facility in April 2011. Morales caught wind of the inspection beforehand and started turning on the systems; Hampton showed the inspector the systems and validated the daily logs despite knowing they were wrong, according to court records.
The scheme was discovered at the end of August 2011, when a new director of environmental compliance for Westward discovered the systems were not running as required by law, Feldis said.
The company conducted an internal investigation and “quickly discovered” the disuse of the pollution preventing systems and the three defendants’ coverup, the prosecutor said. Westward reported the violations to the Environmental Protection Agency, which started a criminal investigation.
The EPA did not receive any reports of harm to human beings as a result of the emissions at Westward during this period. Nitrogen dioxide can cause airway inflammation in otherwise healthy people and can cause or worsen symptoms of asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases.
“This is a matter of integrity of our environmental protection laws. It goes way beyond (the defendants),” Feldis said. “Having clean air is a public good and something that we all have a vested interest in. When they decided not to operate these systems and kept it from regulators for extended periods of time, they risked harming many people. It’s a crime that impacts us all.”
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