Roos and his team settled on yet another rather elegant solution to the ammonia problem. Once again, this solution wouldn’t bust the permit levels and wouldn’t require the refinery to shut down. The large detention ponds at the refinery were not connected only to the sewage system—they were also connected to a vast network of pipes and hydrants used for fighting fires. In case of emergency, water from the detention ponds would power hoses that could douse flames inside the plant.
Fires are a perpetual threat hanging over oil refineries. After all, a refinery is little more than a giant collection of pipes and tanks full of flammable material under very high pressure. Everybody knows that one small flame, within minutes, could give birth to a conflagration that might kills hundreds of people and destroy the facility. To protect against this eventuality, every priority is given to firefighting. At the Koch refinery, a set of hydrants located throughout the facility could be activated rapidly, making use of more than thirty million gallons of water in the detention ponds. Everybody knew that the water in the detention ponds was polluted, and nobody relished the thought of spraying it all over the refinery. But extinguishing a fire took precedence over everything else.
To keep it in peak condition, the firefighting system was flushed out about once a year. This task was overseen by the safety department. Safety employees would drive down to the detention ponds and open a group of special hydrants that drained the entire network of pipes used to fight fires. Doing so would draw water from the detention ponds, flush it through the firefighting system, and then spray it out of the hydrants and onto open ground near the refinery. This ground consisted of open crop fields and wooded land about one mile from the river and its surrounding wetlands. When the safety team flushed the system, they only kept the hydrants open for about an hour or so. It didn’t draw down much water from the detention ponds.
As water kept stacking up in the ponds during the summer of 1996, Roos and Estes discussed a novel idea. They could open the fire safety hydrants connected to the detention ponds and flush the water out onto the ground. They decided it would be a better idea to flush the water onto open ground rather than send it to the river, where it would violate Koch’s permit level. Roos downplayed the risk of pouring ammonia on the ground. He reminded Estes that ammonia was often used as a fertilizer. “I grew up on a farm. Ammonia is a fertilizer, and that quantity is not harmful. We had a discussion like that, you know,” Roos said.
Roos and Estes never determined a clear policy about whether or not it was legally acceptable to drain the detention ponds out onto surrounding land. But in the absence of a clear policy on the matter, the desire to keep ammonia out of the river won out over concerns about polluting the land. On June 18, 1996, the fire safety hydrants were opened and water from the detention ponds was flushed out onto the land. The next day, the hydrants were opened again, flushing more water out of the ponds.
Nobody told Heather Faragher.
* * *
Every weekday morning at seven o’clock, there was an operations meeting inside a large conference room at the refinery. This was a chance for supervisors throughout the operation to share information and pass around news from their scattered outposts. Process owners like Roos attended along with shift supervisors like Estes. Environmental engineers like Faragher also attended. During the fall of 1996, ammonia pollution became a topic of discussion. Very high loads of ammonia were still being delivered to the wastewater plant. Shift workers in the safety department were complaining about high water levels in the ponds.
During one meeting, Estes brought up the idea that she’d discussed with Brian Roos: maybe they could just open the hydrants and flush the pond water out onto the land. Faragher’s reaction to this idea was immediate and unequivocal: No. That was not possible. With that declarative statement, Faragher gained the undivided attention of her bosses. She explained to them that dumping water on the ground violated their state permit in many ways. To begin with, opening the hydrants would be considered a trick—called a “bypass” in regulatory circles. The state monitored Koch’s pollution at an agreed-upon location: the pipes that went into the Mississippi River. Flushing the water out a back door and onto open land was bypassing this monitoring point, a practice that was specifically outlawed in the permit.
But there was more than that: if Koch released chemicals into the environment, it needed to measure how much it was releasing and report those releases to the state if the pollution levels were high enough.II Because Koch didn’t measure pollution in its detention ponds, the company might be pouring reportable quantities of pollution out into the environment without telling the state.
And, more to the point, it was the wrong thing to do. Faragher didn’t need to consult any manuals or state regulations to make her judgment. It was an easy decision for her, and an instant one. It seemed to her that no wastewater engineer would have to think very long about it to come to the same conclusion. But Steve David, Faragher’s boss’s boss, did not agree with her. After Faragher had made her point, David told the group that he wasn’t so sure about her opinion. There might be more of a gray area there than Faragher was letting on. With that, the meeting broke up.
Faragher left the meeting thinking she had clearly just prohibited the idea of opening the hydrants and flushing out polluted water from the detention ponds. Steve David might have said he wanted to look into it, but that didn’t change the fact that she had opposed it. Maybe he could come up with some good reason why Koch could pour out ammonia onto the ground, but that didn’t seem likely. And the language Faragher used was not ambiguous: this would violate the permit, she said. In other words, it was illegal.
* * *
On October 24, 1996, Heather Faragher sent a memo to the environmental team and the plant operators. She told them that Koch would conduct routine pollution testing on November 4, which was a Monday. These were the tests that Koch would then give to the state to prove that it was operating within its pollution limits. Koch would test water at the polishing ponds and at other points within the plant. This was a routine memo—Faragher liked to give everyone a heads-up about the testing.
On Saturday, November 2, days before this test, the wastewater plant cut back its flow of water into the river. More water was sent to the detention ponds, which were already brimming.
The next morning was relatively quiet at the refinery. On weekends the place ran with a leaner staff. Heather Faragher was not at work, and most of the engineers’ offices were dark.
Todd Aalto was the operator on shift that day at the wastewater plant. He read the latest lab work on the water being sent to the river, and the ammonia numbers shocked him. A typical target for ammonia might be 40 parts per million. The lab results showed ammonia was dumping in at 110 parts per million. There were other problems. The tests also looked for pollution called “total suspended solids,” which measured particulate matter in the water. Koch aimed for 35 parts per million. The tests were showing 72 parts per million.
“I thought, This is not good,” Aalto later recalled. He knew that if water was sent to the polishing ponds, it could break the ammonia permit levels. So he diverted it. The operators cut the flow of water to the river from about four million gallons to one million gallons. Millions of gallons were sent to the detention ponds.