The difference between these two statements was stark. Faragher had written that Koch would comply with MPCA’s wishes. Voyles had written the company wasn’t aware of any legal reason to do so. And now this memo was about to be sent to the state under Faragher’s name.
That’s when Faragher decided to go above her bosses’ heads.
Koch Industries had installed a hotline that employees could use to report an ethics complaint. After reading Voyles’s edits to her memo, Faragher called it. The first man she reached seemed nonchalant about Faragher’s story. He took her name and phone number and said someone would call her back.
Eventually someone did. Years later, Faragher could not remember the name of the man who called her back. (At that time, the head of ethical compliance at Koch Industries was a lawyer named Ben Burgess.)IV Faragher spilled her story to the man on the other end of the line. She told him everything: how her legal opinion was being marginalized, how Koch was taking a legal risk by doing so, and about the troubling edits that Voyles had made on her memo to the state. Faragher even talked about the personal toll that all of this was taking on her. She was pregnant, and she was worried that the stress of all this might be hurting her baby. Faragher was having trouble sleeping—the stress was wearing on her mind and body.
After hearing her out, the man in Wichita tried to sooth Faragher. He told her that the situation would be handled. And he insinuated that her concerns might be a bit overblown. He told her, then, to focus on her own health and personal life. “He told me that I needed to be taking care of myself and my baby. ‘You’re kind of just emotional because you’re pregnant,’ ” she later recalled. “I never heard from him again.”
When the phone call ended, Faragher realized that she was on her own.
* * *
On February 18, Brian Roos sent a memo to Faragher, Steve David, and an operations manager named Jim Jacobson. The memo was labeled: “In reference to the water policy.”
The water policy in question was the one Faragher had laid out in the memo she had previously shared, based on her meeting with the MPCA. Roos informed the team that he wished he had been consulted before that policy was announced. He thought the policy was wrongheaded.
Roos was particularly bothered by the idea that Koch would need to conduct pollution tests anytime it flushed more than twenty thousand gallons of water from the hydrants. He said that these and other constraints were unreasonable.
“I believe there is more red tape here than necessary. For routine use of the fire water for cleaning and flushing, we should not be required to go through this procedure,” Roos wrote. Heather Faragher, once again, was contradicted by senior management at the refinery.
There was urgency to this issue. The ammonia loads continued to arrive at the wastewater plant in alarmingly high levels. Once again, the water was being diverted to the detention ponds, and once again the detention ponds were getting dangerously full. The outcome seemed inevitable.
* * *
Koch Industries opened the fire hydrants and spewed ammonia-laden water onto open ground on February 25, 26, and 27, and again on March 26, without seeking prior approval from the state. Two men who worked with the wastewater plant—named Charlie Chadwell and Terry Stormoen—did not understand why Koch was dumping polluted water onto open fields around the plant. They were being asked to cooperate with the practice even after they’d gotten the memo from Faragher saying that it was unethical and possibly illegal.
This was just one of many grievances among the OCAW workers at the refinery during the 1990s. It was an unusually tense time between management and the union. It wasn’t all-out war like 1972, but wounds from that period lingered. The union men felt disrespected, and the work rules seemed to give them no job security at all anymore. The Market-Based Management teachings emanating from Wichita struck them as a tidal wave of corporate lingo. In many cases, it seemed like little more than a smokescreen used to justify firing any workers that Koch didn’t want around. The OCAW employees felt like they knew plenty about running a refinery—they didn’t need to learn about property rights and process ownership. There was a brief strike in 1993, and it concluded without much of a sense that anything was accomplished.
Longtime employees like Charlie Chadwell wanted out of the company. In April of 1997, it seemed like Chadwell’s desire to quit merged neatly with a need for him to relieve his conscience about the ammonia pollution. Maybe he could do the right thing, and win a generous severance package at the same time. On April 4, Chadwell and Stormoen paid a visit to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. When they arrived, they told a story that was even more damning than Faragher’s. The two plant workers alleged that Koch Industries made a habit of violating state pollution laws. To prove their point, the two brought along reams of documents: operating logs and internal communication that spelled out the violations in inarguable detail. It was all there: the logs of hydrants being opened for twelve hours, the notations of workers dumping xylene and naphtha down a leaky sewer system meant to process only water with some oil in it, and other complaints about leaky tanks and pollution.
Chadwell returned to the refinery and immediately told his bosses what he had done. He wondered if they might not want to negotiate his exit from the company.
The state regulators were not very far behind Chadwell. They arrived a few days later.
* * *
On April 8, 1997, Steve David, Faragher’s boss, told her that the MPCA was going to send agents to the refinery the following day for a surprise inspection. He had been tipped off by a source at the agency.
David gave Faragher clear instructions: She could meet with the MPCA investigators when they arrived, but she could not volunteer any information to them. She was to answer their questions with as little information as possible. “Yes” or “no” answers were preferable.
The next day, the regulators showed up unannounced, just as expected.
* * *
When the state inspectors arrived, Faragher saw that Don Kriens was with them. He was the official with whom she’d met months before, the one who’d told her Koch needed to stop flushing ammonia onto the ground, or at least give the state prior notification if it did so. Koch had already violated Kriens’s command several times.
Kriens and his team of MPCA agents gathered up a small group of Koch employees, including Faragher and David. Kriens asked the Koch employees to take him on a walking tour of the refinery. He wanted to see the detention ponds and other sights.
The state inspectors noticed that Faragher was nervous. She seemed to be having a silent argument in her mind. Every time they asked her a question, even a simple question, Faragher paused. She looked as if she might be comparing different versions of scripts in her head before responding.
Kriens and his team asked Faragher if Koch had flushed ammonia onto the ground at any time besides the incident that Faragher had already reported.
Faragher said that she didn’t know. She said Koch’s safety department controlled the hydrants, not the environmental engineers. This was not true, and Kriens’s team suspected as much. The state now had evidence of several other flushing incidents.