Kriens would later ask Faragher why she’d misled him, and Faragher would not have a good answer. “I was instructed not to give you any information you didn’t ask for,” she said. She seemed almost surprised by what she had done.
The state inspectors walked down to the detention ponds to inspect them. They walked near the wooded area that had been blasted sideways by the hydrant streams. Two of Koch’s safety department employees, Gary Ista and Chris Rapp, met Kriens at the detention ponds and told him what Faragher would not: that the ponds had been drained onto land several times after the incident.
Kriens and his team turned to Steve David. They asked him if he had known about these flushing episodes. Had Koch’s environmental team been aware that this was happening?
David told them that the environmental team didn’t know about the flushing until January, when Faragher reported the flushing to the state. This was not true. David also left out the fact that he and other senior managers at Koch not only knew about the flushing but had held multiple meetings discussing the issue. One of those meetings had been all the way back in November, when David and Faragher debated the issue with Koch’s senior attorney Jim Voyles.
David would later say that he hid the fact of the meetings because Voyles told him the discussions were top secret and protected by attorney-client privilege. Voyles gave David the impression that even acknowledging the meeting would violate the attorney-client privilege, which David was not authorized to do. This was not true, as David would later learn.
Kriens and his delegation walked over to an area called the coker pond, a detention pool often filled with highly polluted water. Kriens had reason to believe that the coker pond had been overflowing its banks, and he asked David if a sewer mechanism at the pond called a “sump” had recently caused the pond to overflow.
David told him no.
Faragher was visibly nervous at this point. The pond had, in fact, overflowed the previous Monday. Faragher was part of a team that was now lying to the state.
* * *
Without Steve David’s cooperation, it was extremely difficult for state investigators to figure out how much Koch Industries managers knew about the ammonia pollution. The state had piles of work logs showing that the dumping occurred. But those logs told only part of the story. It wasn’t at all clear who had ordered the pollution—who had told the safety department to open the valves. It was even unclear how often the dumping happened.
The investigation might have foundered after Koch’s team left the state offices on May 8. If nobody inside the refinery told the truth to investigators, it was all but impossible for the MPCA to figure out what was happening inside the refinery. This was how Koch Industries wanted it. Ernie Tromberg, the longtime Pine Bend operator and manager who retired in the early 1990s, said Koch’s management team felt that the state had no right to know what happened inside the fence line of Koch’s property. Managers obeyed a code of silence to maintain this wall around Koch’s operations. They didn’t talk about the company’s business to outsiders. This was an unspoken rule among Koch’s tightly knit team of leaders.
On May 12, Faragher called Kriens. She told him that Steve David had lied during their meeting. She was ready to help the state.
* * *
On May 27, Kriens and his team met again with Koch’s managers. This time David, Faragher, and Hall were joined by Roos. Once again, Kriens asked if Koch’s environmental team had been aware of the ammonia dumping prior to January, when Faragher had reported it to the state. Once again, he was told “No.” But this time, Kriens knew the truth. During back-channel meetings, Faragher was helping him understand it.
* * *
The state’s investigation grinded on through the spring and summer months of 1997. Koch built a legal wall around its refinery, hiring criminal defense lawyers to represent the employees involved in the ammonia dumping. Jim Voyles traveled to Pine Bend from Wichita and helped coach the employees, preparing them for an intense investigation by the MPCA.
Faragher kept going in to work every day, as if everything were normal. She had very little choice. Her pregnancy was progressing, and she was always aware that soon she’d have a child to support. The happy days of her early career at Koch were finished. The sense of community, the softball games, the drinking sessions—all of it had disappeared. Faragher had gained a reputation. She was known to be the complainer, the employee who’d fought her bosses on the ammonia issue.
Faragher kept her mouth shut at work during the long summer months. It was obvious what happened to those who did otherwise. Life had become instantly and thoroughly miserable for Charlie Chadwell and Terry Stormoen, the shift workers who took evidence of Koch’s criminal conduct to state officials and then told their bosses about it. Chadwell was reprimanded after cigarette ashes were found in a work vehicle he used—he said he’d been smoking during his shift but not on refinery property. He was suspended. His managers held disciplinary meetings with him. A Koch attorney interrogated Chadwell about his views on Koch’s environmental policy. Chadwell didn’t cooperate and claimed that he couldn’t answer some of the questions because he had short-term memory loss.
Chadwell called in sick after that meeting, and, in response, Koch required him to go see a company doctor who could evaluate his health. Koch’s doctor referred Chadwell to a neurologist, who was hired by Koch, and the neurologist, in turn, referred Chadwell to a psychologist, also hired by Koch. The psychologist said that Chadwell did not, in fact, suffer from a memory disorder that would cause short-term memory loss.
Chadwell became even more confrontational. He took a briefcase full of documents from the refinery and gave them to the state, informing his bosses about it after the fact. Koch suspended Chadwell, saying he would not be reinstated on the job until he returned that evidence. Chadwell started telling people that Koch Industries was trying to kill him. He said someone had detonated an explosive device in his mailbox, an act he thought was orchestrated by the company. On December 9, Chadwell met again with Koch supervisors. This time he said he had been lying about the mailbox explosion and that he simply wanted to be fired.
Koch granted Chadwell’s wish on December 17. He was terminated.
News traveled fast around the Pine Bend refinery. Chadwell’s story was well known. Employees like Faragher saw what happened to employees who worked with state regulators.
* * *
On October 27, Faragher gave birth to her first child, a healthy girl. She stayed home and began a maternity leave that would last more than two months. The leave gave her time to think. She focused on her daughter. She trained her mind to avoid thoughts of Koch Industries. She thought the stress would only hurt her health, and therefore the health of her new baby. During the holidays of 1997 and the frigid new year, Faragher kept her eyes and her thoughts on her little girl.
But the problems at Koch came to her doorstep. On March 18, 1998, Faragher was home with her husband and infant daughter when the doorbell rang. She answered it and found a well-dressed man and woman on her front porch.
It was the woman who would lodge herself in Faragher’s memory. Actually, it was the pistol on the woman’s hip that was memorable. The couple introduced themselves to Faragher as she held the door open. The man was John Bonhage, a special agent with the FBI. The woman was Maureen O’Mara, an agent with the US Environmental Protection Agency. They asked if they could come in and talk, and Faragher said they could. It didn’t appear that she had much choice.