Leetsdale company fined for environmental crimes
A Leetsdale copper processing company will spend three years on probation and pay $550,000 in fines for multiple violations of the Clean Water Act and other counts after pleading guilty on Tuesday in federal court.
Hussey Copper, which waived indictment by a grand jury, instead pleaded to the information filed against it on Nov. 30.
The company pleaded before U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV to three counts, including submitting a false discharge monitoring report; discharging a quantity of oil that may be harmful to the environment and failing to make immediate required notification of such oil discharge.
The U.S. Attorney’s office alleged that the company, which was found in 1848 and moved to Leetsdale in 1963, submitted false discharge monitoring reports for its manufacturing facility on the Ohio River from 2012 to 2017. The prosecution said the company changed the amount of oil and copper that were being discharged so that they would fall within acceptable limits of its state-issued permit.
The federal government also said that the company from 2012 to 2018 repeatedly discharged quantities of oil on the Ohio River large enough to create oil sheens, but failed to report them to the state Department of Environmental Protection or the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Internal logs kept by Hussey documented hundreds of the sheens, prosecutors said.
In addition to the fine and probation, the company also will pay a $1,200 special assessment.
Paula Reed Ward is a TribLive reporter covering federal and Allegheny County courts. She joined the Trib in 2020 after spending nearly 17 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. She is the author of “Death by Cyanide.” She can be reached at pward@triblive.com.
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