As the Public Is Poisoned, State Casts its Lot with Polluter
Will they get away with it?
“They” are Hawaiian Western Steel and Campbell Estate. “It” is the indisputable record of crimes against the environment and the public compiled during the three decades of the steel plant’s operations at the estate’s Campbell Industrial Park.
And, yes, it appears they will.
Aiding and Abetting
Environmental crimes are every bit as serious as armed robberies, rapes, murders, and drug sales. Their victims are more disperse and the injury inflicted sometimes takes years to become manifest. Yet both Congress and the state Legislature have acknowledged the need to protect human health and the environment by regulating polluting industries and providing for penalties when transgressions occur.
In the case of Hawaiian Western Steel, the system hasn’t worked. The criminals have disguised themselves as pillars of the community and their industrial crimes are camouflaged as business having a quantifiable economic benefit to the state. They schmooze with high elected and appointed officials in the state and can get an audience with Hawai`i’s Democratic pope, Senator Daniel Inouye, on short notice. Their lawyers would doubtless shrink in horror at the thought of representing muggers and rapists, but, as former officials with the Bush and Reagan administrations not too shy to cash in on their experience, they unblushingly counsel former adversaries on ways to elude the laws they used to enforce.
The state, charged with administering the Clean Air Act and Hawai`i’s own pollution laws, has seemed embarrassed by the duty. At every opportunity, from the governor on down, state officials have vouchsafed for the plant’s operators and shirked their responsibility to enforce. For an entire decade, from 1981 to 1991, the state chose not to cite Hawaiian Western Steel for emissions violations.
Hawai`i has not received delegated authority for enforcing the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which deals with hazardous waste. For this it relies on the Region IX office of the Environmental Protection Agency. The cooperating state agency, the Health Department’s Solid and Hazardous Waste Branch, appears to have discharged its duties with appropriate concern, forwarding year after year reports to the regional EPA office that recommended the EPA take enforcement action. But, like the state, the EPA also dragged its feet. The administrative enforcement action it brought in 1987 for RCRA violations has been simmering along on the back burner for so long that it appears to have prejudiced the federal government’s chance of success in the civil action it filed in district court last September.
Bloody Hands
When faced with mounting debt and a possible criminal investigation, Hawaiian Western Steel suddenly became a company no one wanted to own. The idea that it is a free-standing corporate orphan is convenient at such times, and, for purposes of bankruptcy filings, wholly legal. Still, it is important to bear in mind that since its inception, the majority of the company’s stock has been owned by a series of Canadian corporations. To be sure, two Hawai`i-based firms bought into it: Alexander & Baldwin and Okada Trucking. Their stake may have caused them to grease political wheels on the company’s behalf, but the overall day-to-day management of the plant was in the hands of its foreign owners.
In that context, the behavior elsewhere of the steel plant’s corporate parents sheds light on their operation here. That behavior is anything but exemplary. Cominco’s smelting operations have resulted in elevated lead levels in the blood of children in the small town of Trail, British Columbia. Its operation of a zinc mine in Alaska led to substantially higher levels of metal contaminants in two streams and a resulting decline in fish population, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. Cominco’s labor relations, especially with workers at the Western Steel plant in Vancouver, B.C., have been disputatious, to put it charitably. Nor did Ipsco’s takeover of Western Steel operations help; it shut the plant down permanently.
Blaming the Victims
For three decades, Hawaiian Western Steel was drained of all value by its corporate owners. Reinvestment in new equipment was minimal. The plant is a virtual antique. Basic repair and maintenance of existing facilities were scandalously neglected (as the shredded metal roof over the furnace structure still attests to). The company’s 90 or so hourly wage workers would seem to have been exposed to extremely high levels of lead and cadmium in the workplace; the company provided respirators, but when temperatures are as hot as they are in the area of the furnace, it is not uncommon for workers to remove safety equipment that only increases their discomfort. Nor were they being highly paid for their high-risk jobs: according to a company official, when Ipsco took over in 1989, wages had not been increased for 10 years.
This is the same company on whose behalf the governor and congressional delegation begged the federal investigators to call off their dogs. If only the same officials would show the same concern for the workers exposed to high levels of lead and their families, exposed indirectly; for the poor folk, including many of Hawaiian ancestry, who eat fish contaminated by Hawaiian Western Steel’s operations; for the endangered plants that were coated daily with hazardous dust and forced to contend with heavy metals in the soil; for the people living and working nearby, who were unknowingly exposing themselves to poisons in the very air they breathed, day after day, year after year.
Protection of these groups and more is mandated by state and federal laws. At both levels, however, the officials sworn to uphold those laws chose instead to protect the wrong-doers, to the point of inviting charges of malfeasance to say nothing of breach of trust. Were that not disgraceful enough, they had the cheek to blame the victim for the demise of the polluter. Had the plant not been faced with potential fines for RCRA violations, these officials stated repeatedly, the company would not have had to close down. Overlooked in this argument is the fact that to date, Hawaiian Western Steel has not paid one bloody red cent for any of its many acknowledged infractions of environmental law. The company’s bankruptcy filing appears to have been the result of its parent company wanting to lob off a losing operation. Threats of possible environmental prosecution served only as a convenient mask.
Like drivers of getaway cars in a bank robbery, federal and state officials have helped Hawaiian Western Steel in its flight to avoid prosecution. The company, which seems unlikely to emerge intact from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, will probably go unpunished. And, given the utter indifference displayed by the daily press to the problem, it appears likely that the officials who have aided and abetted these crimes will escape having to answer for their actions.
Closure?
Bringing closure to the problems raised by Hawaiian Western Steel’s operations will involve more than dealing with the 43,000 cubic yards of solid and hazardous waste it is known to have generated. Full resolution would entail finding answers to many of the puzzling questions raised in these pages and in the report to the House subcommittee headed by Representative Dingell, excerpts of which appear in this issue.
The changing White House administration might bring about a climate in which the actions of officials within the Department of Justice during the Bush years could be investigated. However, given the close ties between President-elect Clinton and Governor Waihe`e, it is probably futile to hope for a federal grand jury investigation into the actions of state officials similar to the one that is now reported to be looking into the state Land Use Commission’s approval of the Hawaiian Riviera Resort.
Closure of this sort, though unlikely, is vitally important. Should the question of how Hawaiian Western Steel got away with so much for so long not be answered, it is reasonable to believe that the lessons that could be gleaned from this case history will not be seared into the minds of the officials responsible. Having suffered no political embarrassment, they will remain unchastened, ready once more to go to bat for the next politically well-connected polluter to come down the pike.
That would be awful.
That appears likely in the extreme.
Erratum
In last month’s editorial, a statement was attributed to Maurice Kaya of the Department of Business and Economic Development. The source of the statement was actually Gerry Lesperance. Our apologies for the error.
Volume 3, Number 7 January 1993
Leave a Reply