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Hardrock Excavating fined $75K in oil field waste dumping
YOUNGSTOWN
Hardrock Excavating LLC, the final defendant charged with violating the Clean Water Act in the dumping of oil-field waste into a Mahoning River tributary in 2012 and 2013, has been fined $75,000.
The company pleaded guilty of violating the CWA.
Under the plea agreement, the company also will make a community-service payment of $25,000 to be split equally between the Friends of the Mahoning River and the Midwest Environmental Enforcement Association, based in St. Charles, Ill.
According to court documents, the MEEA’s mission is to improve the quality of the environment through enhancing the knowledge and skills of environmental- enforcement professionals through training. It was formed in 1982.
The plea by the company, of which Ben Lupo is part owner, was made Thursday before U.S. District Court Judge Donald C. Nugent in Cleveland.
The company could have been fined up to $500,000.
The judge granted a request by Hardrock’s lawyer, James M. Kersey of Cleveland, to waive a pre-sentence report and sentence the company immediately.
Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not object to that request when he discussed it with them, Kersey told the judge.
Restitution was not an issue because the environmental cleanup was completed and paid for by D&L Energy Inc., another company operated by Lupo, said Brad Beeson, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case.
After pleading guilty to violating the Clean Water Act, Lupo, 64, of Springfield Township, was fined $25,000 and sentenced to 28 months in prison for ordering the illegal dumping.
Lupo is at the Federal Medical Center Devens in Ayer, Mass., from which he is scheduled to be released Oct. 11, 2016.
The oily mess, which was dumped down a Youngstown storm drain and into a Mahoning River tributary, necessitated a $3.1 million cleanup that lasted more than a month.
A series of 31 surreptitious nighttime discharges from Lupo’s Salt Springs Road waste-storage tanks began Nov. 1, 2012, and ended Jan. 31, 2013, when Ohio Department of Natural Resources agents, acting on an anonymous tip, saw an illegal discharge of brine, drilling mud and drill cuttings in progress.
Two Hardrock employees, Mark A. Goff, 46, of Newton Falls, and Michael P. Guesman, 35, of Cortland, who pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act, got three years’ probation after saying they repeatedly dumped the waste at Lupo’s direction.
Without objection from the U.S. attorney or probation office, Judge Nugent granted Guesman’s request for early termination of his probation last month.