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The problem started inside a machine called the sour water stripper, which played a critical role in cutting down on the ammonia emissions that were pumped into the wastewater treatment plant. For some reason, one of the sour water strippers started to malfunction. Only later would it be discovered that a series of trays inside the stripper had built up a layer of residue called “scaling” that made the trays far less efficient. Unfortunately, no one at the plant was aware that this had happened. The trays were buried deep inside the machine, and they could not be seen unless the machine was turned off and disassembled. Doing so would require a partial outage at the refinery. Production would be interrupted. Output would fall. Sales would be hurt. The sour water strippers were allowed to keep running.

  Large levels of ammonia started flowing into the wastewater plant. Only so much of the ammonia could be removed by the nitrification process. The ammonia loads were overtaking the microorganisms that were supposed to eat them. As a result, heavy doses of ammonia were sent from the wastewater plant out to the polishing ponds and, ultimately, into the river. Doing this for too long would violate Koch’s operating permit. The fine for doing so would have only been about $30,000—pocket change for Koch. But it wasn’t the fine that was important. If the high ammonia levels still continued, then the legal troubles would escalate. The entire operation could be endangered.

  Brian Roos discussed this problem with the other people in operations, like Todd Aalto in the wastewater treatment plant. Roos also talked with Aalto’s boss, a woman named Ruth Estes. These discussions often occurred when Heather Faragher was not around. The operations people had to figure out how to handle the high ammonia levels. Eventually they settled on a rather elegant solution. It wouldn’t bust the permit levels. But it wouldn’t require the refinery to shut down, either.

  * * *

  From the control room, Todd Alato could pull back on the amount of water that was flushed into the polishing ponds and divert it into a series of large detention ponds on the far end of the refinery. These ponds were enormous: one held twenty-two million gallons of water, and another held twelve million. The ponds were a kind of catchall basin for runoff from the plant, and it was not entirely clear just what was inside of them. The ponds took runoff from the oily water sewer and other pipes within the refinery—the cracked and leaky system where employees dumped naphtha, xylene, and other chemicals. A test by state regulators would later show that soil near one of these detention ponds was contaminated with mercury, chromium, zinc, and other pollutants.

  In June of 1996, operators like Aalto started sending millions of gallons of water that was heavily polluted with ammonia into these detention ponds. The technique was known as “stacking” the water, and it had the immediate effect of helping Koch Industries. Because the ammonia-laden water was being stored in these detention ponds, it was not being sent out to the river, where it would count against Koch’s permit levels. Engineers like Faragher were testing for pollution in the polishing ponds, not the detention ponds.

  Unfortunately, over the ensuing months, stacking the water began to present its own problems. Water levels at the detention ponds rose steadily. Soon, the water was creeping dangerously close to the tops of levees that surrounded the ponds. If there was a heavy rainstorm, it could potentially cause the detention ponds to overflow, sending a stream of pollution into nearby farmland and wetlands.

  Roos assigned engineers to figure out just what was causing the high ammonia levels, but they failed to do so. For a number of technical reasons, the engineers did not suspect that the problem was the trays inside the sour water stripper—usually those trays were effective for many years, and the trays in place then were not very old. The sour water strippers were not shut down and disassembled for rigorous inspection.

  Roos and his team settled on yet another rather elegant solution to the ammonia problem. Once again, this solution wouldn’t bust the permit levels and wouldn’t require the refinery to shut down. The large detention ponds at the refinery were not connected only to the sewage system—they were also connected to a vast network of pipes and hydrants used for fighting fires. In case of emergency, water from the detention ponds would power hoses that could douse flames inside the plant.

  Fires are a perpetual threat hanging over oil refineries. After all, a refinery is little more than a giant collection of pipes and tanks full of flammable material under very high pressure. Everybody knows that one small flame, within minutes, could give birth to a conflagration that might kills hundreds of people and destroy the facility. To protect against this eventuality, every priority is given to firefighting. At the Koch refinery, a set of hydrants located throughout the facility could be activated rapidly, making use of more than thirty million gallons of water in the detention ponds. Everybody knew that the water in the detention ponds was polluted, and nobody relished the thought of spraying it all over the refinery. But extinguishing a fire took precedence over everything else.

  To keep it in peak condition, the firefighting system was flushed out about once a year. This task was overseen by the safety department. Safety employees would drive down to the detention ponds and open a group of special hydrants that drained the entire network of pipes used to fight fires. Doing so would draw water from the detention ponds, flush it through the firefighting system, and then spray it out of the hydrants and onto open ground near the refinery. This ground consisted of open crop fields and wooded land about one mile from the river and its surrounding wetlands. When the safety team flushed the system, they only kept the hydrants open for about an hour or so. It didn’t draw down much water from the detention ponds.

  As water kept stacking up in the ponds during the summer of 1996, Roos and Estes discussed a novel idea. They could open the fire safety hydrants connected to the detention ponds and flush the water out onto the ground. They decided it would be a better idea to flush the water onto open ground rather than send it to the river, where it would violate Koch’s permit level. Roos downplayed the risk of pouring ammonia on the ground. He reminded Estes that ammonia was often used as a fertilizer. “I grew up on a farm. Ammonia is a fertilizer, and that quantity is not harmful. We had a discussion like that, you know,” Roos said.

  Roos and Estes never determined a clear policy about whether or not it was legally acceptable to drain the detention ponds out onto surrounding land. But in the absence of a clear policy on the matter, the desire to keep ammonia out of the river won out over concerns about polluting the land. On June 18, 1996, the fire safety hydrants were opened and water from the detention ponds was flushed out onto the land. The next day, the hydrants were opened again, flushing more water out of the ponds.

  Nobody told Heather Faragher.

  * * *

  Every weekday morning at seven o’clock, there was an operations meeting inside a large conference room at the refinery. This was a chance for supervisors throughout the operation to share information and pass around news from their scattered outposts. Process owners like Roos attended along with shift supervisors like Estes. Environmental engineers like Faragher also attended. During the fall of 1996, ammonia pollution became a topic of discussion. Very high loads of ammonia were still being delivered to the wastewater plant. Shift workers in the safety department were complaining about high water levels in the ponds.

  During one meeting, Estes brought up the idea that she’d discussed with Brian Roos: maybe they could just open the hydrants and flush the pond water out onto the land. Faragher’s reaction to this idea was immediate and unequivocal: No. That was not possible. With that declarative statement, Faragher gained the undivided attention of her bosses. She explained to them that dumping water on the ground violated their state permit in many ways. To begin with, opening the hydrants would be considered a trick—called a “bypass” in regulatory circles. The state monitored Koch’s pollution at an agreed-upon location: the pipes that went into the Mississippi River. Flushing the water out a back door and onto open land was bypassing this monitorin
g point, a practice that was specifically outlawed in the permit.

  But there was more than that: if Koch released chemicals into the environment, it needed to measure how much it was releasing and report those releases to the state if the pollution levels were high enough.II Because Koch didn’t measure pollution in its detention ponds, the company might be pouring reportable quantities of pollution out into the environment without telling the state.

  And, more to the point, it was the wrong thing to do. Faragher didn’t need to consult any manuals or state regulations to make her judgment. It was an easy decision for her, and an instant one. It seemed to her that no wastewater engineer would have to think very long about it to come to the same conclusion. But Steve David, Faragher’s boss’s boss, did not agree with her. After Faragher had made her point, David told the group that he wasn’t so sure about her opinion. There might be more of a gray area there than Faragher was letting on. With that, the meeting broke up.

  Faragher left the meeting thinking she had clearly just prohibited the idea of opening the hydrants and flushing out polluted water from the detention ponds. Steve David might have said he wanted to look into it, but that didn’t change the fact that she had opposed it. Maybe he could come up with some good reason why Koch could pour out ammonia onto the ground, but that didn’t seem likely. And the language Faragher used was not ambiguous: this would violate the permit, she said. In other words, it was illegal.

  * * *

  On October 24, 1996, Heather Faragher sent a memo to the environmental team and the plant operators. She told them that Koch would conduct routine pollution testing on November 4, which was a Monday. These were the tests that Koch would then give to the state to prove that it was operating within its pollution limits. Koch would test water at the polishing ponds and at other points within the plant. This was a routine memo—Faragher liked to give everyone a heads-up about the testing.

  On Saturday, November 2, days before this test, the wastewater plant cut back its flow of water into the river. More water was sent to the detention ponds, which were already brimming.

  The next morning was relatively quiet at the refinery. On weekends the place ran with a leaner staff. Heather Faragher was not at work, and most of the engineers’ offices were dark.

  Todd Aalto was the operator on shift that day at the wastewater plant. He read the latest lab work on the water being sent to the river, and the ammonia numbers shocked him. A typical target for ammonia might be 40 parts per million. The lab results showed ammonia was dumping in at 110 parts per million. There were other problems. The tests also looked for pollution called “total suspended solids,” which measured particulate matter in the water. Koch aimed for 35 parts per million. The tests were showing 72 parts per million.

  “I thought, This is not good,” Aalto later recalled. He knew that if water was sent to the polishing ponds, it could break the ammonia permit levels. So he diverted it. The operators cut the flow of water to the river from about four million gallons to one million gallons. Millions of gallons were sent to the detention ponds.

  Koch managers were aware that testing for the state regulators would occur Monday. Shifting the water flow would help them beat the test. During that weekend, an operator in the wastewater plant named David Gardner wrote in a logbook: “I hope these moves prove sufficient in light of tomorrow’s annual toxicity testing.”

  Estes was the shift supervisor on duty that weekend. She had many problems to take care of, but, by Sunday afternoon, it became very clear that she also had a crisis on her hands. There was simply too much water flowing to the detention ponds and a very real risk of overflows.

  The hydrants were sitting there, capable of being opened, siphoning off the water. She had a tool at her disposal to easily solve the problem. Estes remembered that Faragher had opposed opening the hydrants. But their boss, Steve David, had undercut Faragher in front of everybody. There did not seem to be a clear answer. And regardless, environmental engineers were merely consultants. As Hall had put it: We don’t run the place. They do.

  Estes had a clear choice on her hands that afternoon: “It would have been basically, ‘Our [pond] levels are high, we’re about to go over, what the hell are you going to do about it?’ ” she said.

  At seven o’clock Sunday evening, safety department employees went down to the hydrants and began the detailed process of opening them up. Soon enough, fountains of water began pouring out, flowing over open fields and into the woods and low-lying wetland areas.

  The operators went home for the night. And they left the hydrants open. When workers arrived around seven for their Monday-morning shift, the hydrants were still spewing water. Employees from the safety team then closed the hydrants, just as the morning operations meeting was beginning in the conference room inside the plant. The state of Minnesota later estimated that roughly six million gallons of water were flushed onto the ground overnight.

  * * *

  On the morning of November 4, Heather Faragher was informed that the safety team had flushed out the detention ponds. She was furious. She had made it perfectly clear that flushing the hydrants was prohibited, that it was illegal. And yet Ruth Estes had gone ahead and opened the spigots—for twelve hours. It was only on that Monday morning, after the damage had been done, that Estes checked with Faragher and Brian Roos to make sure that flushing the water was “kosher.”

  Estes later told state investigators “I talked to the environmental [team] and Brian about it, and essentially they also viewed it as a gray area, you know.”

  But there was no gray area as far as Faragher was concerned. “Heather was against it; unequivocally against it,” Estes remembered. The group eventually decided to call Koch’s legal team.

  They reached Jim Voyles, a senior attorney at Koch’s headquarters in Wichita. Hopefully he would be a voice of reason who could help cut through the dispute. But Voyles told them during the call that he needed to do more research into the legality of flushing the hydrants. He refused to side with Faragher.

  Faragher went back to her office, and she was alone in trying to figure out what to do next. She did some quick calculations, trying to estimate how much water had been released and how heavy the ammonia concentrations in that water had been. This was essentially a guessing game because nobody had measured pollution levels in the detention pond. Ultimately, Faragher decided that the release was not a reportable event—there probably had not been enough ammonia released. But there was still a problem. Faragher felt that she was also required under law to report any pollution bypass releases. During the conference call with Voyles, Faragher brought up the need to report the bypass. “That was discussed in the meeting, and the decision was made that that wasn’t [reportable]—that I was wrong,” Faragher later told investigators.

  On November 16 and November 17, the hydrants were opened again, and water was flushed out onto the ground. This time, nobody told Heather Faragher.

  * * *

  Heather Faragher reported directly to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency—or the MPCA, as it was called—which was the state-level agency that enforced federal environmental laws. Behind the MPCA stood the US Environmental Protection Agency—the feds. And the feds were not to be tampered with. The feds had the best attorneys in the field, and the feds did not hesitate to pursue anyone who violated the law.

  During November and December, there weren’t any more heated meetings about dumping ammonia. The issue had been left to lie as an enduring “gray area,” something that Jim Voyles in Wichita was looking into. There was no clear policy, and the ammonia continued to flow into the wastewater plant at dangerously high levels. A log notation in early November, for example, indicated that ammonia was flowing toward the polishing ponds at about 170 parts per million, more than four times the level that could keep Koch inside its legal limits. The operations team kept diverting the water into the detention ponds, which crept ever higher.

  During this time, something changed in
Heather Faragher—something that might have escaped the notice of her bosses. It was around this time that Faragher began to worry that working at Koch Industries might land her in prison.

  * * *

  Ruth Estes was the shift supervisor on Saturday, January 4, 1997. When she arrived at work, she faced a familiar crisis: once again the water levels were dangerously high down at the detention ponds. An employee with the safety department complained to Estes that the ponds were about to overflow—one more rush of water into the ponds might send water spilling onto the nearby roads. Estes simply couldn’t send any more water into the detention ponds.

  Estes called Todd Aalto at the wastewater plant. She asked him if he could divert the water back into the polishing ponds and the river beyond them. Aalto said that he could not. Estes did not press him on the point, but she also didn’t know why Aalto couldn’t just send the water to the polishing ponds, where it normally went. Maybe the polishing ponds were full, or their ammonia levels were already too high. Regardless, sending water to the river did not seem like an option to her.

  The other tool available to Estes was the fire safety hydrants. With one order, she could drain the detention ponds onto surrounding land. But was it illegal to do so? Estes didn’t know.

  Koch’s lawyer, Jim Voyles, and Estes’s managers had intentionally left the matter vague. For all Estes knew, Voyles was still examining the legal issue and might decide that it was completely acceptable. The only thing that Estes was certain of was that nobody had specifically prohibited her from opening the hydrants. It was still an option on the table. So she started discussing it with the operators.

  Faragher was on vacation and out of town, so Estes could not call her. Instead, Estes called down to the environmental engineering department, where an engineer was pulling a weekend shift. Estes told him that she was thinking of flushing the hydrants, but the engineer balked. He didn’t think it was the proper thing to do. Estes soothed him with a convincing, but untrue, argument. She told the engineer on duty that Faragher had given the tactic the green light. The reluctant engineer said he would defer to Faragher’s judgment on the matter.