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Alabama Foundry Sentenced to Pay $4.25 Million for RCRA and OSHA Violations

Release Date: 09/22/2005
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Contact: Dave Ryan, 202-564-4355 / [email protected]

(9/22/05) On Sept. 7, Union Foundry Company of Birmingham, Ala., a division of McWane, Inc., was sentenced to pay a $3.5 million criminal fine, perform a $750,000 environmental community service project and serve five years probation by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. The sentence resulted from Union Foundry's guilty plea to charges of violating both the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulation. The RCRA charge arose from Union Foundry's practice of allowing its employees to treat toxic dust containing lead and cadmium without a required permit. The dust came from an air filtration device that controlled pollution from scrap iron melting. The OSHA violation arose from the lack of a safety guard on a conveyor belt which caused the death of an employee in August 2000. The case was investigated by the Atlanta office of EPA's Criminal Investigation Division and the FBI. It was prosecuted by the Environmental Crimes Section of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. attorney's office in Birmingham, Ala.