Virginia Man Sentenced for Clean Water Act Violations
Release Date: 09/14/2005
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(9/14/05) D.J. Cooper, owner of the Hardy Road Trailer Park in Bedford County, Va., was sentenced on Sept. 7 to serve 27 months in prison and was ordered to pay a fine of $270,000 by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. On April 28, 2005, Cooper was convicted of nine felony violations of the Clean Water Act for illegally discharging pollutants into waters of the United States without a permit from August 2003 to August 2004. Cooper's trailer park sewage treatment lagoon discharges wastewater into Sandy Creek, which is a tributary of Falling Creek that flows into the Roanoke River and eventually into Smith Mountain Lake. Previous attempts by Virginia State regulators to bring the trailer park's sewage treatment system into compliance were unsuccessful. The discharge of improperly treated sewage into surface waters can make the waters unfit for human contact and harm fish and wildlife. The case was investigated by the Herndon, Va., Office of EPA's Criminal Investigation Division, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's Criminal Investigation Unit, the Roanoke City Police Department, and the Blue Ridge Environmental Task Force. It was prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office in Roanoke with assistance from EPA's Region 3 criminal enforcement counsel.
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