The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency offered her a job, but with a significant pay cut. She ended up getting a job in another state.
After he was fired, Charlie Chadwell sued Koch, claiming the company violated whistle-blower laws by retaliating against him. Chadwell lost the case when a jury decided that Koch had sufficient reason to fire him for his erratic behavior on the job. Terry Stormoen, the other shift worker who reported Koch’s criminal activity, said that he simply quit his job without getting any kind of severance package or settlement from Koch.
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Not everyone did so poorly. Brian Roos, the process owner over at Pine Bend’s wastewater plant, was promoted to Wichita. By 2010, he had become a manager of strategic planning at Koch’s petroleum division. Timothy Rusch, the refinery manager at Pine Bend, became Koch’s vice president of construction and refinery services, overseeing projects at both the Pine Bend and Corpus Christi refineries. Jim Voyles, Koch’s attorney, went on to have a successful career in environmental law, leaving Koch to join the fertilizer company Mosaic. In 2013, he spoke at a national conference on corporate sustainability held by the National Association for Environmental Management. In 2016, he was a senior attorney for Chevron in Bakersfield, California.
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The illegal activity at Pine Bend was not an isolated incident. There were incidents of lawbreaking across Koch Industries, caused in part by a cultural bias toward maximizing profits and abetted by a general disdain for government.
At the refinery in Corpus Christi, for example, Koch managers delayed equipment improvements in much the same way that Brian Roos and others hesitated to shut down the Pine Bend refinery to inspect the sour water strippers. In April of 1996, an environmental technician named Sally Barnes-Soliz went to state environmental regulators and told them that Koch Industries had been lying about illegal emissions of the chemical benzene, which causes cancer. Barnes-Soliz worked at the Corpus Christi refinery. The state had ordered Koch Industries to cut benzene emissions from the refinery. Koch had told the state it complied with the order. But Barnes-Soliz said this was a lie. “The refinery was just hemorrhaging benzene into the atmosphere,” she later told Bloomberg Markets magazine.
Barnes-Soliz reported the high emissions levels to her bosses. But like Faragher, she said, she was sidelined. Koch reported much lower levels to the state, filing false reports that undercounted how much benzene it was emitting. Thanks in part to assistance from Barnes-Soliz, federal prosecutors filed a ninety-seven-count criminal indictment against Koch. The company disputed that Barnes-Soliz was a whistle-blower, pointing out that Koch managers themselves reported wrongdoing to authorities when they discovered that a manager had falsified pollution reports. Most of the ninety-seven counts against Koch were later dropped, a sign, Koch’s attorney said, that prosecutors had been overzealous. A federal judge ended up fining the company $10 million for the violations and ordering it to pay another $10 million to Texas authorities to fund environmental work. Barnes-Soliz said Koch retaliated against her whistle-blowing: “They were pressuring me to quit,” she told Bloomberg Markets. She did so in 1996. Koch insisted that Barnes-Soliz had a poor performance record and her departure was unrelated to the benzene pollution.
In Koch’s pipeline division, managers delayed needed repairs to boost profits. Phil Dubose, the onetime oil gauger who rose to senior levels in the transportation department, said he was shocked at the sorry state of Koch’s pipelines. They were leaky and poorly cared for. Koch often didn’t even trim foliage that grew over and around the pipes as it was supposed to do to keep a clean right-of-way. The EPA sued Koch in 1995 for negligence of the pipeline system. The agency alleged that Koch spilled roughly twelve million gallons of oil between 1988 and 1996 and caused 312 spills in six states. The company was eventually fined $30 million for the pipeline leaks, which was the largest fine of its kind in US history.
The most tragic case happened in Texas. One of Koch’s neglected pipelines began to leak butane vapors into the air in the summer of 1996. Two teenagers named Danielle Smalley and Jason Stone were driving near the pipeline leak when it ignited and caused an explosion. The two kids were burned alive. Smalley’s family sued Koch and won a judgment of $296 million, another record-breaking amount. The family later settled for an undisclosed amount. These fines and charges, combined with those for the ammonia dumping at Pine Bend, marked Koch Industries