Raymond Williams trucked millions of pounds of hazardous powder from Mississippi to Berger, Missouri, where it was stored in a warehouse that was regularly broken into.
His plan to recycle it never materialized. Eventually, the Environmental Protection Agency cleaned up the site in 2019 under its Superfund program.
That cleanup cost more than $4.2 million — mostly at taxpayers’ expense.
Going up the chain
The point of the Superfund program is to hold the responsible people and companies accountable for the cleanup of contaminated sites. Williams — who owned U.S. Technology Corp., the company that created the plastic blast media that became toxic powder after it was used — took a plea deal and was sentenced to pay $1.5 million to the government.
But that only covered about a third of the cleanup. So, to recoup their costs, the EPA went up the chain to parties that had a hand in creating the waste, even if they didn’t directly violate the law.
For U.S. Technology, that might mean hundreds of actors. Barrels of spent blast media found at the Berger site by the EPA bore information that could be traced to more than 100 distinct locations.
“Even if you can show there are hundreds of potentially responsible parties who send materials to be repaired at a location, all of those, like the mom-and-pop shops, can be caught up in that claim of liability,” said Jane Fedder, an environmental lawyer based in St. Louis.
“But generally, the government, when they’re putting a case together, they go after the low-hanging fruit, the parties that they can prove pretty quickly and easily had a connection to the site and had some kind of engagement that meant it triggered the statutes,” she added.
That low-hanging fruit, the bulk of Williams’ clients, was the government itself. Military bases used Williams’ spent blast material to strip paint off of vehicles and equipment for decades.
So the government did get reimbursed for the cleanup — mostly by the taxpayer-supported government itself.
Under the settlement, the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard and NASA paid almost half the cost of the cleanup.
“You’re just really shifting money from one pot to another,” Fedder said.
The EPA also settled with private companies including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Landing Gear LLC and Space Gateway Support for $407,000 — less than 10% of the cleanup fees. The remaining 7% not paid for by Williams or his clients was paid for by the EPA itself, referred to as an “orphan share.”
More than 20 years earlier, Williams had volunteered to clean up the Hydromex site in Yazoo City, Mississippi, with the goal of keeping his clients from having to pay for it.
But two decades later, his customers in the defense and aerospace industries would have to pay for cleanups of both the Berger and Yazoo City sites.
EPA on-scene coordinator Joe Davis oversaw the site’s cleanup. He said this sort of cost-recovery ensures that companies do their due diligence when deciding whom to work with.
“Whether it’s government or industry, when you’re going to dispose of waste, you’ve got to make sure that the final disposal facility is regulated and they’re going to do the right thing with the waste,” he said.
By any other name
U.S. Technology Corp. received more than $13 million in federal contracts from 2007 to 2015 alone and was in business for decades before then.
Embroiled in investigations and court cases, Williams sold the company in 2015 for $20 million. The new owners retained the employees, contracts and most of the name — now U.S. Technology Media — according to a ProPublica investigation.
Since April 2015, the new company has received $9.6 million in federal contracts. When the old company, U.S. Tech, was blacklisted from federal contracts in July 2017 because it was under investigation, the new company continued to secure contracts without issue.
And it has since violated the same laws Williams did.
In 2017 and 2019, U.S. Technology Media failed to recycle enough of its spent blast material in the legally allowed timeframe — rendering it hazardous waste — and failed to dispose of the waste at a licensed facility. Like the material near Berger, that spent blast material had high levels of cadmium, chromium and lead, according to a settlement agreement.
According to the EPA, U.S. Tech Media stored the material at all three of its facilities — located in Georgia, Ohio and Utah — and, at times, shipped material between facilities. These facilities weren’t permitted to store hazardous waste.
As part of the settlement, U.S. Tech Media was ordered to pay $200,000 and stop receiving spent blast powder until it disposed of the 3.4 million pounds of backlogged material at its sites.
“US Technology Media placed the communities around its facilities at increased risk of exposure by failing to properly manage its hazardous waste,” wrote Larry Starfield, an EPA administrator, in a press release. “This settlement agreement will ensure all future handling of hazardous waste by US Technology Media is done in compliance with environmental regulations.”
Today, U.S. Tech Media still receives government contracts. The company has an ongoing deal with the Army to provide abrasives and completed a contract with the Air Force in September.
Representatives of U.S. Tech Media did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Williams said the new company “got out of the recycle business.”
They “had no interest in it,” he said. “They just sell (sandblasting) media.”
U.S. Tech Media’s website does not advertise recycling services, but several of its product descriptions promote that the materials qualify for “‘lease and recycle,’ eliminating hazwaste generation.”
Williams’ punishments
Williams, now 78 and retired, still has a chip on his shoulder. To this day, he maintains his innocence and says the government ruined “the greatest recycle program ever.”
“And they destroyed it with intent,” he said.
He tried to personally sue Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality employees Steve Bailey and Richard Harrell for defamation, among other counts, in 2015.
Williams “felt that those two had not treated him fairly, obviously, and had acted outside of their state responsibilities,” said Laura Mills, Williams’ lawyer. “But the judge, a very good judge in Natchez, Mississippi, found, based on immunity arguments, that the case needed to be dismissed.”
In the federal case against Williams for his role in the Berger site, he took a plea deal, admitting guilt to conspiring to transport hazardous waste without a permit — one of two counts he was initially charged with.
“What (Department of Justice) people do, in every case I’ve ever seen, is they charge you with a million things and then they say, ‘OK, well, if you go to trial, you’re going to do 10-20 years, and we’re going to take everything you’ve ever owned. But if you agree to this deal, you won’t do any time. We’ll just have some probation and a fine,’” he said.
He also heard that Penny and Daryl Duncan, the Missouri couple who accepted the waste at their Berger warehouse, were both taking plea deals.
“If you go to trial, you’ve got a 50-50 chance against the government. If you’re 100% innocent, you can prove it all day long. You’ve still got a 50-50 chance of winning,” he said. “So really, you have no choice.”
Williams had another reason for pleading guilty. He was enmeshed in another court case around the same time. And that case, where he was charged with bribing an Air Force employee to win contracts for his company, carried much heavier penalties.
“They told me I’d spend the rest of my life in prison — ‘You’ll get 20 to 30 years,’” he said.
Williams would again take a plea deal and was sentenced to five years in prison, but he still maintains his innocence in that case, as well.
A new tenant
Back in Berger, a New York-based company, Medorra, has moved into the Zero Road warehouse. But the town is still hurting for jobs. Medorra is outside of city limits and, according to a city official, brought in out-of-town workers to work at the factory.
It’s also not entirely clear what the company does.
On its website, the company claims to sell medical cleaning supplies. But multiple products have nonsense placeholder descriptions, the links at the bottom of the site don’t work and it’s impossible to purchase anything because there are “no available payment methods” at checkout.
Medorra wouldn’t respond to calls from KBIA and The Beacon.
When reporters visited, the building was decrepit — rust had accumulated on its sides, the front window was covered with cardboard and something was being burned around the back. Workers at the facility declined to talk.
Residents of Berger said they don’t know what’s been going on in the Zero Road warehouse, either.
“One day we hear they’re packing medical supplies, but, I mean, you hear so many rumors out here, you know?” Berger resident Glenn Vollertsen said. “You know, it’s hard to say. No one knows what’s really going on.”
