Trucks filled with 66 tons of hazardous material left Yazoo City, Mississippi, on Oct. 30, 2013.
Full of sacks containing plastic dust contaminated with lead, cadmium and chromium, the trucks made their way to the outskirts of Berger, Missouri, a town of 250 people along the Missouri River.
The next day brought another 85 tons. Then 43. Then another 22. By early 2014, 6,500 tons — or 13 million pounds — of powder, stuffed into drums and bags, filled the warehouse to its brim.
Over the next five years, drums would spill, sacks would rip and dozens of people would be exposed to the toxic material before it was cleaned up, in part, on the taxpayers' dime.
'A very successful program'
Raymond Williams had been in the sandblasting business for decades. His Ohio-based company, U.S. Technology Corp., made a national name for itself by leasing sandblasting material and equipment for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
U.S. Tech also leased the material to federal agencies and defense contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, to strip paint off of planes, ships and other vehicles, including the space shuttle.
The sandblasting material, made of tiny plastic pellets, could be used for several projects before it became too fine to reuse. By that point, it was mixed with paint and metal chips containing lead, cadmium and chromium, heavy metals that rendered the powder hazardous.
Normally, hazardous material is considered waste and needs to be disposed of at a licensed facility. But under a federal law known as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, companies can recycle hazardous materials into products instead.
They have to meet certain requirements first, though. The new products have to be a usable replacement for the regular version, and they can't come into direct contact with the ground.
Finally, companies can't sit on the hazardous material forever. To prevent hoarding, most of it has to be recycled within one to two years.
"If you're doing these things, you're exempt from regulation," Williams told KBIA and The Beacon. "That means you don't have to have a permit to transport it, you don't have to have a permit to store it, you don't have to have a permit to manufacture your product. It's all exempt from regulation."
By bypassing these regulations, U.S. Tech and its customers were able to save a lot of money. The cost of getting permits and paying to dump the material at a hazardous waste facility would be "astronomical," according to Laura Mills, Williams' lawyer.
At the same time, military officials were under growing pressure from the Department of Defense to comply with federal waste-minimization regulations, according to a ProPublica investigation into military contractors, including U.S. Tech.
Recycling the sandblasting powder helped bases meet quotas for eliminating waste, and recycling the material was baked into Williams' contracts.
During the 25 years Williams oversaw U.S. Tech's recycling program, he said the company had written approval from 48 states to offer its services to companies and agencies there.
KBIA and The Beacon reviewed many of these approvals, including one from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which said: "The MDNR does not consider the spent plastic abrasive to be a solid waste if it is recycled according to (federal requirements)."
"It was a very successful program, and military bases all over the country got awards and prizes for participating," Williams said.
In a 2007 magazine article, Williams was lauded for his development of a nonporous, stronger concrete block — made with 10% recycled sandblasting powder — that was being used for "re-building the South" after Hurricane Katrina.
"With two production facilities, one just outside of Canton, OH, and one in Yazoo (City), MS, the manufacturing plants are two of the most advanced of their kind in the world," the article read.
'Doing the right thing'
The Mississippi facility was the outcome of a collaboration between U.S. Tech and a company called Hydromex in 2000. Williams said Hydromex President Dennie Eugene Pridemore approached him with an offer to help recycle his material.
Under this new partnership, Hydromex opened a facility in Yazoo City, a town of 10,000 northwest of Jackson, to recycle U.S. Tech's sandblasting powder into concrete blocks to help it fulfill its contracts.
It never sold a single block.
"At some point, they started using less and less cement, less binding agent, to the point that most of their blocks were just crumbling in the yard. They had no structural integrity," said Richard Harrell, the then-director of the Office of Pollution Control within the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ).
"Then, at some point, (Hydromex) just started pouring it in the ground and pouring pads over top of it," he added.
Hydromex was shut down in 2002, and Pridemore would eventually be sentenced to more than three years in prison.
At the same time, federal investigators looked into U.S. Tech, ultimately concluding that Williams was a victim of Hydromex's cover-up, not a conspirator.
Meanwhile, Williams took matters into his own hands.
"I went to the attorney general in the state of Mississippi and said, 'Hey, we had a subcontractor inappropriately bury this material in your state. It's going to cost millions and millions of dollars to recover it, and as the party that's contracted with the government to recycle, we'd like to step in and … dig it all up … and put it back in the recycling world,'" Williams said.
Mills, Williams' lawyer, said her client took on the job "because otherwise, he would not have been able to continue his lease-and-recycle program with the government, because they would have said, 'Hey, this isn't working.'"
"It was a matter of stepping up and doing the right thing, but also maintaining the business he had," she said.
Under the federal law that makes it possible to recycle hazardous material, a company must recycle 75% of its material within a year. If it doesn't, the material has been "speculatively accumulated," making it hazardous waste that cannot legally be recycled.
Because Hydromex had speculatively accumulated the material on its site, that material was now hazardous waste in the eyes of the government. But in its offer to help clean up the site, U.S. Tech insisted that it be allowed to recycle the powder, and Mississippi agreed.
In 2003, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and U.S. Tech entered into an agreed order, a legally binding agreement commonly used by the department. The agreement gave U.S. Tech one year, with the possibility of a second year, to remove, process and recycle the material from the site.
It would take until 2007 — the year after Pridemore was indicted — to fully recycle all of the above-ground powder.
During a later trial, Mills would question Felix Flechas, an expert witness who used to work at EPA Region VIII enforcing the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Flechas said U.S. Tech took a longer time because of the ongoing investigation into Hydromex — which turned the property into a crime scene — as well as wet conditions and the sheer amount of material.
". . . this project is well within the time frames that would be expected for cleaning up and remediating this amount of waste," he said.
Despite the delays, Harrell said the department was "trying to work with them" because "the agency encourages recycling."
"(You) had a pretty good collapse in some of the industries at that time, so a lot of the bricks he was making, he was having trouble selling them," Harrell said. "We just tried to work with him on schedules and timelines as the economy ebbed and waned."
Williams did sell blocks — in promotional material, he claimed his patented "SEALTECH" blocks, which use 10% recycled material, helped build Walmarts, hardware stores and even a "pregnancy support center" in Ohio, where he's based.
In 2009, U.S. Tech and MDEQ began investigating the scope of the underground material. Two years later, they amended their original agreed order to give the company another two years to excavate and recycle the buried powder.
In 2013, before the deadline to have everything removed from the site, Williams reached out to MDEQ to tell it that U.S. Tech had gotten approval from the Mississippi Department of Transportation to use its powder in road base for an upcoming highway project.
MDEQ amended the agreed order again, giving U.S. Tech until the end of the year to get all of the remaining material to the MDOT project site.
But in October, the MDOT deal fell through because the department had lost funding for the new highway.
A different route
Williams immediately reached out to MDEQ to ask if he could instead move the material to a site a mile down the road from the Yazoo City facility, where he hoped to set up his recycling equipment. Mississippi said no.
"We already had one contaminated site. We had contamination in the soil. We had contamination in the water around the site. We were concerned that all we would be doing is moving one problem from Problem A to Problem B and generating another site, " Harrell testified in a 2015 court case.
"At that point, I don't think we had any confidence that that material was being handled right," Harrell told KBIA and The Beacon. "This had been going on for multiple years, and we weren't seeing near enough progress to remove this material and handle it safely."
So, Williams turned to the World of Concrete, an industry conference in Las Vegas.
There, he ran into Daryl Duncan, who had worked in abrasive blasting for decades, including as a salesman for U.S. Tech from 2003 to 2005.
"In our discussions, I related that I had to move 16 or 17 million pounds of recycle material out of Mississippi. Daryl said he would love to get the material since he had completed recycling several billion pounds of glass and liked the recycle supply business," Williams wrote in a statement.
Duncan's family owned a large warehouse outside of Berger, Missouri, a small town near the Missouri River east of Hermann. The warehouse, once the home of several factories, was vacant.
KBIA and The Beacon were unable to get in contact with Daryl Duncan, but some of his thoughts were included in a transcribed interview with federal investigators.
In that conversation, interviewers questioned whether Williams and Duncan conspired to dump the material in Berger to save Williams from the cost of properly disposing of it, but Duncan insisted he was "trying to develop that (site) into an industrial park."
"We used to have GenCorps in the building; (it) had 300-400 employees. Was great. They moved out, and we are trying to develop that," he said.
As part of that new enterprise, Duncan and his then-wife, Penny, founded a new company, Missouri Green Materials, of which Penny was listed as the registered agent. She declined repeated requests for an interview.
From the end of October through December 2013, trucks arrived at the warehouse almost daily, carrying tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of hazardous powder each trip.
The government would later accuse Duncan of knowing it was hazardous. Prosecutors said Williams had it tested in October, and the results revealed more than seven times the legally safe limit of cadmium, a heavy metal and known human carcinogen.
Sacks from Yazoo City and barrels from other U.S. Tech facilities were loaded onto the warehouse floor. When space ran out, they were stacked on top of each other.
According to court documents, Williams tried to inform MDEQ in mid-November that U.S. Tech had been shipping the powder to the Berger facility, but the department never responded. When Williams followed up two weeks later, officials told him to contact Missouri regulators.
"I said, 'I don't know why. We don't have a requirement to do that. But if it makes you happy, we will,'" Williams said.
When Williams called the next day, Missouri officials said Mississippi had informed them that U.S. Tech was illegally hauling hazardous waste into their state.
Both states ordered Williams to stop moving the material as Missouri launched its investigation. Ultimately, regulators at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources deferred to Mississippi's decision.
"If MDEQ has evidence that this material is/was hazardous waste, then we would consider the material to be hazardous waste, contrary to Mr. Duncan's claim," Anthony Pierce, then an environmental specialist at Missouri DNR's Hazardous Waste Program, wrote to Steve Bailey, an MDEQ employee who oversaw the Hydromex site, in December 2013.
To be recyclable or not recyclable
In his conversations with Mississippi and Missouri officials, Williams argued that the material was not hazardous waste because it had been granted a recycling exemption under the agreed order.
When Williams volunteered to clean up the Yazoo City site and recycle what was there, Mississippi regulators decided to exempt him from permit requirements. But according to Bailey, the exemption never changed the status of the material itself, which had been speculatively accumulated by Hydromex.
"Since we have deemed it hazardous material, any time it is transported to another facility, it has to be properly manifested as a hazardous waste," Bailey later testified. "We exempted it (for) them on (the Yazoo City) site."
Williams also argued that the 2011 amendment to the agreed order allowed him to send the material to a "manufacturing facility designated by U.S. Technology."
However, when Mississippi approved using the material for the road base, it amended the agreed order. It removed a section allowing U.S. Tech to use the material to make blocks and replaced it with a section allowing it to use the powder for the new highway.
That meant that under the new version of the agreed order, the highway project was the only legal way for Williams to recycle the material.
Because the highway project was made impossible by Mississippi's state budget decisions, Williams argued U.S. Tech could revert to the previous amendment.
". . . because the road base opportunity went away beyond our control, we reverted to the prior agreed order and shipped it up here to Missouri Green Materials," Williams told federal investigators. "They were going to buy the equipment off of us and manufacture concrete products with the material."
But even if MDEQ had agreed to revert to the previous version of the agreed order, that version said that how much could be sent to a facility "shall be controlled by the production capacity of the facility." Missouri Green Materials' capacity was unknown, as it had never recycled this material before and didn't yet have equipment installed.
When Mills, Williams' lawyer, pressed Harrell in court about what U.S. Tech was supposed to do after the highway project fell through, Harrell replied, "I believe we always left the alternative that he could ship it to a proper hazardous waste permitted facility."
Which would be costly. Williams estimated the cost to dispose of 13 million pounds of spent blast media would be around $6 million.
By moving the material without permission, U.S. Tech violated the agreed order, the only thing allowing it to transport the material without permits, Harrell said.
Under federal law, the material had been speculatively accumulated and was therefore hazardous waste. Mississippi's exemption applied only within its own borders, meaning that in Missouri or elsewhere, the material would be treated as hazardous waste, according to an environmental lawyer and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act expert who spoke with KBIA and The Beacon on background.
It would be several years before federal prosecutors accused Williams and the Duncans of illegally transporting hazardous waste and dumping it in Berger to save Williams from the cost of disposing of it properly.
In the meantime, the trucks had stopped coming. By the time the last truck left the facility, 9 million pounds of powder from Yazoo City and another 4 million pounds from U.S. Tech's facilities in Arkansas, Georgia, Ohio and Utah filled the Berger warehouse to the brim.
Despite federal and state authorities knowing about the site, the material would continue to sit on the outskirts of the tiny town flanked by the Missouri River for five years.
Dumped In Berger is a collaboration between KBIA and The Beacon examining the U.S. Technology Superfund site in Berger, Missouri. Stories will publish daily the week of Dec. 15.
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