Buried At Sea

[August 13th, 2008]

Five years after Houston-based energy giant Kinder Morgan paid a ship captain at the Port of Portland to illegally dump material at sea, a judge is set to fine the company $240,000 for violating environmental rules.

But at a sentencing hearing scheduled Wednesday, Aug. 13, that prosecutors and company officials say should end the long-running case, the original whistleblower plans to tell U.S. District Court Judge Garr King that the government’s deal with Kinder Morgan is a whitewash.

“It keeps everything quiet about what goes on,” says Jerry Cressa, a 61-year-old former dockworker who says union retaliation for his exposure of the case forced him to quit his job. “It doesn’t punish anybody.”

As first detailed in WW (see “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Aug. 15, 2007), Cressa has long accused Kinder Morgan—a major Port tenant—of loading 160 tons of water-contaminated potash onto the deck of a ship at Terminal 5 on Aug. 7, 2003, and paying the captain $1,250 to dump it illegally in the Pacific Ocean.

Potash is a chemical similar to salt that’s used as fertilizer. Disposing of it legally in a landfill would have cost $80,000.

After uncovering the case through interviews with dockworkers, Cressa spent years trying to persuade the Port, the state Department of Environmental Quality, the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to investigate. He says they repeatedly ignored and stonewalled him.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Portland finally charged Kinder Morgan with one count of illegal ocean dumping on April 18 of this year. After years spent denying the incident ever happened, the company has admitted to all of Cressa’s accusations and agreed to pay the $240,000 fine negotiated with federal prosecutors to settle the case.

It’s believed to be only the third time an ocean-dumping case has been charged criminally, according to legal databases. The government’s sentencing memorandum calls the fine “severe” due to Kinder Morgan employees’ “egregious” conduct.

But after court documents were filed last week that lay out the case, Cressa says prosecutors failed to hold anyone personally responsible. No individuals are named except the Japanese ship captain, who’s painted as an unwitting accomplice.

Foremost among those Cressa believes should be named are Bruce Holte, a Port commissioner and secretary-treasurer of the International Longshoremen & Warehouse Union Local 8 who Cressa says threatened him for pursuing the case, and Sebastian Degans, a Port manager Cressa says tried to bury the allegations.

Cressa says union officials bullied him because they feared Kinder Morgan would retaliate against the union. Holte told WW that Cressa is a liar and denied threatening him. Degans was not available Tuesday for comment.

The court documents shed new light on the investigation. Among the findings: Kinder Morgan officials were short of cash to pay the ship captain and had to borrow $700 from a union boss who’s known on the docks as “Lending Larry.”

The documents say the investigation was delayed because EPA agents had to determine where the potash was dumped. That didn’t happen until INTERPOL found the ship captain, Toshiharu Kaga, on Japan’s Honshu Island in August 2007. Kaga kept meticulous records of the nine-hour dumping 500 miles off the U.S. coast.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton says the settlement helps ensure “corporations realize this kind of conduct would not go unpunished.”

But Cressa insists the company escaped unscathed.

“It’s just the cost of doing business,” he says.