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A Bluffdale cement precast firm and two executives face felony charges for allegedly dumping caustic cement slurry and concrete waste on the banks of the Jordan River in violation of the Utah Water Quality Act. The waste has elevated the alkalinity of surrounding soils, which could disrupt the chemistry of the river.
Even after regulators instructed a manager to cease dumping waste Jan. 7, employees of Owell Precast continued to wash out cement trucks and deposit material on an artificial apron, according to charges filed last week in 3rd District Court. The dumping site is on a side of the Owell property abutting the river at Point of the Mountain, where it has operated since 1997 supplying concrete and preformed building products to Utah contractors.
Named in the charges are Owell co-owners William Brent Baker, 55, and William Ashton, 48, along with Owell itself, also known as Olympus Precast, and its parent, L&B Resources LLC. Each faces two third-degree felony counts, which could result in prison sentences of up to five years per count for the human defendants.
"We filed a minimum number of charges, but the potential fines can run up to $50,000 per day," said Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill. The charges are the result of a joint investigation involving federal authorities, the Utah Division of Water Quality and the Salt Lake County Health Department.
On the advice of legal counsel, Ashton declined to comment. He told KUER-FM on Friday that the firm was "blindsided" by the charges.
The dumping was first documented by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers investigator Timothy Witman when he visited the site Jan. 7 in response to witness complaints.
Witman said he saw equipment dump cured cement and slurry cement onto a spot near the Jordan Narrows.
One felony count stems from dumping prior to Jan. 7, the day Witman videotaped the dumping, and the second stems from dumping after Jan. 13, the day a county official advised Owell manager Todd Panter that the practice was illegally contaminating the environment.
Investigators believe the dumped waste — which included rebar, tubing, precast rejects, drums and pallets — was intended to create a platform above the river.
Army Corps inspectors returned to the site on Jan. 21 to discover that the company had kept dumping illegally, according to the charges. They confronted Baker and Ashton, who acknowledged they had used the river side of the Owell property for storing precast seconds and for waste disposal, but only for the past few weeks when their neighbor to the north cut off access to their usual washout location.
However, a review of aerial photographs indicate that material had been dumped at this site since at least October 2011, charging documents say. In the years since, an artificial platform had grown to about .8 acres in size.
Owell has no federal or state permits for dumping waste.
A wetlands biochemist with the Division of Water Quality took soil samples near the dump site and found elevated pH levels as high as 10.2. Expected pH there would be around 8.5.
"Any time you change the pH balance, you are changing the conditions of that soil for life to thrive. It's not that you can't remediate for it, but it is often a costly process," Gill said. "It compromises the vegetation and the wildlife. That injury is to the entire community of users in whose trust that land and resources are being conserved. When you are polluting the groundwater, the victims of that crime may have yet to be born."
Officials could not say Monday whether the contamination has been contained or cleaned up.
Owell operates at 16120 S. Pony Express Road, where it employs 15 people and logs $3 million in annual sales, according to its website.