MOUNT JEWETT – Rustick LLC part owner and former president Maria
Casey is asking a court to order the company to give her complete
access to the former McKean County Landfill and its records and
documents.
In an “Emergency motion for equitable relief” filed Friday in
Schuylkill County Court, Casey asked for immediate action to
“prevent further waste and severe mismanagement.”
Casey first filed against Rustick, managing partner Dick Welch,
and others in May of 2006, at that time charging that the
defendants “froze her out” of the landfill operation. Those filings
also allege mismanagement, failure to devote enough time to Rustick
affairs and wasting of the company’s assets.
Last week’s filings charge that Rustick has “repeatedly failed
to properly respond when monitoring devices indicated the presence
of radiation in trucks entering the landfill, and that as a result,
radioactive material has been improperly buried without the
radioisotopes being characterized and identified as required by
law.”
Those actions have not only endangered landfill employees and
the public, but have made the company and its partners, of which
she is one, potentially liable for civil and criminal
penalties.
Additionally, the improper actions could cause the state
Department of Environmental Protection to deny Rustick’s plans for
expansion or even revoke its current operating permit, she
contends.
Casey’s filing says that she discovered the procedure
infractions and notified DEP, who conducted a “surprise inspection”
April 20 and confirmed at least seven violations so far this year,
five of which resulted in unknown amounts of radioactive material
being deposited in the landfill without being checked further to
determine whether they were relatively harmless medical waste with
a short life or something more dangerous.
Casey is calling for a survey of the landfill and possible
exhumation of those materials to determine their characteristics
and potential dangers to employees, surrounding properties, and,
particularly, the water table.
Despite the “very serious magnitude of their infractions,” the
company has tried to deny and confuse the situation, Casey
says.
As an example, the papers filed Friday note, at a May 11
deposition, Site Operations Manager Michael Manderfield failed to
provide required documents and “concocted” a story about the
radiation being caused by a diaper, apparently in medical waste,
and “induced” a third party to issue a report apparently verifying
it.
Manderfield has since been named landfill general manager,
replacing Dick Tyger, who has been assigned to community relations
and recycling.
According to Casey, she was told by DEP official Jack Crow on
two occasions that “various haulers had been coached, as (they all)
used the same words/phrases regarding the radiation incidents.”
In subsequent depositions of Tyger and two other landfill
employees, proceedings which Casey alleges Rustick counsel tried to
avoid and block, scalemaster Barb Causer testified that there never
was a diaper and that no one inspected the trucks that registered
radiation.
In addition to the issues about the radiation violations, Casey
complains that Godshall, who is now president of Rustick, has been
allowed to become involved with competing landfills and has not
devoted sufficient time to making the McKean facility the model
landfill Welch said it would become before the company purchased
it.
Last week she testified in a hearing in Cumru Township in
eastern Pennsylvania, where a landfill Godshall reportedly runs for
Ches-Mont Disposal is applying for an expansion permit.
In that testimony, she described the above radiation violations
and pointed out that Godshall had not listed them on the expansion
application, something he apparently is required to do.
