Poison the water, close the business and skip town

It's always nice to read or hear another one of those stories about somebody deliberately doing something damaging and irresponsible and yet, somehow, nobody is really accountable for it. This is one of those.

A Georgia company called American Sealcoat Manufacturing was discovered to be dumping highly toxic chemicals into a stream west of Atlanta, about 1,000 feet from where the stream empties into the Chattahoochee River. The dumping came to the attention of Chattahoochee Riverkeeper Jason Ulseth, who got together with the company leadership to talk about, well, not pouring poison into the river any more.

"Most of our cases, when we approach an industrial polluter," Ulseth told WABE, the Public Broadcasting station in Atlanta, "they are usually pretty quick to respond and get their site cleaned up."

Not this time: When people from the Riverkeeper organization went back to check on the progress of the cleanup, "we caught them actually dumping all of this black oily material again straight into the stream. That's when we had no choice but to file a lawsuit."

That suit was successful technically: A federal judge ordered the company to pay a $10 million fine. Except that by then American Sealcoat no longer existed, and the former owner was nowhere to be found.

"The toxic dump pit is still there," Ulseth said. "The polluted and contaminated soils are still there, and we still have pollution leaving the site every time it rains because of stormwater runoff carrying off these pollutants."

Now the state Environmental Protection Division and the property owner who leased the site to American Sealcoat are working to clean it up, meaning we're all helping pay for it. Meanwhile, in terms of real accountability and real consequences, the real people who are really responsible for real and willful environmental plunder might as well have ceased to exist, along with the defunct company in whose name they acted.

Caveat emptor

From environmental protection to consumer protection: It seems Georgians aren't doing all that well in the latter category, either.

According to the state's own report, the work of Georgia's consumer protection unit has not necessarily "resulted in the efficient and effective use of resources or desired outcomes."

The Department of Audits and Accounts said lax record-keeping, duplication and poor case selection resulted in too many cases not being prosecuted, some because they languished in bureaucratic limbo until the statute of limitations had expired.

If we're going to have "lemon laws" and other ostensible protections from unscrupulous or shoddy business practices, they must be enforceable or they might as well not even exist.

This story was originally published August 19, 2015 at 4:31 PM with the headline "Poison the water, close the business and skip town."