With new comment from Smith Frozen Foods attorney Tom Lindley and Sen. Gordon Smith’s spokeswoman below.
For the second time in about a year, wastewater from the frozen-foods plant owned and operated in Eastern Oregon by the family of U.S. Sen Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) overflowed into a nearby creek in violation of state environmental regulations.
Smith Frozen Foods, a multimillion dollar operation, processes peas, corn, carrots and lima beans for companies like Campbell Soup using heavy amounts of water to move and wash the fresh vegetables.
The timing of the plant’s wastewater overflow into Pine Creek couldn’t be worse for Smith, who’s waging a tough re-election campaign to keep his seat in Washington, D.C.
Smith Frozen Foods has a long history of wastewater violations. And Oregon Democrats (including U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, who narrowly defeated Smith in the 1996 special Senate election after pointing to Smith’s environmental record at the company) will no doubt highlight the company’s transgressions again this election season.
According to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, an employee of Smith Frozen Foods contacted the state agency on July 29 (while the plant was processing corn) to report an incident overflow from the company’s wastewater lagoon that “resulted in a milky discharge to Pine Creek.” The plant — located in tiny Weston, Ore. — responded by placing portable pumps in the creek to remove the contaminated water, the DEQ says. On Aug. 4, the company submitted a “corrective action” plan to the DEQ, listing its efforts to clean the spill, prevent future ones and investigate the cause of the July 29 overflow.
Nonetheless, the incident is considered a serious “Class 1″ violation, meaning it “can harm aquatic life, contaminate drinking waters, and impair recreational, commercial and agricultural uses of water.” Because the case is still open, the violation has not yet resulted in any fine.
On July 30, 2007, at the height of last year’s corn season, Smith Frozen Foods had a similar violation. That violation resulted in a $3,000 fine — a small sum compared with the $25,000 DEQ fine in 1992 for another infraction. Between those two events, Smith Frozen Foods has been cited or fined by the DEQ more than a handful times.
A voicemail message left with Kelly Brown, a manager of Smith Frozen Foods, was not immediately returned.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Gordon Smith, who ran the plant in the late 1980s before turning it over to his wife Sharon Smith when he first took office in the Oregon Senate in 1992, also did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Update at 5 pm Monday: Spokeswoman Lindsay Gilbride referred questions to Smith Frozen Foods.
Update at 10 am Tuesday: Tom Lindley, an attorney for Smith Frozen Foods at Perkins Coie in Portland, says “overflow” is the wrong word to describe the discharge of polluted water into Pine Creek. But at this point, company officials do not know for certain how the incident occurred. Also, they do not know for sure how much wastewater was released into the creek. But they suspect it was about 5 to 20 gallons. Their “best guess” about what happened is complicated. Here’s what Lindley said: Husks and cobs from the corn processed at the plant are ground down to make feed for cattle. Somewhere in this process water may have dripped from the husks and the cobs near where the husks and cobs were being loaded into trucks outside the plant. This water may have made its way into an old storm drain that runs into the creek. Engineers with Smith Frozen Foods are looking into the case, Lindley says. And if that’s what happened, the old storm drain will be redirected to the company’s wastewater system, he says.
“The critical thing is it was self reported within minutes of discovery,” Lindley says. “It was a small quantity that was immediately stopped.”
[Top photo: Pine Creek. Photo above: Weston, Ore., population 701.]
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Hmmmmm, sounds like politics to me. Not that this is OK. Is Willamette Week negative on the Senator? I wonder how many violations the printer for Willamette Week has from it’s hazardous waste.
…the City of Portland frequently causes sewage to get into the Willamette River when it rains hard – but, since it isn’t their "family" that is doing it while running for a Senate seat, that is not newsworthy?
Once again, it has to do with the discrepancy between what a politician claims he’s "all about", and what turns out to be reality. Not unlike those "family values" people who get nailed for strange behavior.
GJS – do you really think that if Jeff Merkley said he was pro-environment, then his company leaked wastewater like Smith’s did, that the WW wouldn’t report on that? C’mon. It’s not about the paper being anti-Smith, it’s about Smith being hypocritical to win an election.
This makes me believe there might be something to the concept of "bad Karma"! Smith has been making up all sorts of negative claims against Merkely lately, and now rain exposes Smith’s environmental polution….
People! The clean water act exempts most domestic activities and because of that I’d be willing to bet that negev79 has done more to pollute water than Smith’s Foods has in the past several years. It isn’t hypocritical to be imperfect. To BettyH: do the DNC attack ads (some of them clearly illegal) directed at Senator Smith also bother you? I sure hope so, or negev79 might call you a hypocrit. Ghandi would say that your approach to karma would result in everyone being blind (an eye for an eye).
It’s obvious where Gordon Smith’s main interest lies…in protecting his corporate profits and not the people of Oregon or the environment.
Shame on Gordon Smith for putting his personal corporate profits first.
Matthew – I never said I was an environmentalist. That’s the difference. And I’m not running for office. So even if I had said that, then you determined I was a polluter. IT WOULDN’T BE NEWS. See?
Seriously Matthew? That’s some great logic. Really. I never said I was an environmentalist. And even if I had, and then you found out that I was a polluter, the WW wouldn’t print that – because IT’S NOT NEWS. Remember, my post was in response to YOUR charge that the WW had some grudge against Smith. The POINT here is that Gordon Smith ran ads SAYING HE WAS ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY. And this recent event, and others in the past, show that is not necessarily true. If he hadn’t run the ads, it wouldn’t be news. I never said the man couldn’t pollute or that I was somehow better than that.
oops, I meant GJS’s post, not Matthew’s. My original post was in response to GJS. Sorry.
GJS’s charge that WW had a grudge against Smith – not Matthew. Sorry.
So, Smith Frozen Foods doesn’t know how it happened or how much was discharged.
They "suspect" that it was 5 to 20 gallons. Given their obvious motive to downplay the seriousness of the pollution I "suspect" that adding a couple zeros to each figure (i.e., 500 to 2000 gallons) might well be closer to reality.
Lindley characterizes the pollution event as "a small quantity", but "small" in relation to what? The Pacific Ocean?
I also find it interesting that on the one hand SFF reportedly submitted a corrective action plan to DEQ which detail, among other things, it’s plan to prevent a recurrance. Yet their attorney openly admits that they don’t know for certain how the pollution event happened.
Here’s the Aug. 4 letter from Smith Frozen Foods to Oregon DEQ officials:
http://media.wweek.com/attach/2008/08/19/Smith-DEQ_080804.jpg
DG wrote: "…the City of Portland frequently causes sewage to get into the Willamette River when it rains hard – but, since it isn’t their "family" that is doing it while running for a Senate seat, that is not newsworthy?"
You must not read the paper when it rains. The news media frequently reports that the aged city sewer system overflows and discharges into the Willamette during heavy rain, in fact the City will post a health advisory against swimming and other river activities. And I think they have been fined by other Gov’t divisions, tho I am not 100% sure of that. Here’s the big difference between the City and a private company like Smith Foods: The city must get money from the taxpayers and other sources to mitigate the overflow, and they did raise the money and have been working for a few years now upgrading the old pipes. And since the population continues to grow and add streets and houses and families and users of these systems, they have become overwhelmed and in need of repair & upgrades. If you drive in downtown Portland you may have seen lots of sewer/stormdrain work being done, tying up traffic, etc.
For Smith foods, they have the same responsability but seem to have blown that off. It’s certainly easier to pay a few thousand dollars in fines every year than to spend who knows how much to upgrade their systems.
It comes down to this: The Government’s responsability is to the People, their safety and welfare.
Smith Food’s concern is with the bottom line, they only has to answer to the shareholders.