Company owner sentenced to 17 years
In what is believed to be the longest sentence ever imposed for an environmental crime, a federal judge ordered an Idaho man to serve 17 years in prison for his crimes that left a 20-year-old employee with permanent brain damage from cyanide poisoning.
The Department of Justice announced recently that Allan Elias also was ordered to pay $6 million in restitution to the victim and his family. In May 1999, a jury in Pocatello, ID, found that Elias ordered employees of Evergreen Resources, a fertilizer manufacturing company he owned, to enter and clean out a 25,000-gallon storage tank containing cyanide without taking required precautions to protect his employees.
Occupational Safety and Health Administra-tion inspectors repeatedly had warned Elias about the dangers of cyanide and explained the lockout/tagout and confined space precautions he must take before sending his employees into the tank, the Justice Department reports.
Scott Dominguez, an Evergreen Resources employee, was overcome by hydrogen cyanide gas while cleaning the tank and sustained permanent brain damage as a result of cyanide poisoning.
Illegal disposal of hazardous waste
The jury convicted Elias of three counts of violating the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. In addition to the charge that Elias knowingly endangered his employees, Elias was convicted of illegally disposing of hazardous cyanide waste on two separate occasions at Evergreen’s Soda Springs, ID, facility.
According to prosecutors, over a period of two days in August 1996, Elias directed his employees — wearing only jeans and T-shirts — to enter an 11-foot-high, 36-foot-long storage tank and clean out cyanide waste from a mining operation he owned.
Elias did not first test the material inside the tank for its toxicity, nor did he determine the amount of toxic gases present. After the first day of working inside the tank, several employees met with Elias and told him that working in the tank was giving them sore throats, which is an early symptom of exposure to hydrogen cyanide gas.
The employees asked Elias to test the air in the tank for toxic gases and bring them protective gear. Elias did not provide the protective gear, as required by OSHA, and he ordered the employees to go back into the tank, falsely assuring them that he would get them the equipment they sought.
Later that morning, Dominguez collapsed inside the tank. And he could not be rescued for nearly an hour because Elias also had not given employees the required rescue equipment.
The defendant also was convicted of making a false statement to OSHA by fabricating and backdating a safety plan for entering the storage tank containing cyanide. Elias told rescue workers and emergency department personnel that the storage tank contained nothing that could injure employees, and he specifically denied that cyanide was in the tank.
The day after Dominguez was critically injured, Elias prepared a backdated safety permit that falsely stated that employees had been given safety gear before they entered the tank.
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content