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One wintry morning, an investigator with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office teamed up with a federal agent to surveil America’s largest medical waste incinerator. They watched from nearby as employees at the south Baltimore facility used a front-end loader to lift inadequately burned waste into a container, then they tailed it on its way to a landfill in Virginia.
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As the investigators drove, fluid leaking from the medical waste in the truck’s trailer splattered their windshields, court records say.
That surveillance in early 2020 was part of an investigation that spanned several years and led to what Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown (D) said Tuesday is among his office’s largest penalties ever in an environmental case.
After a plea agreement reached this summer, the medical waste disposal company, Curtis Bay Energy, was sentenced to pay a $1 million fine to the Maryland Clean Water Fund, as well as $750,000 to support environmental projects to benefit the underserved Baltimore community, Curtis Bay, that has hosted the incinerator for decades. The company was also placed on two years of probation.
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The company pleaded guilty to inadequately incinerating medical waste, as well as to hiding an unpermitted water outflow from state inspectors.
“Our evidence shows that they knew that they were failing to do what they were required to do,” Brown said during a news conference. “They failed, and they got caught.”
The company was sold in 2021, before the plea agreement, and Brown said the new ownership has taken responsible measures to stop the illegal behavior. “They’ve invested in infrastructure, they created a new regulatory oversight position, and they brought in qualified people to do the work,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the company, Kelly Love, said in a statement Tuesday that “Curtis Bay Energy remains committed to increasing its investment for preventive maintenance and workforce training and to honor its place in the community and region.”
The medical waste the company handles consists primarily of “red bag” waste from hospitals and labs; it comes in marked biohazard containers because of its risk of transmitting disease. The contaminated material — which includes supplies such as surgical gloves and bedding — has often come in contact with blood, feces or other bodily fluids. Curtis Bay Energy handles medical waste from sources in numerous U.S. states and Canada. It processes the waste at facilities along the East Coast, including the Baltimore incinerator.
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In November 2019, someone complained to the attorney general’s office that employees at the facility had hidden an illegal water pump and hose that were underneath a leaking condenser so state inspectors wouldn’t see them during an unannounced inspection. The person told officials that workers delayed the inspectors in the main office while a call went out on employee radios that they were there.
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The water traveled from a sump pump at the base of a building, through a hose that ran into the woods, up a hill, into a PVC pipe and through a chain-link fence to flow out onto the neighboring property, which was owned by the state. A sample of the water was tested and found to be primarily free of contaminants, but the outflow was unpermitted.
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One morning in January 2020, an attorney general’s investigator returned with state inspectors and found the pipe through the fence. After taking photos of the outflow, the inspectors went to the front of the facility to conduct another inspection. Again, a Curtis Bay Energy employee removed the sump pump from under the building, disconnected the hose and hid them in the woods, according to the plea agreement. This time, the investigator was watching and taking photos from the woods.
The investigators also looked into inadequately burned medical refuse, leading to the surveillance that wintry morning the next month. The incinerator is designed to burn the waste until it is reduced to a fine, black ash before it is taken to a landfill.
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Witnesses told investigators that waste routinely passed through the system not fully incinerated, and there were no tools on hand to cull such waste — which employees sometimes referred to as “raw,” “bad” or “uncooked” — so that it could be reburned, as required by the company’s permit and its operating procedures.
The corners were cut to process waste faster, officials said. The facility increased its production by 20 percent to process more than 30,000 tons of waste in 2019, according to the plea agreement, an increase accomplished even while labor costs declined.
The investigation has also led to the prosecution of facility employees, one of whom, former plant operations manager Kenneth T. Jackson, pleaded guilty this month. A Baltimore City circuit court judge sentenced him to two years in prison, which was suspended, placed him on three years of probation and ordered him to pay $50,000, suspending all but $30,000, to the Maryland Clean Water Fund.
Jackson’s lawyer, W. Warren Hamel, noted Tuesday in an email that the illegal water discharge contained no contaminants and that the medical refuse, even if it didn’t burn completely, “was heated to between 1800 and 2000 degrees, well beyond the temperature required to assure that the ash was sterilized, and all ash was disposed of at an appropriate landfill in Virginia.”
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