Alabama Grease Haulers Charged with Clean Water Act Violations for Dumping into Mobile Area Sewers

Alabama Grease Haulers Charged with Clean Water Act Violations for Dumping
into Mobile Area Sewers

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A Mobile, Ala., grand jury has
indicted a waste disposal company, its president and top manager for offenses
involving the illegal disposal of waste into the sewage treatment systems of
Mobile and of neighboring municipalities, the Justice Department and the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced today.

DHS Inc., operating under the name Roto Rooter; its president, Donald Gregory
Smith; and manager William Wilmoth Sr. were charged today in a forty-three
count indictment with numerous violations of the Clean Water Act and with
fraud and conspiracy for having dumped into local sewers thousands of gallons
of waste grease and oil that they had been hired to dispose of safely and
legally. The indictment recites Mobile's history of years of sewage overflows,
inadequate wastewater treatment and polluting effluent caused by blockages of
sewer lines and treatment works with solidified grease.

In response to lawsuits under the Clean Water Act, the city of Mobile entered
into a court ordered agreement with EPA under which Mobile implemented a
grease control program requiring restaurants and other food service
establishments to install grease traps to prevent cooking oils from entering
the sewer system. The indictment charges that Roto Rooter, on the
representation that it would pump out the grease traps of restaurants and
other commercial customers and dispose of their grease waste at legal
facilities, instead discharged the grease through grease traps and manholes
into the sewer lines that the defendants were being paid to prevent it from
entering.

Roto Rooter employee Michael L. Edington has entered guilty pleas today in
federal district court in Mobile to having dumped from Roto Rooter pump trucks
numerous loads of grease into area sewer systems between 2004 and 2006, to
having falsified grease tracking manifests to make it appear that the waste
had been disposed of properly, and to having conspired with the defendants
named in the indictment to commit the illegal disposals and fraud with which
they have all been charged.

Individuals who are found to have violated the Clean Water Act are subject to
up to three years of incarceration per count, twenty years in prison for
fraud, as well as monetary penalties.

The matter is being handled by the Justice Department's Environmental Crimes
Section, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Alabama and
EPA's Criminal Investigation Division.

An indictment is a determination by a grand jury that there is probable cause
to believe that offenses have been committed by a defendant. A defendant, of
course, is presumed innocent until and unless he or she is proven guilty at
trial.

SOURCE U.S. Department of Justice

U.S. Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, +1-202-514-2007, TDD
+1-202-514-1888