Former Exide Smelter Employee: It WAS as Crappy As You Thought

Although the Great Dallas Drilling Scandal has kept our heads spinning lately, we did mange to take note of a rather big story in a small paper that should get a lot more coverage.

On February 21st, the Frisco Enterprise-Plano Star community newspaper published an article about the Exide lead smelter in Frisco using an unnamed ex-Exide employee as the sole source. The sole source's anonymity probably kept major outlets from offering the same coverage, but in this case the specifics are so compelling that we're glad the suburban chain took the chance.

Although he never gives his name, the Star says the employee "served in a managerial position at the plant." From the workday scenarios he describes he appears to have been directly involved in Exide's production line. Taken together, all of the accounts he gives the paper would seem to confirm residents' impression that the circa- mid 1960's Frisco facility was a mobile home park with a lead smelter in the middle of it.

"I guess we were probably producing $200,000 worth of product every shift — $600,000 worth of product every day," he said. "Yet [one time] we had six people working on [maintenance when the plant lost power]. We had one flashlight and one set of tools. What I needed was six flashlights and six sets of tools, but they wouldn't even give me that."

If Exide wouldn't open up the corporate wallet for flashlights, no wonder the company balked for so long about adding  multi-million pollution controls to reduce lead emissions to legal levels.

And, according to the Star's source, those lead (and cadmium and arsenic) emissions could be many times what's been officially estimated by government agencies, or even citizens' own air modeling results published last year.

Power being knocked out was a particular issue, the source said, as vapors resulting from the lead-acid recycling system were no longer captured. Those vapors include lead particles, and long periods of lead exposure result in chronic lead poisoning, which in turn can result in physical defects such as kidney damage.

The former employee doesn't say how often this kind of outage occurred, but he makes it clear it wasn't infrequent. It wouldn't take too many such incidents to significantly raise the exposure level of those residents living downwind. Of course, when the state and EPA are calculating what constitutes "safe" levels of exposure to a facility's pollution, they never take into account these kind of "upsets" or accidents that can balloon the chances of inhaling harmful poisons.

Among the other allegations made by the ex-employee:

Only 1/5 of the violations Exide received "for a lack of federal compliance or unsafe working conditions" were forwarded to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Incident reports submitted to the state about violations represented "a great difference in the truth" between what was being claimed by Exide, and what really happened.

These incidents were as frequent as every other week.

Prior to the announced visits of TCEQ or EPA inspectors, "employees were paid overtime to clean the plant extensively. The same initiative was made before visits by non-plant employees, such as trips by corporate managers. Outside of those events, however, the plant was rarely cleaned."

Carbon dioxide monitors were constantly beeping, indicating dangerous CO2 levels. "The environment of operations was poisoning us."

Ah, but all of that is in the past, right? Not with Exide planning to leave over 9 million pounds of lead smelter waste behind on 90 acres in the middle of central Frisco, with another hundred acres or so outside of that donut hole" being purchased by the city for rehabilitation. 

When asked if he would feel comfortable visiting the land Frisco purchased from Exide when it's remediated to federally compliant levels, the former employee said he wouldn't.

"With the way it's going right now, I'll never take my children or my dog to that area," he said. "I studied petroleum engineering and geology in college, and I know the bad stuff sinks to the bottom. I will never [go there]. It'll be nice to have it gone, but I don't know how you patch that up. You have to pull up everything, wrap it up and get it gone."

Official reaction was predictable:

"An Exide Technologies spokeswoman said the company "does not comment on unsubstantiated hearsay"…"A TCEQ spokeswoman said she could not comment on whether or not an employee signing an incident report with false information would be illegal without being told what reports are in question."

It'd be better if former employees like this came completely forward and were willing to cooperate with the EPA in exchange for immunity, but we're grateful for the peak inside Exide. It confirms not only what we already suspected about the way this company and this plant did business, it also once again confirms the way all bad acting polluters behave when it comes to hiding their real identity from the public and regulators.