TLPJ has won a major victory in its Clean Air Act citizen suit in Kentucky against a steel mill owned by Gallatin Steel Company and an adjoining slag dumping operation run by Harsco Corporation. Slag is a byproduct of steel making. On June 20, 2002, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky entered an order enjoining Harsco from sending fugitive dust from its slag dumping operation across its property line and onto the property of neighboring residents.

For the past seven years, Harsco’s operations have sent huge clouds of dust into the air, and Harsco resisted demands to install control measures. As a result of the citizen suit, the United States filed its own enforcement action and negotiated a consent decree that required Harsco to install a containment building. However, the building did not stop all the violations, and the citizens objected that the decree needed to be strengthened to add more control measures.

Simultaneously with its approval of the injunction in the citizen suit, the Court entered an order approving the decree with those additional measures, including more walls on the containment building and water sprays to suppress the dust caused by moving the slag outside that building.

TLPJ's legal team in the case includes TLPJ Environmental Enforcement Project Director Jim Hecker and co-counsel Jeffrey Sanders of Covington, Kentucky, and Jon Conte of Cincinnati, Ohio.