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I have found no direct link of Koch Industries to the Freedom Industries of West-Virginia. It is however, a distributor of Talon mining reagents to the coal mining business for Georgia-Pacific Chemicals, owned by Koch Industries.
DEP inspectors describe early scene at Freedom leak site
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WVgazette) — When state inspectors arrived at the Freedom Industries tank farm late last Thursday morning, they found a 400-square-foot pool of clear liquid had collected outside a white tank marked as number 396.
A 4-foot wide stream of the liquid — thicker than water, but not as heavy as syrup — was flowing across the bottom of a containment dike. The flow disappeared right at the joint where the dike’s wall connected to its floor.
Freedom Industries had set up one cinder block and used one 50-pound bag of some sort of safety absorbent powder to try to block the chemical flow, state Department of Environmental Protection inspectors say.
“This was a Band-Aid approach,” said DEP air quality inspector Mike Kolb. “It was apparent that this was not an event that had just happened.”
In an interview with The Charleston Gazette, Kolb and DEP air quality engineer Dan Bauerle described discovering the leak of “Crude MCHM” that fouled the drinking water supply that serves hundreds of thousands of West Virginians.
…
The DEP officials went to the office, where Dennis P. Farrell, who identified himself as president of the company … DEP officials asked to show them around the facility. When they went outside, an employee asked to speak to Farrell. After that conversation, Farrell told the DEP officials there was a problem, and led them to tank 396.Anybody else interesting behind Freedom Industries?
(Business Week) – Well, yes. State records in West Virginia show that a man named Carl L. Kennedy II joined Gary Southern in forming the company years ago. A well-known restaurant owner and man-about-town in Charleston, according to the Gazette, Kennedy is a twice-convicted felon. The paper reported on Sunday that he pleaded guilty in federal court in West Virginia in 2005 to tax evasion and was sentenced to three years in prison, a penalty that was reduced after he agreed to wear a wire and make controlled cocaine buys in a separate investigation. Kennedy apparently no longer works at Freedom Industries. In another twist, Stover-Kennedy, Farrell’s friend and the Facebook defender of Freedom Industries, is Kennedy’s ex-wife, according to Gazette archives.
Freedom executive Kennedy had felonies
(WVgazette) – Within the last two weeks, on Dec. 31, 2013, Freedom merged with three other companies, Etowah River Terminal, Poca Blending and Crete Technologies LLC from Delaware.
The companies were already interrelated. Freedom markets and distributes chemicals that are mixed by Poca Blending in Nitro. Etowah River Terminal is the storage facility on the Elk which leaked the chemical. It has about a dozen tanks, each of which can hold tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals. It was formerly a Pennzoil facility.
Kennedy told the court in 2006 that he also owned portions of Poca Blending, Etowah River Terminal, New River Chemical Co., New River Leasing, New River Air, The Sands Land Co., Dogtech Land Co., Protech Land Co., and all of Southway Inc.
Kennedy filed for bankruptcy in 2005 after he was charged with tax evasion and willful failure to pay employees’ withholdings to the government. He pleaded guilty to both charges in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of West Virginia.
- ○ West Virginia Company Finished Merger Days Before Spill
○ WV water contamination exposes chemical hazards of coal power
○ Bill Koch’s Oak Mesa coal mine
