Tyson Foods, Inc., has agreed to pay a $3,950,000 civil penalty to settle alleged violations of Clean-Air Act regulations covering the prevention of chemical accidents at its facilities including the plants in Hutchinson and South Hutchinson.

At the South Hutchinson facility, an employee died while working on the plant refrigeration system. 51-year-old Micheal Wiebe died October 31, 2006 when a pipe rupture releasing a toxic cloud of ammonia. The accident also injured a co-worker. Federal investigators found that the pipe fitting that split, while the two were trying to drain anhydrous ammonia from refrigeration equipment, was responsible for the death. OSHA noted that the men weren’t using protective gear required by federal regulations. Tyson was fined $40,000 dollars by OSHA for that incident.

As part of a consent decree lodged Friday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis, Mo., Tyson agreed to conduct pipe-testing and third-party audits of its ammonia refrigeration systems to improve compliance with the Clean-Air Act’s Risk Management Program requirements at all 23 of the company’s facilities in the four Midwestern states.
 
The settlement stems from a series of eight separate incidents between 2006 and 2010.

Through a series of inspections and information requests, EPA found multiple occasions of noncompliance with the Clean-Air Act’s chemical accident prevention provisions at Tyson’s facilities.

Dating back to October 2006, those violations included failures to follow the general industry standards to test or replace safety relief valves, improperly co-located gas-fired boilers and ammonia machinery, as well as failures to abide by the Clean-Air Act’s Risk Management Program prevention and reporting requirements.