The State of Ohio has filed a lawsuit against three people convicted for their role in a clean-up of a plating site in Sebring, Ohio.
The June 8 suit filed by Attorney General David Yost names Richard Sickelsmith, Samual Hopper, and Brian Hopper, who were owners of the Sebring Industrial Plating facility, which the state was forced to clean up solid and hazardous waste.
Yost says the plant closed in 2021, leaving unlawfully stored hazardous waste behind. The U.S. EPA began cleaning the site in 2021 and had to remove 75 chemical drums and over 50 containers of hazardous waste.
Sickelsmith pled guilty in 2022 to felony counts of operating a hazardous waste facility without a license and storing hazardous waste at a facility without a license and will have to pay a $1 million fine and was being placed on five years of probation.
The Hoppers were sentenced in 2022 to three years of probation and ordered to help pay $1 million in restitution to the U.S. and Ohio EPA.
The facility began operations in 1957 as a contract plater that performed zinc electroplating of steel parts. In March 2021, Ohio EPA investigators searched the 0.12-acre site and found at least 38,000 pounds of hazardous waste, some of which had been at the site since 2016.
Sickelsmith owned the property and business at one time and later sold it to the Hoppers.
The Youngstown Vindicator says the suit is called a “complaint for injunctive relief and a civil penalty.” The newspaper says the suit seeks civil penalties of at least $25,000 for each of the eight violations the three men are alleged to have committed and seeks an order preventing them from “receiving, storing, treating and/or disposing of any additional waste.” It also asks the judge to order the men to submit a plan to the EPA for proper closure of the facility.
