`If I Believed in Hell, This Could Be No Worse.'.

• Author: SIEGAL, NINA
• Position: Louisiana-Pacific Corp. sued over environmental crimes - Abstract

How Louisiana-Pacific cooked its books and smoked its books neighbors

Arthur and Margaret Orjias thought a fifty-acre plot of irrigated farm land in the high desert valley of Olathe, Colorado, would be the perfect place to settle when Arthur was laid off from Pan American Airlines in 1973. They poured Arthur's severance pay and their small savings into building a new home on the land, setting up four trailer sites to rent, and starting a large garden.

In 1984, when the couple was still putting the finishing touches on their house, a new neighbor moved into town--a timber mill owned by Louisiana-Pacific Corporation. The plant was set up to produce oriented strand board, a plywood substitute, through a process that includes pressing wood chips together with a chemical resin. In no time, the atmosphere at the Orjiases' home changed dramatically.

"Almost every day, especially in the winter, smoke poured out of their stacks all over everything. It came out of every window," says Margaret Orjias today. "It was like four or five tons of wood smoke came out of there an hour."

Other residents described it as thick brown or gray smoke that hung in the air above the valley and would sometimes blow along the ground and across the highway that runs right past the plant. Sometimes, in broad daylight, drivers would have to slow down and turn on their headlights to see the road. Toward the end of the 1980s, a pungent odor started seeping out of the plant. Margaret Orjias says it smelled like skunk spray and left an acidic taste in her mouth.

The Orjiases and their neighbors started suffering from health problems. Margaret's oldest son, Arthur Grant, developed chemically induced asthma, and her youngest son, John, started having corneal trouble, for which he later got a cornea transplant. Everyone in the family, it seemed, had some kind of ailment.

"It wasn't so much coughing as it was phlegm. Huge blobs of phlegm would drop down in your throat," she says. "We'd have chest pains, earaches, diarrhea, swollen glands, headaches like you wouldn't believe. I gave up gardening. Our horses would come up to the fence with big blobs of phlegm dripping out of their eyes and mouths. If I believed in hell, this could be no worse."

The Orjiases ran up thousands of dollars in doctors' bills. They weren't the only ones suffering. Kevin Williams, who was then a staff director for the Western Colorado Congress, a nonprofit grassroots citizens' organization based in Montrose, Colorado, just a few miles south of Olathe, visited with four families who lived near the plant that year.

"They all had all kinds of headaches, nausea, respiratory problems," he recalls. "And they didn't have them before the mill came in."

The Orjiases and their neighbors could only suspect it at the time, but throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, managers of the Louisiana-Pacific plant in Olathe were deliberately tampering with monitoring devices that were supposed to check air pollution. They were falsifying emission reports and lying to inspectors about their product.

On May 27, 1998, the company pleaded guilty to eighteen felony counts and agreed to pay a $31.5 million penalty for mail fraud and a $5.5 million fine for willfully conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act, among other crimes. Two Louisiana-Pacific employees were also indicted for their participation in the scheme. Mill superintendent Robert Mann was fined $10,000 and given home detention and probation, and mill manager Dana Dulohery was sentenced to five months in prison.

The penalty for Clean Air Act violations was the largest criminal fine in the twenty-eight-year history of the Act. It was also significant, says John Haried of the Colorado U.S. Attorney's Office, because it was the first case ever brought under the Act's anti-tampering provisions, which make it a crime to disrupt the normal operation of monitoring devices.

"I consider it a very...