An ex-supervisor at a shuttered coke plant on the shore of Lake Erie has admitted to helping his boss, who lives in Pittsburgh, pollute the air for years by deliberately bypassing environmental controls at the 162-acre site.
David Stablein waived indictment on Friday in U.S. District Court and pleaded guilty to a felony conspiracy count in connection with violations of the Clean Air Act at Erie Coke near the entrance to Presque Isle.
Stablein, of Fairview, Pa., admitted that he worked with the superintendent, Anthony Nearhoof of Pittsburgh, to bypass monitoring systems that were supposed to detect violations at the plant.
Nearhoof, 41, is under indictment.
Defendants typically enter into waiver and plea deals with prosecutors when they are cooperating with federal authorities.
In Stablein’s plea, he said he acted on orders from Nearhoof and directed other employees at the plant to break the law by removing flue caps from the ovens that make coke. The removal of the caps released combustion gas into the air.
Stablein pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act from October 2015 through September 2018, when he left the company.
Nearhoof and the corporation were indicted in November after an investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Pennsylvania counterpart.
The grand jury said he and the corporation conspired to violate the Clean Air Act from the fall of 2015 to December 2019, when the plant shut down.
By tampering with the flues, he and others vented directly into the air contaminants including benzene, toluene and xylene. The plant was near a marina, houses and schools.
The EPA said Nearhoof and his underlings repeatedly lied to federal regulators about the discharges.
Erie Coke first began coke operations in 1925. Nearhoof started working there in 2001 and became superintendent in 2015.
According to his indictment, he pressured Stablein and others to open the flues to vent emissions, giving orders directly by radio or sometimes in a logbook used by battery foremen to relay instructions for each shift at the plant.
He and Stablein also personally removed flues, according to the charging papers.
Erie Coke had long fought the city of Erie and the state Department of Environmental Protection over pollution violations until the state finally shut it down for good.
It’s now a Superfund site as a cleanup effort is underway.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
