REEDVILLE, Va. (AP) — Virginia has never been known to beat up companies that violate environmental laws, but in the case of Omega Protein Corp., in 2007, the state had just about seen enough.
Inspectors had determined that Omega Protein again was allowing toxic ammonia to escape its menhaden-processing plant, the largest of its kind on the East Coast, into a creek within earshot of the Chesapeake Bay.
It was the sixth time in eight years that pollution problems had surfaced at the Omega plant, where tens of millions of silvery little menhaden are ground up and converted into fish oil, pet food and health supplements.
Each time, the Texas-based company paid a fine and promised to do better. And each time, the violations kept coming - for excessive ammonia, bacteria, nutrients, cyanide.
But in 2007, enforcement agents with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality were especially steamed, having negotiated five cleanup orders with Omega since 2003.
Also peeved were members of the State Water Control Board, who had pledged to send a message to Omega after the last ammonia mishap: Despite the plant's huge economic impact on Reedville and the Northern Neck peninsula, their patience was up.
"It was not a good time for us," Ben Landry, an Omega spokesman based in Louisiana, said recently. "Basically, what happened was that, over time, no money was being spent to upgrade the plant.
"Our manager said he didn't have the money, and our corporate guys were saying, 'Well, you should ask for the money.' "
L. Preston Bryant, the secretary of natural resources under then-Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, summoned company executives to his office in Richmond.
"I basically told them they needed to do something pretty drastic or else," Bryant recalled. "I think they heard me loud and clear."
What happened next has become lore in Reedville, a coastal fishing village affiliated with the menhaden industry for the past 150 years.
Omega executives from Houston flew into town unannounced, landing at a small corporate airstrip. They held a closed-door meeting, toured the plant on foot and by boat, then fired top managers and staff.
"They decided we needed a culture change in Reedville," Landry said.
Since then, a new general manager has been hired: Monty Deihl, a military veteran who grew up in Reedville and whose family has worked in the menhaden industry for decades.
"When I was a kid around here, septic waste went straight into the creek. And that was pretty much true with the plant," Deihl said during a site tour last month. "But we've cleaned up. This is a different place. We have to be."
Omega also hired its first environmental manager, William Purcell, who previously was a water-quality expert with the state Department of Environmental Quality.
Since 2008, Purcell has helped to design and implement new control systems for air and wastewater pollution, costing some $12 million.
Most of the new equipment, including some engineered in Chile, is on line now, Purcell said, but more work is needed to complete the transformation of this 80-year-old facility to meet a modern, greener world.
Some examples:
Perhaps most symbolically, Omega soon will demolish its towering, corkscrew-shaped smokestack that sits in the middle of the plant on Menhaden Road.
For decades, the smokestack infamously spewed a blue plume of vapor, which, when the wind was right, would carry a pungent smell of rotting fish and strong fertilizer across the town.
Now rusting and stained, the stack and giant fish-dryers beneath it are silent and awaiting a scrap yard.
They are being replaced with energy-saving dryers, which separate valuable fish oil from nasty fish water, along with a series of smaller, more controlled vents that look nothing like the fat, candle-like smokestack.
"There should be no more smells, no more problems," Purcell said.
The menhaden industry in Virginia has been under increasing pressure from conservation groups and environmentalists for years, but not because of the Reedville plant. The issue is the large numbers being caught, and the methods the fishery uses, such as spotter planes that encircle whole schools.
On the East Coast, only Virginia and North Carolina still allow industrial harvests of menhaden. In the Gulf of Mexico, where Omega catches the majority of its fish, Texas last year imposed catch restrictions on menhaden boats.
Menhaden are classified as filter feeders, helping to cleanse water quality of microscopic material, though Omega scientists contest the extent that the fish actually do this.
Menhaden also are critical links in the food chain, fodder for game fish and other finfish. While their populations are not considered over-fished on the Atlantic coast, no specific assessment has been done on Chesapeake Bay stocks.
Former Gov. Kaine brokered a first-ever harvest cap on menhaden in the Bay in 2006. Omega has never breached the annual quota of 109,200 metric tons.
State regulators say that while more data and refinements are needed, the Reedville plant is performing better since upgrades began two years ago.
"They appear to have been in compliance with their effluent limits in 2009," said Kyle Winter, deputy regional director of the DEQ.
More simply, Winter added, the upgrades "represent an example of how the environmentally correct approach can also be the more profitable one."
Not that Omega is out of the woods.
The state issued the company a notice of violation in September and another one last month for various environmental infractions. Thirty gallons of fish oil were accidentally spilled into Cockrell Creek during demolition of a storage tank in December, according to the latest notice.
And Omega did not inform the state, as required, that ultraviolet disinfection units had been installed at the new wastewater treatment system.
During the plant tour last month, Bryant, the former natural resources secretary, looked around at the new equipment, listened to the talk of a new ethic, and stopped.
"I liken what is happening here to what happened at Smithfield Foods," Bryant said, recalling how the meat packing giant shifted cultural gears after being fined more than $12 million in the 1990s for pollution violations.
Like Omega, Bryant said, Smithfield hired an environmental manager who preached modernization and openness, and the company began trying to get its employees to care about their ecological footprint each day at work.
"It takes time," he said. "These are two of our oldest industries, but they're trying, they're moving in the right direction. You can see it."
