The owner of a Flint oil processing company is facing a felony charge of violating the Clean Water Act. That's after his company allegedly dumped nearly 48 million gallons of untreated wastewater into Flint's sewer system.
Robert Massey's company, Oil Chem, was officially an oil processing enterprise. But it also accepted contaminated liquid known as leachate from Michigan landfills, and, without a permit, discharged it into a sewer maintained by the city of Flint.
The federal complaint alleges Massey told his employees to dump the leachate into the sewer at the end of the workday, so it would end up at a city wastewater treatment plant overnight.
The illegal discharges happened between 2007 and 2015, and it's not currently known why Massey is only being charged now, in 2021. Neither he nor his attorney have returned calls requesting comment.