A foundry famous for casting fine art sent painters with zero safety training to spray sculptures with toxic chromium and nickel for over two years, released 14 categories of hazardous air pollutants into a residential community, and then filed zero required pollution reports with the federal government for five straight years while the EPA stayed silent.

The Art World’s Dirty Secret

Walla Walla Foundry operates out of 405 Woodland Avenue in Walla Walla, Washington. It casts sculptures from ferrous and non-ferrous metal alloys and has built a global reputation as an elite art fabricator. The city of Walla Walla is a small community, home to roughly 32,000 people, surrounded by vineyards and farmland. Nobody living nearby signed up to breathe heavy metal compounds so that a foundry could finish its commissions.

The EPA’s inspection on May 24, 2023 confirmed what the agency’s own records should have flagged years earlier: this facility had been operating as a source of hazardous air pollutants since at least October 31, 2013, and the compliance reporting required under federal law simply never arrived. Five years of semiannual reports, ten total required submissions, never filed.

The foundry falls under two separate federal hazardous air pollutant standards: one for iron and steel foundries and one for surface coating operations. The company violated both, simultaneously, over an overlapping period, and the EPA’s enforcement action didn’t begin until more than a decade after the foundry’s foundry operations began.

The Non-Financial Ledger

What Money Cannot Measure

Fourteen categories of hazardous air pollutants. That is the list the EPA confirmed flows out of Walla Walla Foundry and into the air above a residential American city. Chromium compounds. Nickel compounds. Manganese compounds. Lead compounds. Cobalt compounds. And then nine more: cumene, xylenes, styrene, hexamethylene-1,6-diisocyanate, methanol, methyl isobutyl ketone, naphthalene, hexane, and methyl methacrylate. These are not obscure chemical curiosities. These are substances linked to cancer, neurological damage, respiratory disease, and reproductive harm. They entered the air not through some industrial accident, but through routine, daily operations.

Walla Walla’s painters walked into work and picked up spray guns loaded with coatings containing chromium and nickel, two of the most well-documented carcinogenic metal compounds in existence. They did this without any of the federally mandated safety training, without certification, and without any record of compliance being filed anywhere with the government. The document is explicit: between July 23, 2020 and August 9, 2022, none of the foundry’s painters were trained and certified according to the minimum requirements of federal law. That is a period of over two years. Every single shift those painters worked, they were unprotected by the safety protocols that Congress specifically designed to protect them.

The workers themselves are a part of this ledger that the fine does not touch. Federal training and certification requirements under NESHAP 6H exist precisely because spray application of heavy metal compounds is dangerous to the person doing the spraying, to co-workers in the facility, and to anyone breathing the air downwind. These rules are the baseline floor of protection. Walla Walla Foundry treated them as optional. The painters who showed up and did their jobs had no way of knowing their employer had never bothered to get them certified.

The community around Woodland Avenue had no way of knowing either. The semiannual compliance reports that the foundry was legally required to submit to the EPA every six months exist specifically so that regulators can monitor what facilities are releasing and identify problems before they become crises. Walla Walla Foundry submitted zero of those reports across a five-year window. The EPA’s own enforcement document confirms the company has operated as a foundry and area source of hazardous air pollutants since at least October 2013. That means regulators had over a decade of compliance history to track and simply did not. Nobody was watching. Nobody was warning the neighborhood. The air quality information that citizens in Walla Walla were legally entitled to access through government oversight never existed, because the company generating the pollution decided not to create it.

Legal Receipts: The Document Says It Directly

Straight from the EPA’s Own Filing

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health: A Community Breathing Heavy Metal Compounds

The hazardous air pollutants confirmed present at Walla Walla Foundry represent some of the most dangerous substance categories tracked by the Clean Air Act. Chromium compounds in their hexavalent form are classified as known human carcinogens by the EPA and the World Health Organization. Nickel compounds are similarly linked to lung and nasal cancers. Manganese exposure affects the central nervous system, with chronic exposure associated with a Parkinson’s-like condition called manganism. Lead compounds cause irreversible neurological damage, with no established safe level of exposure, particularly for children. The EPA’s enforcement document confirms all of these compounds were released to the atmosphere at Walla Walla Foundry.

The problem compounds don’t stop at heavy metals. The foundry also released cobalt compounds, naphthalene (a probable human carcinogen), styrene (a possible carcinogen linked to neurological effects), xylenes (linked to central nervous system impairment and reproductive toxicity), and hexamethylene-1,6-diisocyanate, a compound known to cause occupational asthma. These were not one-off spills or accidents. The document describes these as substances released routinely in the course of normal foundry operations. The workers on-site, the residents in the surrounding neighborhood, and anyone who regularly passes through the area around Woodland Avenue faced potential exposure, with zero governmental awareness because the reporting never happened.

The foundry’s painters bear a specific portion of this public health story. Federal certification and training requirements exist because spray application of heavy metal coatings generates fine aerosolized particles that travel through air and lodge in lung tissue. Without proper training, workers don’t know the correct ventilation settings, spray pressures, or personal protective equipment protocols. The EPA confirmed every single painter at the facility was unprotected by these baseline standards for the entire two-year period when chromium and nickel spraying occurred.

Economic Inequality: A $78,480 Fine for Years of Contamination

The EPA may assess up to $59,114 per day of violation under the Clean Air Act. The foundry’s violations span years, across multiple regulatory standards, involving 14 classes of hazardous air pollutants and 10 missing government reports. The final penalty came out to $78,480 (roughly what the median American household earns in a single year of full-time work). That number was then split into two installments because the foundry’s owner made a “documented inability to pay claim,” and the EPA accepted it.

The penalty the foundry pays is, by design, supposed to be large enough to sting. It is supposed to remove any financial incentive to violate the law, and then some. A $78,480 fine for years of unreported hazardous air pollution, paid in two installments, represents the system working at its absolute legal minimum. The people who breathed the air near Woodland Avenue received no compensation. The workers who spray-painted sculptures with carcinogenic compounds without training received no remediation. The community received no independent health monitoring. The fine goes to the federal treasury, not to the neighborhood.

The enforcement timeline itself illustrates the inequality baked into environmental oversight. The foundry began operating as a foundry and source of hazardous air pollutants in at least October 2013. The EPA conducted its compliance inspection in May 2023, roughly a decade later. The consent agreement was signed in September 2025, over twelve years into the facility’s operations. Over that same period, federal law required the foundry to submit compliance reports every six months. The math: approximately 24 required reports. The number actually submitted before the EPA showed up: zero. The fine for a decade-plus of regulatory invisibility works out to less than a moderately priced used car.

What Now?

Names, Roles, and Who Needs to Hear From You

Lisa Anderson, Owner of Walla Walla Foundry, Inc., signed the consent agreement and certified the violations have been corrected. The company still neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations. The correction of violations is not independently verified in the document; it rests entirely on a self-certification by the respondent.

Edward J. Kowalski, Director of the Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division at EPA Region 10, signed off on the consent agreement and the associated penalty amount.

• EPA Region 10 Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division: the body responsible for monitoring this facility going forward.
• Washington State Department of Ecology: the state-level agency with authority to conduct independent air quality monitoring in Walla Walla County.
• OSHA: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should be asked whether the untrained painters’ working conditions triggered any worker safety investigations separate from the EPA’s CAA action.
• Walla Walla County Public Health: the local public health authority, which has the standing to request independent health monitoring of residents near Woodland Avenue.
• EPA’s Environmental Justice Office: communities disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution have formal channels to request prioritized oversight.

Organize Locally, Demand Publicly

The legal process here is finished. The fine is paid in installments. The government considers this case closed. The only people who can demand more, whether that is community health monitoring, independent air quality testing, or a public accounting of what years of unreported pollution actually did to Walla Walla, are the people who live there. Local environmental justice organizations, mutual aid networks, and neighborhood coalitions have successfully forced independent health studies in similar situations. Contact Walla Walla County Public Health and demand to know whether any health impact assessment was conducted or requested. Contact Washington State Department of Ecology and ask what ongoing monitoring, if any, exists for this facility. The EPA settled. Your community doesn’t have to.