Three Rivers. Three Facilities. One Company That Knew.

Claxton Smith Concrete Company operates three concrete manufacturing plants in West Virginia: one in Charleston, one in Culloden, and one in Poca. Each one sits adjacent to a waterway. The Charleston Facility drains into the Elk River, a tributary of the Kanawha. The Culloden Facility drains into an unnamed tributary that feeds Indian Fork, then Mud River, and ultimately the Kanawha. The Poca Facility drains into the Pocatalico River. All three are classified as “waters of the United States” protected under federal law.

The EPA conducted separate on-site inspections at each facility: the Charleston Facility on June 28, 2022; the Culloden Facility on June 6, 2023; and the Poca Facility on September 18, 2023. At every single location, inspectors found violations. The EPA then filed 16 separate counts against the company under the Clean Water Act. What investigators found at each site reads less like a compliance failure and more like a company that simply stopped caring about the rivers in its backyard.

The final Consent Agreement and Final Order, filed with the EPA Region 3 Regional Hearing Clerk on August 28, 2025, assessed a civil penalty of $55,000 (roughly enough to cover one year of groceries for about 8 average American households). The company neither admitted nor denied the specific factual allegations — a standard legal maneuver that lets corporations pay a fine without ever officially saying they did anything wrong.

The Violations at a Glance

Across the three facilities, the EPA documented violations in every major category of environmental compliance: illegal discharges above permitted limits, failure to monitor and report, failure to maintain pollution prevention plans, failure to contain chemicals, and failure to maintain basic facility order. The violations weren’t isolated incidents or honest mistakes. They were systemic, multi-year, and in several cases, the same types of failures repeated at all three locations simultaneously.

Charleston: Hydraulic Fluid, Unlabeled Drums, and Concrete Flowing onto a Neighbor’s Property

When EPA inspectors arrived at the Charleston Facility on June 28, 2022, they found a front loader actively dripping what staff believed was hydraulic fluid. A closed bucket of hydraulic fluid was sitting nearby, waiting to be added to the machine. The inspection team also found three 55-gallon drums with no labels in a storage room, and multiple 5-gallon buckets filled with unknown substances near chemical tanks. Nobody at the facility could tell inspectors what was in those containers.

The EPA documented that the Charleston Facility’s own pollution prevention plan — the legal document that is supposed to describe how the company handles stormwater — contained descriptions of operations that no longer matched reality. The plan said waste was handled by a dumpster emptied by Waste Management weekly. In reality, Claxton Smith had moved the dumpster to a different city and workers were hauling trash out by hand. The plan said the truck wash basin pumped overflow to an outlet basin. In reality, the overflow just spilled into a sediment pile. The company was violating its own written procedures while simultaneously violating federal law.

Concrete Was Literally Flowing onto a Neighbor’s Yard

Perhaps the most brazen violation at Charleston: inspectors observed dried concrete that appeared to have flowed down from an unloading area, through the fence, and onto a neighboring property. The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had already issued a Notice of Violation for this exact problem in September 2021 — nearly a year before the EPA’s federal inspection. The company acknowledged the issue but had not installed a proper berm to prevent it from happening again.

The Charleston Facility also racked up 7 pollution limit exceedances between May 2022 and January 2024, including iron levels at nearly 50% above the legal maximum, suspended solids at more than double the permitted level (138 mg/L against a 50 mg/L limit), and pH levels that turned the water dangerously acidic. These weren’t estimates — the company itself reported these numbers in its own discharge monitoring reports. Then it filed 23 of those reports late, some by more than four months.

Culloden: Vegetation Growing From Rags, Green Sludge, and a Pollution Spike Nobody Acted On

In September 2022, the Culloden Facility reported a total suspended solids reading of 476 mg/L — nearly five times the benchmark limit of 100 mg/L. Under the permit, a reading this high makes an exceedance of the four-quarter average “mathematically certain.” The rules are explicit: the company must immediately take corrective action and update its pollution prevention plan. Claxton Smith did neither. When inspectors arrived at Culloden nine months later, in June 2023, there was no evidence of any corrective actions ever being taken, no updated pollution prevention plan, and no corrective action log.

The Culloden SWPPP — the legal document governing pollution prevention — had last been updated on November 15, 2019. The site map required by law was missing critical elements including hazardous waste storage locations, pollution control structures, and materials loading areas. The facility had no preventive maintenance program for its pollution prevention devices. Inspectors found monthly inspection logs that covered only one of the facility’s two outlets, meaning an entire discharge point had gone uninspected and undocumented for over a year.

What Inspectors Actually Saw on the Ground

The on-the-ground conditions at Culloden were a direct result of this sustained negligence. The EPA team found used rags piled near the sedimentation basin with vegetation growing out of them — proof the rags had been sitting there for an extended and undocumented period. The sedimentation basin itself was murky and had a green discoloration. The weirs designed to filter pollutants had significant sediment buildup. The truck washout basin was compacted with sediment and its water was also discolored green.

Materials including raw concrete components were stored in containment areas with downward slopes and no sidewall protection, so materials were migrating outside the containment boundaries. Inspectors observed that solidified concrete had piled higher than the facility’s northern fence line. A bag of topsoil had migrated across the property boundary toward the unnamed tributary of Indian Fork. This is not a portrait of a company trying to comply and falling short. This is a company that stopped trying.

Poca: The Worst Facility. The Closest to a River. The Most Ignored.

The Poca Facility sits directly adjacent to the Pocatalico River. When EPA inspectors arrived in September 2023, they found a catalogue of hazards so extensive that it occupies six separate violation counts in the final legal order. The sediment basin at Poca was so full of built-up concrete that approximately 60 percent of its capacity was unusable. The water recycling pump designed to prevent overflow was out of service, and nobody could say when it would be fixed. During rain events, facility representatives admitted, the basins regularly overflowed — straight toward the river outlets.

One settling basin directly upstream of an outlet was completely choked with cattails and debris. Another had been partially dug out before the inspection, but stormwater had already run over the top of the filled basins to the outlet. A 30-foot pile of solid waste had backed up so badly that workers were stacking new solids directly next to the treatment basin because there was nowhere else to put them. The entire waste management system had failed, and the company’s response was to keep producing concrete and hope the rain didn’t come.

Open Chemical Drums. Holes in the Roof. Twenty Feet From a River.

Here is what EPA inspectors documented at the Poca Facility, stated plainly: open oil and chemical containers were stored in a dilapidated lean-to structure with cracks and holes in the roof, positioned several meters uphill from the Pocatalico River, with the hillside draining directly toward the river. The structure’s interior was wet from the previous day’s rain. Multiple full storage totes and drums filled with “moisture reducer” chemicals were stored outside in a containment structure that was not leak-proof.

Multiple abandoned vehicles were leaking oil and hydraulic fluid onto the ground in uncovered areas. One vehicle in a covered maintenance area was leaking fluid that appeared to flow toward a stormwater drain leading to the property perimeter. The truck wash basin was bleeding water containing acid and a chemical neutralizer with a milky-white liquid mixed in — and the facility representative who watched inspectors document this could not identify what the liquid was. A makeshift gravel berm someone had built to divert this water away from the river outlet wasn’t working: the water was flowing around the side of it and heading directly toward the outlet during the inspection.

Records? What Records?

When inspectors asked for three years of monitoring records at Poca, the facility representative said he had none. No DMRs, no chain-of-custody records for samples, nothing stored on-site electronically or in hardcopy. Of six monitoring reports required between December 2021 and July 2024, four were never submitted at all. The pollution prevention plan itself hadn’t been updated since 2019 and described operations that no longer existed, while failing to map two active discharge locations — one of which was directly across the street from the Pocatalico River and one where workers themselves didn’t know where the drainage went.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What Money Can’t Fix

The rivers that run through Kanawha County and the surrounding area are not abstractions on a map. They are the water that flows past the places where working-class West Virginians fish, swim, and draw their cultural identity from. The Elk River already carries a scar in the region’s memory: a 2014 chemical spill by Freedom Industries contaminated the drinking water supply for 300,000 people across the state. The communities downstream from Claxton Smith’s facilities are not starting from a position of clean, abundant water. They are starting from a position of inherited damage, and every time a company like this discharges iron, acid, and suspended concrete chemicals into the water system, it compounds an existing burden that these communities never created and were never compensated for.

Think about the families who fish the Pocatalico River, the Elk River, or the Mud River system. They eat what they catch. They let their kids wade in the shallows. Nobody sent them a letter explaining that a concrete plant upstream had a leaking acid container stored under a rotting shed, or that green-discolored water was flowing from a truck wash basin toward their fishing hole. Nobody told the neighbor whose yard received a flow of industrial concrete runoff that this had happened before, in September 2021, and that the company had been notified and still hadn’t fixed the gap in the berm by the time federal inspectors showed up nine months later. Accountability, in this case, arrived in the form of a fine smaller than what many American families pay annually in rent.

There is a specific kind of betrayal embedded in the Poca Facility’s paperwork failures. Those monitoring reports — the DMRs that were never submitted — exist precisely so that regulators and the public can know what is going into the water. When a company simply doesn’t file them, it creates a void in the public record. Four of the six required monitoring periods at Poca produced zero data for the public, zero data for regulators, and zero accountability in real time. Whatever entered the Pocatalico River during those unmonitored periods is, by design, unknown. The company didn’t generate evidence of its own violations, so those violations exist only as inference. That is not an accident. That is a strategy.

The EPA’s own legal document acknowledges that the $55,000 (roughly the cost of a mid-range pickup truck) penalty was set partly based on Claxton Smith’s “ability to pay.” This is a standard legal factor, and it is worth sitting with. The penalty was sized to what the company could afford, not to what the rivers could absorb, not to what downstream communities had already endured, and not to the full value of three years of unreported discharges into protected waterways. The regulatory framework explicitly builds in corporate capacity to pay as a ceiling on accountability. The river has no such ceiling on its capacity to absorb harm.

Legal Receipts: Straight From the Document

These are direct quotes and factual statements taken verbatim from the EPA Consent Agreement and Final Order. Read them slowly.

The EPA has a source of the above PDF that can be found right here: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/FAD3BB9C5AAE627E85258CF4006F43EE/$File/Claxton%20Smith%20Concrete%20Company_CWA%20CAFO_Aug%2028%202025_Redacted.pdf

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