The Real (Human) Price of Cruzan Rum

The Price of Paradise

Imagine the salty air of St. Croix, the gentle Caribbean breeze rustling through the palms.

It’s a place people dream of whilst stuck in their dingy ass cubicle working a shitty office job.

Now, picture a warehouse on that island, tucked away at the famous Cruzan Rum distillery. Inside, the air is thick with a different kind of possibility… the dangerous kind!!!

Steel barrels, 55 gallons each, sit in silent rows. Some are rusted through, their lids blooming with corrosion.

What’s inside? Your guess is as good as anyone’s. Labels are missing, scratched out, or completely unreadable.

There are no dates to tell you how long this stuff has been sitting here. Nearby, on a yellow shelf explicitly marked “Caution-Flammable-Keep Fire Away-Hazardous is Waste,” sits another collection of mystery containers. The company hadn’t even bothered to determine if they were, in fact, hazardous.

This isn’t a scene from a disaster movie. This was the reality that federal inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) walked into on August 5, 2022. They found a facility that was, by the EPA’s account, a ticking time bomb, operating in violation of the basic laws designed to keep workers and communities safe from hazardous materials.

So what? This shit matters because it means that for years, a beloved brand was gambling with the health and safety of an entire island community, all while failing to follow the most fundamental safety rules.

A Recipe for Disaster

Making rum involves alcohol, a famously flammable substance. The waste from that process isn’t something you just pour down the drain. It’s industrial-grade hazardous material that has to be handled with extreme care. The rulebook for this, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), is thick for a reason. It’s written in the language of past tragedies—fires, explosions, and toxic spills that have ruined lives and landscapes.

Cruzan Rum Distillery told the government back in 2009 that it was a “small quantity generator” of this kind of waste, a status that comes with a shorter, simpler set of rules. But that special status is a privilege, not a right. It’s granted on the condition that you follow those rules to the letter.

The EPA’s inspection report reads like a checklist of how not to handle dangerous chemicals:

A Timeline of Neglect

Beyond the rusty, unlabeled drums, inspectors found a facility completely unprepared for an emergency. In the hazardous waste accumulation area, different types of chemicals were stored together without proper segregation.

There was no aisle space, meaning if a fire broke out, firefighters and emergency crews couldn’t even get to the barrels to fight it. There was no adequate water supply, no foam equipment, no sprinklers. And the required emergency information—who to call, where the fire extinguishers are—wasn’t posted where it needed to be.

This was creating a workplace where an accidental spark could lead to a chain reaction, endangering the lives of every employee on site.

It was creating a risk that could spill beyond the distillery’s fence line, threatening the fragile ecosystem of a Caribbean island and the health of the people who call it home. The trust between a community and a major local employer was fraying, barrel by rusty barrel.

The Cost of Doing Business

So, what happens when a company gets caught playing fast and loose with public safety? For Cruzan, it meant entering into negotiations with the EPA. Three years after the inspection, they reached a settlement.

The company agreed to pay a civil penalty of $64,276.

Let that sink in. For a globally recognized rum brand, that’s not a punishment. It’s a rounding error. It’s the cost of a mid-level marketing campaign. More importantly, as part of the deal, Cruzan did not have to admit to a single thing. The document is clear: they “neither admit nor deny the allegations”.

This is the distressing reality of our regulatory system. A company can be presented with a mountain of evidence detailing its failures, pay a token fee, and walk away without ever having to acknowledge the risk it created. No executive is named. No one is held personally accountable. The company simply promises to start following the rules it should have been following all along.

This isn’t an isolated case of one “bad apple.” It’s a feature of a system that prioritizes corporate convenience over public accountability.

The fines are so small they become just another line item in the budget, cheaper than the cost of hiring enough staff to manage hazardous waste properly.

The “no-fault” settlements allow companies to protect their brand image, sweeping the mess under the rug while reassuring the public that they are a responsible corporate citizen. It’s a predictable outcome in an economy that too often rewards corner-cutting and penalizes caution.

What Real Justice Looks Like

The settlement requires Cruzan to fix the problems—to finally label its barrels, to make sure they aren’t leaking, to clear an aisle for firefighters. But that isn’t justice. All this is is forcing a company to do the bare fucking minimum required by law, three years after they was caught red-handed.

Real justice would look different. It would mean fines that actually sting, compelling a company’s board of directors to make safety a top priority. It would mean mandatory, public admissions of wrongdoing to rebuild broken trust with the community. It would mean holding individual managers and executives accountable for the choices made under their watch.

Until then, we are left with a shitty system that manages corporate harm rather than preventing it. The story of Cruzan’s rusty barrels isn’t just about one company’s failures in St. Croix. It’s a story about a national framework that allows powerful corporations to treat public health and environmental safety as items to be negotiated away, leaving communities to hope for the best and pray that the next inspection happens before the worst comes to pass.

All factual claims in this article are sourced from the Consent Agreement and Final Order in the matter of Cruzan Viril, LTD, Docket No. RCRA-02-2025-7106, filed on August 20, 2025.