Hanover Foods Corporation broke the law over 600 times in six years, pumped fecal bacteria into a public waterway, and watched federal inspectors document the carnage, then kept doing it anyway.
Investigation | Water Pollution | Pennsylvania | Chesapeake Bay Watershed
How Hanover Foods Turned a Public Waterway Into an Industrial Dump
A federal and state complaint against a Pennsylvania canning giant reveals years of neglected equipment, toxic discharges, and a company that treated a public creek as a private sewer, all while regulators kept showing up and the violations kept accumulating.
The Factory, The Creek, And The Bay They Poisoned Together
Hanover Foods Corporation operates an industrial food-processing and canning facility at 1550 York Street, Hanover, York County, Pennsylvania. The plant produces canned dry beans year-round and processes seasonal vegetables including green beans, corn, peas, and root crops. Every step of that process creates wastewater, and that wastewater has to go somewhere.
Where it went was Oil Creek. Oil Creek flows into Codorus Creek, which flows into the Susquehanna River, which feeds the Chesapeake Bay. That is the chain. Every gram of ammonia nitrogen, every sludge-laden discharge, every spike of fecal bacteria that Hanover Foods pumped past the legal limit did not stay local. It traveled downstream toward one of the most ecologically stressed estuaries in the United States.
Hanover Foods holds a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, the legal document that defines exactly what a company is allowed to put into public water and when. The permit covers pollutants like total suspended solids, carbonaceous biological oxygen demand, ammonia nitrogen, phosphorus, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and fecal coliform bacteria. According to the federal and state complaint filed in October 2025, Hanover Foods violated that permit on more than 600 documented occasions since November 2016.
— U.S. DOJ / EPA / PADEP Complaint, October 2025
The facility’s wastewater treatment is supposed to work through a multi-step process: solids screening, grit removal, anaerobic digesters to break down organic matter, clarifiers to treat phosphorus, lagoons for mixing and aeration, polishing ponds, ultraviolet disinfection, and then discharge through a single pipe called Outfall 001 directly into Oil Creek. Every step of that chain failed, repeatedly, and the government has the records to prove it.
Annual Pollution Violations by Parameter Category
The Equipment Was Broken. They Knew. They Kept Dumping.
Federal and state regulators did not show up once to inspect Hanover Foods. They showed up four times across five years: August 2016, April 2019, July 2020, and February 2021. Each time, the inspectors found problems. Each time, company representatives offered explanations. Each time, they left without the problems being fixed. And each time inspectors returned, the same broken equipment was still broken.
The anaerobic digesters, the units responsible for breaking down the organic waste in the wastewater, were designed to operate at approximately 95 degrees Fahrenheit. During the 2019 inspection, digester #2 was running at 90 degrees or below. A Hanover Foods representative told inspectors the heat exchanger might not provide sufficient pressure. During the 2020 inspection, digester #2 was still running below 95 degrees. The same excuse was offered. During the 2021 federal inspection, the temperature at digester #2 had fallen further, routinely dropping below 85 degrees, a full ten degrees under design spec. This time a representative said he believed the boiler was undersized. Hanover Foods knew the core of its treatment system was failing for at least two years and addressed it with a shrug.
The clarifiers, which separate solids from treated wastewater before it reaches the ponds, showed the same pattern of cascading neglect. In both the 2019 and 2020 inspections, clarifiers #3 and #4 were experiencing short-circuiting, gas release, and solids carry-over, meaning wastewater was escaping the clarifier without adequate treatment. By the 2021 federal inspection, clarifier #3 contained water described as “thick and sludge-like,” with solids floating and bulking across the unit and flowing directly over the weirs. Clarifier #4 had the same problem.
The UV disinfection system, the absolute last line of defense before wastewater exits through Outfall 001 into Oil Creek, was offline entirely during the 2019 inspection. By 2021, it was back on but barely functioning. Water arriving from the turbid polishing ponds was so cloudy that the UV light could not penetrate it effectively. The system’s own electronic interface registered 29 active alarms during the federal inspection. The machine tasked with making the water safe was simultaneously registering nearly 30 failures and treating water that was already too dirty to treat.
The lagoons and polishing ponds were no cleaner. During the 2016 inspection, water was already leaking from a drainpipe under the drain system for Lagoon #2. By 2019, aeration in the polishing ponds had been turned off completely, causing heavy algae growth that fouled the aerator motors. In 2020, scum and solids covered the pond surfaces. In 2021, the water exiting the ponds was visibly turbid. The cooling water flow meter vault was flooded with steaming water during the 2021 inspection, indicating an active pipeline leak. Every major piece of infrastructure in the treatment train showed signs of deferred maintenance, and government inspectors documented all of it in writing.
Selected Daily Max BOD Exceedances vs. Permit Limit (mg/L)
The Non-Financial Ledger: What The Numbers Don’t Say
Every regulatory violation in this case has a number attached to it. A milligram per liter. A percentage exceedance. A count of days. These numbers are precise and useful and they tell you exactly how badly Hanover Foods broke the rules. What they cannot tell you is what it actually means when a company decides that the waterway behind its fence is a cheaper disposal option than maintaining its own equipment.
Oil Creek is a perennial waterway. It does not disappear between growing seasons. It runs year-round through York County, Pennsylvania, and everything Hanover Foods discharged from Outfall 001 since November 2016 moved through that creek system toward Codorus Creek, toward the Susquehanna River, and ultimately toward the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay is already the subject of multi-state restoration agreements and federal water quality regulations because it has been battered for decades by exactly the kind of pollution this complaint describes: excess nutrients feeding algae blooms, dead zones where oxygen levels drop so low that fish cannot survive, and the blocking of sunlight from underwater grasses that form the foundation of the bay’s food web.
When Hanover Foods discharged ammonia nitrogen at 410% over its daily maximum limit in July 2020, that was a single data entry in Appendix A. In the real world, that meant a pulse of nitrogen heading downstream at more than five times the legal limit, feeding algae that suffocate the creek’s oxygen supply. Fish and aquatic insects that depend on dissolved oxygen do not read permit appendices. They respond to conditions. Dissolved oxygen dropped below 5 mg/L, the legal minimum, multiple times across the violation record, including November 2019, November 2020, and December 2019. Below 5 mg/L is the threshold where many species of fish begin to experience stress. Below 3 mg/L is hypoxia, the beginning of a dead zone.
The physical evidence inspectors recorded at Outfall 001 is the part of this story that deserves to sit with you. In July 2020, inspectors watched effluent pour out of the pipe with a greenish-yellow tint and visible solids floating in it. In February 2021, EPA and PADEP inspectors found brown solids accumulating on the streambed and clumps of Sphaerotilus-type bacterial colonies growing on the substrate of Oil Creek itself, stretching from the outfall pipe approximately 20 meters downstream. Sphaerotilus is a filamentous bacterium associated with organically enriched, oxygen-depleted water. It forms visible white or brown mats on stream surfaces. It is an indicator species of pollution. Federal agents stood at the banks of Oil Creek and watched the ecosystem responding to what Hanover Foods had been pouring into it.
Legal Receipts: The Government’s Own Words
Who This Hurts: Mapping The Real World Damage
Environmental Degradation
Oil Creek feeds Codorus Creek, which feeds the Susquehanna River, which is the largest single freshwater source flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay watershed is one of the most ecologically significant estuaries in North America. It is already under severe stress from nutrient pollution, primarily nitrogen and phosphorus, which are exactly the pollutants Hanover Foods exceeded repeatedly over six years.
The complaint directly states that excess ammonia nitrogen and phosphorus cause algae blooms that consume oxygen and create dead zones where fish and shellfish cannot survive. The effluent limits in Hanover Foods’ own permit exist specifically because of downstream water quality standards in the Chesapeake Bay. Every time Hanover Foods blew past its phosphorus limit, which it did for entire calendar months at a time with exceedances reaching 71% above the monthly average limit in October 2017, it was feeding that broader crisis. The October 2017 annual phosphorus total reached 778.68 kilograms discharged against a permitted 443.99 kilograms, a 75% annual exceedance that lasted 365 days.
The bacterial mats inspectors found in Oil Creek in 2021 are the physical fingerprint of chronic organic pollution. Sphaerotilus bacteria thrive where oxygen is depleted and organic matter is abundant. Their presence on the streambed signals that the creek’s base ecology was being actively disrupted at the point of discharge. Aquatic invertebrates, the foundation of the food web in freshwater systems, are particularly sensitive to these conditions. The visible discoloration of the water 20 meters downstream of Outfall 001 was a symptom of a much larger chemical imbalance in the creek system.
Public Health
The most direct public health threat documented in the complaint is the presence of fecal coliform bacteria in the discharge at levels far exceeding the legal limit. On October 31, 2020, Hanover Foods discharged water measuring 26,300 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters of fecal coliform bacteria. The instantaneous maximum limit is 10,000 CFU/100mL. That is a 163% exceedance of the bacteria threshold that exists specifically to protect human health. On February 28, 2021, the discharge registered 29,000 CFU/100mL, a 190% exceedance.
I pulled the PDF used to write this article from the Department of Justice’s website: https://www.justice.gov/enrd/media/1418851/dl?inline
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