A company that handles industrial-scale hazardous chemicals near workers and a residential community violated federal safety rules designed to prevent chemical disasters, and the United States government settled that case for $9,100, which is roughly what a full-time minimum-wage worker in Washington earns in two months.

The Law They Broke, and Why It Exists

The Risk Management Program, known as the RMP, is a federal regulatory framework under Section 112(r) of the Clean Air Act. Congress created it after a series of industrial chemical disasters, most notably the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy that killed thousands of people in India, made visible just how catastrophically dangerous large-scale chemical storage and handling can be when proper safety systems fail.

RMP regulations at 40 C.F.R. Part 68 require facilities that store threshold quantities of certain hazardous substances to develop and implement risk management plans. Those plans cover hazard assessments, prevention programs, and emergency response protocols. The entire system exists so that a chemical release event does not become a mass casualty event for the workers inside and the community outside the fence line.

Zirkle Fruit Company operates a facility at 101 Benitz Road in Prosser, Washington. The company is a major Pacific Northwest fruit packing and storage operation. Agricultural facilities commonly use large quantities of anhydrous ammonia as a refrigerant, which is a substance with a well-documented history of catastrophic accidental releases that have injured and killed workers across the country.

The EPA Didn’t Stumble Onto This Alone

The EPA pursued this case with explicit backing from the U.S. Department of Justice. On November 27, 2022, the DOJ granted concurrence under Section 113(d)(1) of the Clean Air Act, authorizing the administrative enforcement action to proceed. That step matters because it signals this was not a minor clerical flag; the federal government’s law enforcement arm reviewed the case and agreed it warranted formal action.

The settlement agreement was signed and filed with the EPA Regional Hearing Clerk on July 16, 2024, meaning the violations were first flagged well before the 2022 DOJ concurrence date, and the total time from concurrence to settlement was nearly two years. Two years of process, a cabinet-level law enforcement sign-off, and the final bill handed to Zirkle Fruit was $9,100 (less than the average American pays in federal income taxes in a single year).

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Dollar Figure Can’t Measure

Risk Management Program violations are federal crimes against public safety infrastructure. The RMP system is the regulatory architecture standing between an industrial chemical mishap and a mass casualty event. When a company fails to comply, it removes rungs from a ladder that workers, first responders, and nearby residents depend on to survive an emergency they never asked to be part of.

Prosser, Washington, sits in the Yakima Valley, a region heavily dependent on agricultural labor. The workforce in fruit packing operations is disproportionately made up of Latino farmworkers, many of whom are migrant, seasonal, and low-income. These workers operate in environments where hazardous chemicals are present, where language barriers can complicate emergency communication, and where economic precarity makes it difficult to report safety concerns without fear of losing a job or a visa status.

The Risk Management Program requires facilities to prepare for the worst. It demands hazard assessments, accident prevention protocols, and emergency response coordination with local first responders. When a company skips or underperforms these requirements, local fire departments and emergency medical teams may show up to a chemical release event without accurate information about what they are walking into. That gap does not just endanger workers inside the plant; it endangers the firefighters and paramedics rushing toward it.

Zirkle Fruit signed this agreement neither admitting nor denying the factual allegations. That phrase is doing enormous legal and moral work. It means the public record contains a federal enforcement action confirming violations occurred, a DOJ-backed penalty, and a company that never had to say, in plain language, what it did wrong or who it put at risk. The workers at that facility have no public accounting of what specifically failed, what could have gone wrong, or whether the corrections Zirkle certified as complete actually address the hazard that created the risk in the first place.

The dignity violation here is structural. The EPA’s own penalty assessment framework under Section 113(e) of the Clean Air Act requires the agency to weigh the seriousness of the violation, the economic benefit of noncompliance, good-faith efforts to comply, history of violations, and ability to pay. Zirkle Fruit is a sizable regional agricultural company. The final penalty of $9,100 (roughly what it costs to treat a single emergency room visit for chemical exposure without insurance) does not suggest this weighing process produced a figure calibrated to deter future conduct. It suggests it produced a figure the company could pay without blinking.

Legal Receipts: What the Document Actually Says

“EPA has determined that Respondent violated the Risk Management Program (RMP) regulations promulgated at 40 C.F.R. Part 68 under Section 112(r) of the CAA.” Expedited Settlement Agreement, Paragraph 3 — EPA Region 10, CAA-10-2024-0151

“Respondent: (a) admits that EPA has jurisdiction over Respondent and Respondent’s conduct as alleged above; (b) neither admits nor denies the factual allegations contained in this Agreement.” Expedited Settlement Agreement, Paragraph 9 — EPA Region 10, CAA-10-2024-0151

“EPA reserves all of its rights to take enforcement action for any other past, present, or future violations by Respondent of CAA, any other federal statute or regulation, or this Agreement. Nothing in this Agreement or Final Order is intended to, nor shall be construed to operate in any way to resolve, any criminal liability of Respondent.” Expedited Settlement Agreement, Paragraph 13 — EPA Region 10, CAA-10-2024-0151

“Respondent certifies, subject to civil and criminal penalties for making a false submission to the United States Government, that Respondent: (a) has corrected the alleged violations listed in the Summary.” Expedited Settlement Agreement, Paragraph 10 — EPA Region 10, CAA-10-2024-0151

“EPA has determined and Respondent agrees that an appropriate penalty to settle this action is $9,100.” Expedited Settlement Agreement, Paragraph 5 — EPA Region 10, CAA-10-2024-0151

Societal Impact: Who Pays When Companies Don’t

Public Health: Chemical Rules Exist Because People Died Without Them

The Risk Management Program was not created in a vacuum. It emerged from a documented history of industrial chemical releases that caused mass casualties. Facilities that fail RMP compliance requirements represent facilities where the gap between a routine operation and a catastrophic release event is wider than the law intends it to be. Workers at Zirkle Fruit’s Prosser facility, and residents living near 101 Benitz Road, occupied that gap for however long the violations persisted before the EPA acted.

The settlement document confirms Zirkle certified it corrected the violations, but the public record contains no detail about what those violations were specifically, how long they persisted, or how many people worked in the affected environment during that period. The “neither admits nor denies” framework keeps that information shielded. The workers themselves may not have been told what was wrong, what the risk level was, or that a federal enforcement action was underway.

Chemical exposure events carry long-tail health consequences. Acute exposure to compounds like anhydrous ammonia can cause severe respiratory damage, chemical burns, and death. Even sub-acute exposure from routine small releases in a non-compliant facility can contribute to cumulative respiratory harm that workers may not connect to their workplace for years. The public health cost of inadequate RMP compliance is real, measurable, and typically absorbed entirely by the workers, their families, and the public health systems that treat them, not by the company that created the risk.

Economic Inequality: The Fine Is Designed to Be Affordable

The EPA’s penalty framework under Section 113(e) of the Clean Air Act explicitly includes “ability to pay” as a factor. For a large agricultural operation like Zirkle Fruit, a company that processes and distributes fruit across major regional markets, $9,100 (less than many Americans pay annually in car insurance) is a rounding error on an operating budget. The economic benefit Zirkle received from not fully implementing RMP compliance, in terms of saved labor, avoided equipment costs, and deferred administrative burden, almost certainly exceeded the penalty assessed against it.

This is the economic inequality embedded in environmental enforcement. Wealthy corporations absorb fines as a cost of doing business. Individual workers who violate workplace safety rules face termination, civil liability, or criminal prosecution. The asymmetry is not accidental; it reflects who has the legal resources to negotiate settlements, who has the lobbying infrastructure to shape penalty frameworks, and who has the financial cushion to wait out two-year enforcement timelines.

For the agricultural workers in Prosser, many earning wages that keep them well below the median household income, a workplace chemical incident does not carry a $9,100 consequence. It carries the consequence of lost wages during recovery, medical debt without adequate insurance, potential immigration complications if injured undocumented, and the permanent physical damage that comes from a body that encountered a hazard the regulatory system was supposed to prevent.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

The EPA’s own framework requires weighing the economic benefit of noncompliance. Implementing a full, compliant Risk Management Program requires dedicated personnel, documentation systems, emergency response coordination, equipment upgrades, and third-party audits. The cost of full compliance at an agricultural facility of Zirkle’s scale almost certainly runs into tens of thousands of dollars annually. The penalty assessed here does not claw back that economic advantage. It barely acknowledges it.

What Now? Who to Watch and What to Demand

Corporate Roles on Record

• Scott Blackledge — Safety Manager, Zirkle Fruit Company (served as company contact in enforcement proceeding)
• [REDACTED – Not in Source] — Chief Executive / President, Zirkle Fruit Company (company signatory listed as “VP” role, name partially legible in source)
• Edward J. Kowalski — Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 10 (signed the settlement on behalf of EPA)

Regulatory Watchlist

• EPA Region 10 (Seattle) — The body that enforced this case and retains the right to pursue future violations
• EPA Office of Emergency Management — Oversees the national Risk Management Program
• OSHA — Worker safety enforcement at the facility level; separate from EPA RMP but overlapping jurisdiction
• Washington State Department of Ecology — State-level environmental enforcement authority
• Washington State Department of Labor and Industries — Worker protection and workplace safety in Washington
• Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division — Retains criminal enforcement authority not resolved by this civil settlement

What You Can Do Right Now

If you work at or near a facility that handles hazardous chemicals, you have the right to request a copy of the facility’s Risk Management Plan directly from the EPA. You can file a complaint with EPA Region 10 or OSHA if you believe safety requirements are not being met. Agricultural workers in Washington can contact Columbia Legal Services or Northwest Justice Project for free legal support on workplace safety and labor rights issues.

Organize at the local level. Connect with farmworker advocacy organizations in the Yakima Valley. Groups like PCUN (Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste) and Familias Unidas por la Justicia have long track records of building worker power in Pacific Northwest agricultural communities. Corporate fines at this level will not change behavior; sustained worker organizing and community pressure will.

Demand your elected representatives require the EPA to publish penalty transparency reports that compare assessed fines to the economic benefit of noncompliance. Demand that agricultural RMP enforcement include public disclosure of the specific violations found, not just the fine amount. The current system lets companies pay and walk away. Sunlight is the only disinfectant that actually works.