The Bardstown, Ky.-based company, the state’s fourth-largest surface miner, was sued in May in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky by Appalachian Voices, a coalition of four state and national environmental groups. They accused the company of more than 12,000 violations of the CWA, largely related to record-keeping transcription errors.
The suit alleged that over a two-year period starting in May 2008, Nally & Hamilton submitted at least 48 reports on discharged pollutants that repeated the same data in a report for the previous month. Over that time frame, the company also omitted required information from its reporting 68 times, according to the complaint.
In June, Nally & Hamilton formally responded to the complaint. In asking the court to throw out the suit, the company denied most of the allegations, in particular the claims it violated the CWA. “On occasion in the past, transcription errors, typographical errors or other inadvertent human errors have resulted in misreported or omitted data on discharge monitoring reports which represented an extremely low percentage of all reported data points,” the company said.
Nally & Hamilton said on “certain occasions between May 2008 and June 2010, it submitted [reports] with repeated parameter values from a prior month due to inadvertent human error.” Those errors, the company emphasized, “represented an extremely low percentage of all reported data points.”
