AKRON — As the investigation continues into what led to Wednesday's Akron chemical plant explosion, we did our own digging into the company’s past.
We found Emerald Performance Materials, the company that owns the plant, has a history of non-compliance and health and safety violations.
In a 2013 EPA inspection, the federal agency said the company failed to report the release of the chemical “Butadiene” in a timely fashion. That's the same chemical released into the air after the explosion Wednesday and experts say its highly flammable.
During that same inspection, the EPA found a total of 5 violations, including a failure to conduct monthly leak detection of their equipment and “a failure to prevent non-sudden releases of hazardous waste”.
The company fixed those issues, but had to pay $100,000 in fines.
It also had a series of violations with OSHA in 2011 and 2016. The company paid thousands of dollars worth of penalties for those violations. All cases have been closed.