Ranor faces federal charges by EPA
By Caitlyn Kelleher JOURNAL REPORTER

The Westminster-based companies, Ranor, Inc. and Techprecision Corporation, are facing charges under the federal Clean Water Act and the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) for regulator violations at their metal fabrication facility.

"They did not obtain the permit they were supposed to have," said Greg Dain, the EPA's enforcement attorney for the project.

According a press release from the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA New England filed an administrative complaint in June seeking penalties for the companies' discharges of storm water without a permit and for their failure to submit to EPA Toxic Release Inventory Forms related to the processing at their facility of materials containing chromium, nickel and manganese.

The complaint seeks a penalty of up to $157,500 for the storm water violations and up to $32,500 for each of the EPCRA violations.

The company is located on 65 acres in a 125,000 square foot manufacturing facility, which "is the home for state-of-the-art equipment unique to our industry," according to the company's Web site.

Ranor moved to Bella Drive in Westminster in 1975 after it outgrew its original location in Fitchburg, according to the company's Web site. The company was founded by Robert A. Normandin Sr. in 1956.

Nobody from the company was immediately available for comment.

The storm water discharge is not illegal, said Dain. He said the permit requires monitoring processes and sets benchmarks that the company must follow if the monitoring shows specific levels of certain metals.

"The goal of the program is to protect the water," he said.

"We have no evidence that anyone's private well ahs been harmed by this," he said. "If we thought there was any danger of that we would have investigated that."

The discharge violations have occurred over five years and "are significant because the companies failed to implement best management practices to address storm water discharges from the facility and failed to conduct required monitoring," according to the EPA. "These measures, when properly implemented, ensure that storm water runoff does not diminish water quality."

"The Clean Water Act violations prevented the EPA and the company from knowing the quantity of pollutants being discharged into waters of the United States," said Robert W. Varney, Regional Administrator of EPA's New England office, in the press release. "The rightto know violations are also significant because EPA and the general public need to know how facilities are affecting the neighborhoods in which they live."