The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) held a public hearing in Virginia last week on their proposed revisions to the federal coal ash disposal standards—one of the largest sources of toxic water pollution in the United States. Grand Riverkeeper Earl Hatley, Altamaha Riverkeeper Jenifer Hilburn, and Mobile Baykeeper Casi Callaway, Staff Attorney Larissa Liebmann, Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Ted Evgeniadis, Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks, and Potomac Riverkeeper Network Vice President of Programs and Litigation Phillip Musegaas provided testimonies—scroll down to read selections from their first-hand accounts of how coal ash has hurt their communities and waterways.
You can help, too! EPA is taking public comments on this dangerous proposal until midnight tonight. Please submit your comment to EPA and oppose the weakening of public protections from toxic coal ash.
Testimony of Altamaha Riverkeeper Jen Hilburn:
Hello. My name is Jenifer Hilburn and I am the Altamaha Riverkeeper, representing 56 counties and over 6million people’s ability to utilize our waters for swimming, fishing, drinking and recreation.
The Altamaha River System in Georgia travels from Atlanta and Athens, through middle GA’s lake country and finally drains into the Atlantic Ocean. It is the largest river system draining into the SE Atlantic, and the 3rd largest on the eastern seaboard. In this journey, our water passes by the closed Plant Arkwright in Macon, with its closed and leaking coal ash ponds, some of the oldest in the country and into the Ocmulgee River. Our water also passes by the newly closed Plant Branch in Milledgeville with millions of tons of stored coal ash leaking continuously into Lake Sinclair a popular and populated destination for all kinds of Lake fun. Our water passes Plant Sherer, the largest CO2 producer in the western hemisphere, where coal ash ponds have so polluted neighbors drinking water wells that the utility is buying up the properties and when they do they include a liability waiver in the real estate documents, this liability waiver excerpts the utility of any past, present or future medical issues, real or perceived. The utility began this process after they began their required self-monitoring of these ponds, something the current CCR rule requires and is currently being considered to be taken away. Finally, our water ends on Georgia’s unique and beautiful coastline, where the closed Plant McManus coal ash pond has either leaked, or had such woefully inadequate treatment of coal ash pond water before it was de-watered that the salt marsh grass is covered with sludge that contains arsenic and thallium.
Who is supposed to protect these waters, these people, our children? Who do the taxpayers employ to make sure they are able to swim and fish in their rivers, their lakes and along their coast? Who do they trust to make sure that the groundwater wells they drink from are protected? Who do the American people trust to mandate and watch over toxic clean-ups? Who do they trust to make utilities clean up their leaking ponds? To require utilities to monitor these billions of tons of toxic slurry across our nation? To protect their private property rights? The Environmental Protection Agency.
And who is now considering abandoning them, leaving them in the hands of political appointees, in the hands of the very industry that created the pollution while making billions, and prefers to leave the public in the dark? The Environmental Protection Agency. Why would our protection agency become our pollution agency? Because industry is the biggest, meanest, slobbering dog in this fight? Because they have more money than all the taxpayers combined? That is not in the mandate of the EPA
It is long overdue for industry to stop the transfer of their cost-savings onto the health and well-being of our citizens and our waterways. It is a requirement that the Environmental Protection Agency protect our environment, our health, our safety.
This is it folks. This is really it. There is only this earth. This is all there is. There is nowhere to go but here. The Clean Water Act anticipated pollution-free waterways by 1985. We missed the mark. The Environmental Protection Agency missed the mark. Our EPA needs to be working towards protecting what we have, not to succumb to the whims of this wealthy industrial nation.
This is it. This is really it. This is all there is. And it is not ok.
Testimony of Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Ted Evgeniadis:
In 2015, the Obama administration adopted the first-ever national standards for the disposal of coal ash. The federal rule requires numerous critical safeguards, including regular inspection of ash ponds, monitoring of groundwater, cleanup when contamination is found, safe closure, and public posting of monitoring and inspection results. Even with these new standards, many sites containing CCR whether mines or coal-fired power plants still got away with doing the bare minimum. That’s because underfunded state agencies like the PADEP don’t get around to addressing the issues of coal ash. Nor do they have “time and resources” to follow through with finalizing NPDES permits for the coal-fired power plants who are burning the coal, to begin with.
In 2017, the Lower Susquehanna Riverkeeper Association represented by the Sierra Club filed a letter of intent to the sue the state of PA for 10 coal-fired power plants which all have expired NPDES permits. Some of these permits have been expired for over ten years. Our settlement has now put pressure on the PADEP to actually do the intended job of the agency. It’s about time we receive some cooperation from our state agency on addressing coal issues in the state of PA.
Brunner Island’s coal-burning operations generate over 671,800 tons of coal combustion residuals (“CCR”) annually, including fly ash, bottom ash, and FGD, gypsum. CCR generated at the Plant has historically been disposed of in onsite ash basins and landfills, a system which today includes numerous closed ash basins, one active ash basin and one active landfill built on top of a former ash basin. The unlined ash basin has no means of keeping water, such as precipitation, from entering, combining with the CCR wastes inside, and then leaching CCR contaminants into the environment.
As EPA describes, “current scientific literature indicates that steam electric power plant wastewater is not a benign waste.”1 EPA concluded that there is “substantial” evidence that pollutants from coal combustion wastewater discharges to nearby recreational waters can present a threat to human health. Once these pollutants are released from coal ash pits to nearby waters, their harmful effects are persistent and widespread. As EPA recognized, “after being released into the environment, pollutants can reside for a long time in the receiving waters, bioaccumulating and binding with the sediment. There is documented evidence of slow ecological recovery as a result of these pollutant discharges … Some impacts might not be realized for years due to the persistent and bioaccumulative nature of the pollutants released.” 1 EPA modeling “demonstrates that pollutant loadings from discharges of [these wastestreams] are impacting areas beyond the immediate receiving waters and pose a threat to wildlife and human populations in thousands of river-miles downstream from steam electric power plants…”
As you hear those facts presented by the EPA and you look at the actions taken by the EPA over the last year, at this point one can only hope that more damage doesn’t occur in the future. EPA providing support as a backdrop to state agencies is critical. As a Riverkeeper I am concerned about the river communities surrounding sites that contain CCR. Being a resident and Riverkeeper in the same township as an active power plant I am concerned about leaching contaminants into our waterways and my own neighbor’s well water. I know these harmful contaminants will continue to affect water quality and the aquatic species which thrive in those waters. Not to mention any potential effects on humans, which has been documented. The amount of contaminants such as Arsenic, a carcinogen we ALL know, which expel from coal ash sites is disgusting. The leaching of heavy metals and contaminants into our groundwater, Rivers, and tributaries across the United States is atrocious. These regulations cannot be rolled back by the EPA and more accountability must be demanded of our state agencies to continue to monitor these sites and orchestrate cleanups. Our government, its agencies, and the power producers all have a duty to act as stewards of our environment just as every other citizen owes a debt to the land beneath their feet. Our future generations will be the ones to suffer. We must demand that this rule remains in effect and that our state agencies take an active role in addressing coal ash.
Testimony of Mobile Baykeeper Casi Callaway:
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I speak on behalf of the board, officers, staff and more than 4500 members in across Alabama, primarily located in Coastal Alabama. We are a statewide organization focusing on the issues that
affect the health of the Mobile Bay Watershed and our coastal communities.
Coal Ash or Coal Combustion Residuals greatly affect the health of our watershed, our families, our business, and our communities. Alabama boasts 130,000 miles of rivers and the majority of those rivers flow through the Mobile Bay Watershed making us the 4th largest watershed by volume in North America. Those Mobile Bay Watershed rivers converge into the Mobile Tensaw Delta and that is where time seems to have stopped. The area is wild, wooded, wet, blooming, burgeoning with life around every corner.
You can hear the gators bark at each other, the wild hogs rooting and snorting, the eagles are battling the osprey for their hard-won fish and the ducks, anhinga, pelicans and more slam into the flat calm waterways just in time to catch their
dinner. We have more turtle species than anywhere else on the globe, more crawfish, so many species of everything – trees, grasses, fish, snails – you name it, we have it.
But the Delta is not just home to wild things. We use it. We hunt, fish, swim, boat and enjoy those waterways.
And we have businesses in the Delta. Industries such as AM/NS Calvert, Outokumpu, Dupont, Olin – more than 30 major industries reside up the Mobile River on the western side of the Delta. We also support the Port of Mobile, now the 10th largest in the nation, and our coastal counties provide more than 30% of the state’s budget through tourism annually with more than 5.5 million visitors each year. So, we need the Delta, Mobile Bay and all the natural resources that thrive there. We need it to be healthy so that it can support our ability to swim, fish, hunt, work, and play.
The CCR Rules established in 2015 didn’t go far enough to ensure future generations could live without worrying about coal ash ponds and any kind of breach or failure would be out of their minds. These new rules remove even more assurances.
#1) Cleaning up your mess cannot be negotiable; it can’t be a choice, it must be a fact. Every coal ash pond must be closed. Flexibilities for how one pond is closed versus another certainly should exist, based on hydrology, geology, proximity to water, but no one should be exempted from closure for any reason.
#2) Testing is imperative. It must be well defined, consistent and long-term. Barry Steam Plant was told by our state agency – ADEM – that the coal ash from their pond was in close proximity to the groundwater in 1994. No response and no change and no testing happened until the 2015 rule required it. The challenge is we found out in March 2, 2018 that our power plants across Alabama were violating their permit the minute they started testing. It is doubtful that the first time there was groundwater contamination was in March of 2016.
#3) Minimum standards must apply to ALL. Children, women, old, young, rich, poor, black white – standards that protect human health should be the baseline for determining contamination period. States cannot be the ones defining the minimum allowable limits for the pollutants in groundwater – especially when EPA has already defined the limits.
#4) Coal Ash is NOT the same as Municipal Household waste and cannot be treated as such.
#5) EPA must create rules that Clearly define the problem, the solution and remove arbitrary decision-making. We may not have all loved this president, the last president or the next president. The rules that are created must last through political party changes and not be arbitrarily based on favoritism. They must be clear and firm and protect human health and the environment. EPA originally wrote that allowing the groundwater protection standards to be determined by the permit holder or even the state agency is “inappropriate” because it is “too susceptible to potential abuse”.
#6) Public Access to information. More data, all of the data must be made available to the public so that they can take ownership over protecting themselves.
The EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment. Simple.
The Director has stated that his goal is to lead EPA in a way that our future generations inherit a better and healthier environment.
So do it.
Set rules that protect human health and the environment. You know that arsenic, lead, chromium, boron and the host of other pollutants contained in coal ash cause harm to humans and the environment. Set clear rules that protect the public, the economy, and our environment.