Dukeville, N.C. has a problem. Their water supply, at least some of it,
may be poison:
[Sherry] Gobble, who lives alongside Duke Energy’s Buck Steam Station in a Rowan County community called Dukeville, discovered six months ago that water in her family’s well contains the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium-6. Since then, they have armed themselves with bottled water and a growing pile of empty jugs they fill up across town where they know the water isn’t tainted.
Duke Energy vigorously denies these allegations. North Carolina passed
legislature a couple months ago:
Whereas, the issue of coal ash storage has not been adequately addressed in North Carolina for more than six decades; and
Whereas, on February 2, 2014, an estimated 39,000 tons of coal ash was released into the Dan River following the failure of a stormwater pipe under a utility coal ash impoundment pond in Eden, North Carolina; and
Whereas, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources ("Department") finds that coal combustion products have settled into the sediment of the river bottom and will require an extensive clean-up plan to complete remediation; and
Whereas, the Department is in the process of reassessing previous efforts at achieving compliance at coal ash facilities and developing short term and long term policies in light of the Dan River spill, violations discovered in light of increased inspections of coal combustion products disposal facilities and anticipated new federal regulations on coal combustion products; and
Whereas, it is the intent of the Department to ensure that spills of wastewater are reported to the Department in a defined and adequate time frame; and
Whereas, it is the intent of the Department to protect surface water and groundwater resources for their best usage...
The problem is that there are issues with the legislation. Specifically the immediacy with which regulatory changes and standards are to be implemented.
Gobble’s fears highlight what state environmentalists say is a primary flaw of North Carolina’s new law managing coal ash. The law, which went into effect last month after a massive ash spill along the Dan River earlier this year, is groundbreaking in that it is the first state-level attempt to manage the ash impoundments. It prioritizes four of the state’s 14 coal ash sites for immediate cleanup. But cleanup of the remaining sites, such as Buck Steam Station, could take as long as 15 years.
“I don’t understand how you can you say there are four sites that are top priority when there are 14 in the state,” Gobble said.
Follow me below the fold for more on what's being done and what is not being done.
The "wake up call" that prompted this legislation was the aforementioned Dan River environmental disaster. However, many environmentalists felt that the legislation, though bold by today's sad standards, came up short.
Molly Diggins, state director of the North Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club, said North Carolina’s experience illuminates how desperately the state needs the EPA to provide minimum standards for coal ash management nationwide. Federal clean water standards are often delegated to states to implement
“The legislature really struggled mightily with trying to develop a bill given that there were no Federal requirements and no best practices in other states,” she said. “North Carolina was trying to bring the entire sector of pollution into the state’s regulatory scheme with no assistance,” she said.
Diggins and other environmentalists said that partly due to this, the bill came up short. She said it should have requirements to ensure that all coal ash be permanently separated from the ground water, such as in lined impoundments, if it’s not removed from the site.
Rick Gaskins, executive director of the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, elaborated on this. “One of the biggest concerns we have with the law is we know that every single one of these unlined coal ash ponds in the state is leaking and has contaminated ground water.” He said the Charlotte, North Carolina-based foundation is seeing periodic spikes in carcinogens, such as arsenic, in a reservoir north of the city near Duke Energy’s Riverbend site, one of the four sites prioritized by the new law.
The Riverbend site is the primary drinking water source for about a million people in the Charlotte metropolitan area, according to Gaskins. “A catastrophic failure like they had up at Dan River is a real risk,” he said. Coal ash ponds along the Catawba River are dramatically bigger than the Dan River ash pond, which held about 30,000 tons of ash — one-tenth the size of the coal ash impoundment at the Marshal Steam Station on Lake Norman north of Charlotte, which is linked to the Catawba River, he said.
North Carolina's anti-environmental issues came to light after the Dan river disaster. Daily Kos' Meteor Blades
wrote about the recklessness of the N.C. government here.
But back to Dukeville. While Duke Energy denies any contamination, activists are calling for further testing. Duke Energy says it has tested water around it's ash ponds and found nothing amiss, and they say they have tested some people's well water and found no pollutants. But:
The findings, however, differed from results of other well tests conducted by the Waterkeeper Alliance, which has prompted calls from residents and activists for Duke, the alliance and state officials to test the same wells at the same time.
The power plant’s willingness to cooperate with that request, however, has broken down over the request to test coal ash basins for chemical comparison, according to the Waterkeeper Alliance. Sutton disputed this, saying that Duke tests the groundwater around the coal ash basins several times a year and makes the date publicly available through the DENR.
“They denied any possibility that there could be a problem here, which I think on its face is a pretty unreasonable position to take,” Harrison said.
“The issue is the same issue Duke has from our own data from the private wells. How can we know that we trust that data?” he said.
It seems that there needs to be an EPA investigation in this case. The worst case scenario is that the energy plants have to spend money to stop polluting the surrounding environments they inhabit–probably expensive but clearly the legal and moral thing to do. In the best case scenario, the water is not being polluted and there's a boost in the job creation for well water and ash pond scientists.