Coal ash mixed with snow on a Meigs County road.
Courtesy of Meigs Citizens Action Now!
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The EPA opened the public comment period last week for two proposals for regulation of coal ash, a byproduct of coal combustion at power plants that many people first heard about after the Kingston, TN spill in 2008.
I spoke with two people who live in communities where coal ash is dumped. They had a lot to say about the consequences of not regulating it as hazardous waste.
John Wathen lives in Perry County, Alabama, where much of the coal ash from the Kingston spill has been sent for disposal. He works in water conservation and has been monitoring the landfill where the coal ash is being dumped for heavy metals and other toxins that he has found are leaching out from the site and into public water supplies. He spoke with me from Louisiana (where he has been documenting the effects of the BP oil spill).
Planet Green: You have a background working with water—how did you get started working on coal ash?
I started working on the coal ash issue right after Kingston, TN. I was asked to visit the site and when I saw the volume that was there, and the liquid involved, I knew it was going to be an issue wherever they took it. I didn't know they were going to take it to Alabama, where I live.
When I did find out, we tried to mobilize the state and do what we could to block it. The area where they're dumping it is 70 percent people of color and many are below the poverty level. It's an environmental justice community. It's a county where all the white people, for the most part, are going to vote Republican and all the black people, for the most part are going to vote Democratic. Democrats don't come down there because they know they're going to get the vote anyway. So neither party pays a lot of attention to Perry County.
It's primarily a poor community, with people that grow gardens every year not for hobby but because they need the food. They can't grow their vegetables now because they're afraid of what may be in the water.
They bring the wet coal ash down here and mix it with household garbage, creating an enormous amount of leachate. It's thick and brown—it's like a toxic milkshake. In order to reduce the amount of leachate, they pump it from the bottom of the landfill into trucks and drive it around to the top, on top of the coal ash and let that filter through—but that intensifies the arsenic.
We sent two complaints to Lisa Jackson. First I sent one informal request for help, then two formal complaints through the EPA process, and they've never responded to a single one.
PG: What do you think of the regulation proposals currently being considered by the EPA?
One alternative classifies coal ash as a hazardous material, I like that one better—this stuff is toxic and it needs to be treated as such. When you deal with it from state to state, you run into situations like the one I'm in in Alabama. Tennessee is treating it like hazmat: trucks have to be double-washed and if you go in and out of the plant, your car has to be double-washed. There are air monitor stations all over the place. They put it in sealed bags on trains so that no dust is let out—and when it gets to Perry County, they bust open the bags and dump the waste all over the ground. The train cars have to be washed and vacuumed before returning to Tennessee, and here it's washing directly into the stream. It's near 120 commercial catfish farms—if there's an accident, we'll have a problem with the catfish ponds. And the groundwater. And you can't tell me they won't have another accident.
Elisa Young lives in Meigs County, Ohio. Coal ash from four nearby power plants has spread throughout her community; she talks here about how it has affected her community, and the public health issues she believes are related to the lack of regulation and proper treatment.
PG: Can you describe how coal ash has affected your community?
Elisa Young: Right now I'm sitting in my car on the side of the road looking at coal ash. They dump it on our roads 35 times a winter. When I go dig up in my garden, you know what I see? I see coal ash. I raise my chickens to eat the eggs—I don't want that in my garden, I don't want that in my chickens.
I've lost six neighbors to cancer. Our cows are getting cancer, my dog died of cancer. A report just came out, we have the poorest health in the state, the highest lung cancer death rate according to the American Cancer Society, and the highest for all cancer deaths combined. Both families and children are the least likely in the state to have health insurance, and there's no county hospital.
Regulations only apply to landfills—they don't regulate or monitor beneficial use of coal ash. They've lined the children's running tracks with it. They make gypsum board and roofing shingles out of it—anyone who wants to gather water from their roof like I've always done, will wonder what's in the shingles.
As taxpayers, we pay the EPA to protect public health. But they call it "special waste." How pitiful is that? If you look at the environmental definition of hazardous waste, coal is hazardous waste. It's toxic. But coal ash looks totally different to a number cruncher in Washington, DC, than it does to someone who's burying their neighbors in it.
PG: What do you want from the EPA?
EY: We need the EPA to stand up for us. Because when they fail, we don't have other meaningful ways of addressing it. And the EPA can only enforce existing rules—there has to be an existing rule that protects public safety. If they have a weaker law in West Virginia, they'll just dump it from the West Virginia side. Unless we have an overarching law, there will never be equity.
None of us work for the coal industry. They're not employing the entire community, but they're putting the entire community at risk.
No industry has that right, to render an entire community unsuitable for living. The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the entire U.S., and that's where my drinking water comes from. Even if I make the verbal commitment to stay here, I don't know if I can physically do it. We are dying younger and younger, while if you look at the national mortality rate, it's increasing. It's a web of life and it's time that they start considering that—water doesn't know any boundaries.
We want a citizens' advisory component to be included in creating the regulations that protect our communities. We also want public hearings in the environmental justice communities that are impacted—not just one hearing held out of reach in Washington, DC.
The median income in my community is $14,000 a year, and we have double digit unemployment. The last number I saw was 17.7 percent, but I've seen it as high as 24 percent. We have a lot of farmers, and even if they had the funds to get to DC to give testimony, summer is not a good time for them to travel. We really need to have public hearings in our communities if this is meant for people to participate and not just create a show of public participation.
To comment on the EPA's proposed rules, which are available online [PDF], visit http://www.regulations.gov/ or email rcra-docket@epa.gov. by September 20.
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