‘Coal-ash counties’ disappointed by new EPA regulations

Photo by Sam Perkins, Catawba Riverkeeper

Coal-ash slurry from a shuttered Duke Energy generating station in Eden, N.C. flows into the Dan River in February 2014 from a leaking ash basin. The utility estimated the spill at up to 39,000 tons of ash and 24 million gallons of wastewater.

When the EPA issued regulations last month on the disposal of coal ash, two North Carolina counties hoped there'd be good news for them. The agency had been considering whether to label coal ash as a hazardous material.

Lee and Chatham counties in North Carolina have been fighting against state-sanctioned industry plans to store residue from coal-fired electricity generation within their borders. Additionally, Chatham County is home to a shuttered power plant on the Cape Fear River where ash is stored. Coal ash contains toxic chemicals such as arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium, cadmium and chromium.

But the new law which EPA calls "the first national regulations to provide for the safe disposal of coal combustion residuals" stopped short of designating the material as hazardous. Its rules also rely on states and legal action to ensure compliance, not federal enforcement as environmentalists had hoped for. In addition, it does not apply to ash ponds at now-closed power plants, like the one in Chatham.

"Our case was not helped by the EPA, as we see it, abandoning and turning a blind eye to this," said Jim Crawford, chairman of the Chatham County Board of Commissioners.

Toothless Regulations

Ulla Reeves manages the high-risk energy program for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), which monitors coal ash issues in the Southeast. "The guidelines laid out are good guidelines; the problem with the federal rule is that it doesn't have any teeth . There's no federal oversight that's really meaningful in the new rule."

EPA has been studying the effects of coal-ash disposal since a catastrophic ash pond failure in Tennessee in 2008 that flooded 300 acres and released coal ash into two rivers. A massive leak into the Dan River in North Carolina last year also prompted legislative action in that state, the Coal Ash Management Act, passed in August 2014. But it doesn't make cleanup of lagoons in Chatham County (pop. 66,800) a priority, Crawford said.

"Lee and Chatham counties have some of the worst coal ash lagoons in the state," said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has successfully sued utility companies in the Southeast to have ash ponds closed or cleaned up.

But interest in the issue extends far beyond just these two counties. A region that includes Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida and Virginia is home to 40 percent of the nation's coal ash impoundments coal ash ponds and landfills, according to SoutheastCoalAsh.org.

"It is a critical problem in the Southeast because due to our historic dependence on coal to generate electricity we have at least one set of these coal ash lagoons on virtually every major river system in the Southeast, all of which are drinking water sources," Holleman added. It's also an issue in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions, and to a lesser degree, the West. But he said the biggest impacts are east of the Mississippi.

A Mainly Southeastern U.S. Problem

There are some 450 coal-ash impoundments in the Southeast, most of them unlined and more than 30 years old, according to SACE. They hold more than 118 billion gallons of "toxic waste" enough to cover 275,000 football fields in ash one foot deep.

For neighboring Lee and Chatham counties, the coal-ash issue is two-pronged. While both are concerned about hosting coal-ash dumps, Chatham is also worried about the safety of the ash ponds that already exist, which are upstream of the drinking water intake for Sanford, the Lee County seat.

Lee County's Board of Commissioners passed a resolution Jan. 5 opposing a plan to bury up to 8 million tons of coal ash from Duke Energy in an empty clay pit over the next eight years. Commission Chair Amy Dalrymple says it will be a "coal-ash mountain," a half mile long and five stories high. "That is not the 'Welcome to Lee County' sign we want."

The county's resolution stated, in part, that "by hosting this type of facility in Lee County, the citizens and businesses who have invested in the community will suffer economic hardships due to the stigma of being the coal ash capital of North Carolina."

Dalrymple recognizes that the counties' resolutions might not carry much weight. "But we wanted to at least send a message to our citizens that they were being heard," she said, "and that the majority of our board definitely agrees with the citizens that this is not a good thing for Lee County [pop. 60,000], and it certainly was not done correctly."

Chatham County's resolution, passed in December, noted shortcomings in the state's Coal Ash Management Act, highlighting provisions it said failed to adequately protect public health and natural resources, including "a prohibition on any local ordinances related to coal ash, including disposal, storage or transport within their jurisdictions, and limitations on local land use or zoning ordinance provisions that might apply to coal ash facilities ."

South Carolina as 'Poster Child'

Holleman said one needs look no farther than south of the border, in South Carolina albeit as a result of litigation and negotiations for an example of what EPA could have required. Every electric utility with coal ash ponds in the Palmetto State has agreed to excavate all of their water-filled coal ash lagoons in the state and move the ash to safe, lined storage or recycle it for beneficial uses, such as a component of concrete, he said.

While county resolutions may be "just words on paper," as Dalrymple says, focusing a community's attention and energies on a problem can be effective, according to Holleman.

"I think it's important to point out that in these efforts the local governments whether they have direct legal control they can have great impact on getting these sites cleaned up." He cited an example from Horry County, S.C. in which local government-focused opposition helped influence the utility Santee Cooper to clean up a site in Horry County.

"South Carolina has become kind of the poster child in the Southeast for good solutions to the coal ash problem," SACE's Reeves said.

Utilities can be influenced by the local counties, or local governments "expressing strong views about cleanups," Holleman said.

That's what Lee and Chatham counties are committed to doing.

"Jim and I are very hard-headed people," Dalrymple said of Crawford, "much like our citizens in our county, and they want us to fight this."

Added Crawford, "We've talked to Lee County, and they're comparable to us in terms of population size; we're looking at possible legal actions."

EPA coal-ash regulation highlights

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy signed the Disposal of Coal Combustion Residuals (CCR) from Electric Utilities final rule on Dec. 19, 2014, saying it established "safeguards to protect communities from coal ash impoundment failures." These include, but are not limited to:

• the closure of surface impoundments and landfills that fail to meet engineering and structural standards and will no longer receive coal ash
• reducing the risk of catastrophic failure by requiring regular inspections of the structural safety of surface impoundments
• restrictions on the location of new surface impoundments and landfills so that they cannot be built in sensitive areas such as wetlands and earthquake zones
• protecting groundwater by requiring monitoring, immediate cleanup of contamination, and closure of unlined surface impoundments that are polluting groundwater
• protecting communities using "fugitive dust" controls to reduce windblown coal ash dust, and
• requiring liner barriers for new units and proper closure of surface impoundments and landfills that will no longer receive CCRs.

Source: EPA news release, Dec. 19, 2014