Buffalo Creek disaster

February 26, 2012 marked the 40th anniversary of the Buffalo Creek disaster—the “most destructive flood in West Virginia history,” which took 125 lives in Logan County, West Virginia, injured 1100, and left 4000 homeless.

The accounts of the manmade tsunami, borne of greed and negligence, are heartbreaking. The close-knit community was destroyed in an instant as children, neighbors, families and pets were swept to their deaths. According to one reporter who witnessed the event 40 years ago, the local high school was turned into a morgue like a scene from Gone with the Wind.

Because of the near total destruction of the community, not even photographs exist of all the victims. Nevertheless, the angelic face of 1-year old Jesse Gunells, who perished in the flood, graced a West Virginia gathering last weekend, speaking a thousand words of warning: that scores of coal ash dams, some entirely unregulated, pose similar deadly threats to communities living under them.

There are strong similarities between the Buffalo Creek disaster and the 2008 coal ash disaster in Harriman, Tennessee. A significant difference, however, is that—unlike in Tennessee—federal officials responded meaningfully to the West Virginia tragedy. The dam break led to the passage of the Surface Mining and Control and Reclamation Act and the addition of new standards in the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) that require all coal slurry impoundments to meet stricter engineering standards and undergo frequent inspections.

No regulatory reform whatsoever followed the TVA dam failure. No rules have been established by EPA, and our myopic, industry-funded leaders in the House passed a bill (HR 2273) that contains absolutely no requirements for inspections or specific engineering standards to address the nation’s hundreds of aging coal ash impoundments. The Senate is currently considering an identical bill (S 1751).

Trainloads of coal

On Tuesday, Virginia attorney Ted G. Yoakam, representing nearly 400 people living near the Battlefield Golf Club in Chesapeake, refiled a lawsuit against Dominion Virginian Power, MJM Golf LLC (the owner of the golf course) and two additional parties involved in building the course, requesting more than $2 billion in damages. 

The refiling doubles the demand for damages of the original suit and is based on new evidence of residential water wells contaminated with hazardous substances.  Wells near the golf course were found with elevated levels of toxic metals, including lead, vanadium, manganese, cobalt, nickel, cadmium and zinc. The complaint also alleges that 10 individuals – nine of them children – are injured by exposure to the hazardous chemicals from coal ash. Arsenic found in the fly ash on one of the properties was 700 times the accepted level, and radioactive elements thorium, radium and uranium in the ash was twice the level of background soils.  
 
Yet, according to Dominion, the ash is “completely non-hazardous.” This is a familiar story.
 

Two-headed trout from selenium-impacted stream. Photo from J.R. Simplot Company Study.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

The J.R. Simplot Company, owner of several phosphate mines in Idaho, is asking federal and state regulators to relax water quality standards and permit more selenium in Idaho streams than the law currently allows.  The reason: Simplot, one of the largest privately held companies in the world, doesn’t want to clean up creeks polluted with selenium from its mining operations in the Caribou National Forest.  As part of Simplot’s campaign to avoid expensive Superfund cleanups, the company conducted a study of the fish impacted by selenium near its Smoky Canyon Mine to demonstrate that a little more selenium is not such a bad thing.

The rub is that selenium is a deadly, bioaccumulative poison in small doses, which has caused widespread devastation of fisheries from California to North Carolina.  The principle sources of selenium contamination in U.S. waters are agricultural runoff, phosphate mining and, yes, coal ash.
 

The American Coal Ash Association is trying with might to mislead us. In a recent press release, they exaggerated the impact the Environmental Protection Agency’s rulemaking process is having on coal ash recycling, claiming a decrease in the recycling of combustion waste from coal plants since the EPA started work on a coal ash rule.The industry group stated the recycling rate “stalled in 2008 and 2009 as EPA reopened its coal ash regulatory agenda following the failure of a coal ash disposal facility in Tennessee.” 

However, the collapse of the TVA pond occurred in December 2008, and thus would have had no impact whatsoever on recycling rates that year.  The truth of the matter is that recycling rates fell in this period largely because of a downturn in the construction industry.

Aftermath of coal-ash dam spill in Tennessee

The earthquake that yesterday rattled foundations along the eastern seaboard, shut down a nuclear power plant and cracked the Washington Monument also shook a great many dangerous coal ash dams, similar to the one that failed in Harriman, Tennessee almost three years ago.

Several large ash ponds are located near the epicenter of the quake, about 40 miles northwest of Richmond, including three significant-hazard earthen dams at Dominion’s Bremo Bluff and Chesterfield power stations. By definition, these dams will cause serious economic and/or environmental damage in the event of a break. The decades-old dams impound thousands of acre-feet of toxic waste from the two coal-fired plants. However, no one appears to be paying much attention.

But they should be.

Rep. David McKinley

Tomorrow morning, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will vote on a bill to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate coal ash, introduced by Rep. David McKinley (WV-R).  To quote Jeff Goodell of Rolling Stone, this is not just a fight about coal ash,  “it's about demonizing the EPA, stalling the clean energy revolution, and putting corporate profits above public health and a sustainable planet.”  Goodell used these words in a recent editorial, referring to the latest corporate nonsense from AEP, the power company that decried its “premature retirement” of plants over half a century old.  While not directly about coal ash, the shoe fits.   

Goodell also is right that this is all about money. 

The arrogance and disregard for public health of the Virginia-based power giant, AES Corporation, is stunning. In 2002, AES, one of the world’s largest power companies, built a coal-fired power plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico without a solid waste landfill of any kind. Although the 450-MW power plant churns out almost 400,000 tons of toxic coal ash a year, AES has nowhere to safely dispose of the waste. Yet the situation is apparently working out just fine for AES.

From 2003 to 2004, the plant loaded its waste on 10,000-ton barges and sailed for the Dominican Republic. In the DR, AES dumped an estimated 80,000 tons of coal ash along beaches in the port towns of Arroyo Barill and Manzanillo, under the guise of future port “renovations.”  After the ash sat on the beaches for about two years, blowing into a nearby village, the Dominican Republic sued AES in federal court for $80 million in damages and stopped the dumping. In 2009, a civil action was filed against AES, alleging severe birth defects were caused by the coal ash contamination.

Coal ash storage in Tennessee

Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released final assessment reports that detail the structural integrity of 38 coal ash dams.  The agency began inspecting coal ash dams in May 2009, and EPA contractors have, to date, completed assessments of 228 dams.  Of these 228 coal ash dams, EPA inspectors gave a rating of “poor” to 55 dams, about 24 percent of the total inspected.  Nine “poor” rated dams were identified yesterday in Alabama, Colorado, Louisiana and Texas. 

These 55 poor-rated dams could kill people, devastate communities and cause substantial economic and environmental damage should they fail.  The EPA explicitly tells us this.  Of these 55 dams containing millions of gallons of metal-laden sludge, nine are high hazard dams, meaning that if breached, they would likely take human life and 39 were significant hazard dams, defined as dams that would cause substantial economic and environmental harm if they failed. 

Several House members and right-wing bloggers believed they struck gold after House members indulged in a bit of chicanery at an April 15th Environment and Energy subcommittee hearing on a bill to remove EPA’s authority to establish strong coal ash regulations. The ruse started when Rep. Cory Gardner (R, CO) excerpted a single sentence from a 242-page Regulatory Impact Analysis prepared by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on its proposed rule to regulate disposal of coal ash.  

The excerpted sentence was displayed prominently on the hearing room monitor.  It read:

This [Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA)] does not include either qualitative or quantitative estimation of the potential effects of the proposed rule on economic productivity, economic growth, employment, job creation, or international economic competitiveness.

It was a “gotcha” moment for the Republican majority members present.  “EPA admits jobs don’t matter” was the story that immediately went viral. The problem is that the sound bites were nonsense. 

News that the EPA may delay the coal ash rule until the end of 2012 or even 2013 will come as a bitter disappointment to communities across the United States. Many had faith in Administrator Jackson’s promise that this Administration would finally issue effective controls on toxic ash disposal in 2010.

The regulation of coal ash is already 30 years overdue. In 1976, Congress was cognizant of the threat to health, environment and drinking water from toxic waste, and it mandated that EPA regulate the disposal of both solid and hazardous wastes. In the years that followed, EPA proceeded to regulate hundreds of dangerous waste streams. Nevertheless, powerful interests have kept the regulation of coal ash at bay. In doing so, however, the electric utility industry has created monsters they cannot control—as seen in the release of over a billion gallons of toxic sludge from just one of hundreds of impoundments hanging above communities across the nation.