A cloud of highly toxic coal ash is seen blowing like a sandstorm straight at the homes on the Moapa River Reservation, one of many communities across the country at risk from unregulated coal ash dump sites. (Photo by Moapa Band of Paiutes)

The House’s embrace of David McKinley’s (R-WV) amendment and its attachment to the transportation bill is nothing short of a deadly betrayal of public health. This measure ensures that the nation’s dangerous and leaking coal ash ponds and landfills will continue to operate indefinitely without regulation or federal oversight. If it passes the Senate, it may be the most effective protection of Big Coal ever enacted by Congress.

Clearly such protection is at the expense of thousands of communities where toxic coal ash is dumped into drinking water, stacked high above towns, and blown into the lungs of children. The House has conveniently forgotten the largest toxic waste spill in U.S. history, which occurred in 2008 when a coal ash pond collapsed onto a riverside town in Kingston, TN, sweeping away houses and permanently destroying a community.

Instead of addressing the nationwide problem, the House amendment prevents the EPA from regulating coal ash and setting minimum standards for safe disposal. As a result, disposal of banana peels and other household trash would be more stringently regulated in the U.S. than the dumping of toxic ash.

Picture of coal ash site in Fairbanks, Alaska

(Russ Maddox is an Alaska Chapter Sierra Club volunteer.)

As the rest of the nation wakes up and begins to realize how damaging wanton handling and disposal of coal ash truly is, regulators and leaders in Alaska continue to keep their heads buried in the sand, or in this case, coal ash.

The forests of Alaska’s interior fueled the early gold rush. When they became scarce the railroad was pushed south to the coal fields of Nenana to fuel the steamships, massive dredges necessary to access and extract the gold.

These days it’s difficult to tell which hills are natural and which are just massive piles of mine tailings and waste. Along with the coal rush that fueled and heated the gold rush came millions of tons of coal ash. With the majority of the lowlands being wetlands and subject to periodic floods, coal ash was seen as a valuable resource for filling in low areas for development. Peat was mined for use as topsoil to support what was once a thriving local agriculture. Coal ash was and is still routinely used to refill the leftover peat pits to prepare them for development.

Aerial view of the Little Blue Run coal ash storage reservoir in Beaver County

Has Rep. David McKinley had a change of heart?  In a letter dated March 8, 2012, the primary author of EPA- bashing HR 2273 and best friend of coal ash, McKinley (R, WV) wrote Secretary Randy Huffman, head of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, to request that he accompany him on a visit to Chester, WV, at the southeastern edge of the massive Little Blue Run coal ash pond.  The goal of the urgent request is to assess the effectiveness of a new pumping system, which was designed to address the leaks in the pond that have plagued Chester residents for years.

The Little Blue Run coal ash pond is the largest in the nation, spanning two states and bordering a third, covering approximately 1,000 acres (over 1.5 square miles), and held back by a 40-story high hazard dam. The pond is 30 times larger than the TVA pond at the Kingston Fossil Plant, which burst in December 2008 and flooded 300 acres with 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge.  Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection estimates that a failure of the Little Blue dam would take the lives of 50,000 people.
 

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).