Uniontown, Ala., is home to about 2,000 people, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store and a catfish plant. And now, Uniontown is also home to a 1 million-ton mountain of coal ash.
Coal ash — a byproduct of the combustion of coal at power plants — contains more than a dozen heavy metals and chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency associates with cancer and other serious health effects. Without proper protections, EPA warns that the contaminants in coal ash — including arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, molybdenum, selenium and thallium — can leach into groundwater and make their way into the nation’s drinking water sources.
Due to the widespread use of coal to generate electricity, coal ash dumps likely exist in every state in the nation, environmental and health activists say. EPA estimates there are about 300 dry landfills and close to 600 coal ash waste ponds across 45 states. Additionally, coal ash has been deposited across the country as fill in hundreds of inactive dumps as well as in abandoned and active mines.
Despite the dangers posed by coal ash to human health and the environment, there are no federally enforceable regulations specific to coal ash. Environmental and health activists blame the lack of safeguards for a December 2008 accident in Kingston, Tenn., that sent more than 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge spewing across 300 acres when an earthen wall holding back a 40-acre coal ash disposal pond failed at a coal-fired power plant. Inarguably the worst coal ash disaster in U.S. history, the accident contaminated the Emory and Clinch rivers, destroyed several homes, displaced dozens of residents and left EPA overseeing a cleanup effort reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Sarah McCoin, of Roane County, Tenn., looks over cleanup work near Kingston, Tenn., in September. In 2008, a coal ash pond breach spread 1 billion gallons of toxic sludge in the area.
Photo by Bob Fowler, courtesy Knoxville News Sentinel/AP Images
Nearly two years after the Kingston coal ash disaster catapulted the dangers associated with structurally unsafe coal ash impoundments into the national spotlight, EPA in May proposed the first-ever national rules to ensure the safe disposal and management of coal ash from coal-fired power plants. In August, the agency kicked off hundreds of hours of standing-room only regional hearings across the United States to gather public comment on two approaches to regulate coal ash available under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
“We’re proposing strong steps to address the serious risk of groundwater contamination and threats to drinking water, and we’re also putting in place stronger safeguards against structural failures of coal ash impoundments,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a May statement announcing the national dialogue on the two options for addressing the risks of coal ash management.
Environmental organizations, including the Sierra Club, are applauding EPA for recognizing the health and environmental risks posed by coal ash and for soliciting public comment on the issue.
“It’s the only way many people who live near these sites will be heard — and they have powerful stories to tell of high incidences of cancer, contaminated drinking water and lost property values as a result of decades of inadequate state regulation and irresponsible coal ash disposal,” Lyndsay Moseley of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign, told The Nation’s Health.
The two options — taken from authorities available under subtitles C and D of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act — are drawing a distinct line between environmental and health activists and coal industry lobbyists, many of whom testified at the public hearings that ran from August to October around the country. The tougher option, under Subtitle C, would do more to protect the public’s health by regulating coal ash as “special” waste and putting needed protections in place, including the phase-out of dangerous waste ponds, environmental activists say. The Subtitle D option, favored by coal and power industries lobbyists, would designate coal ash as non-hazardous waste, essentially maintaining the voluntary and varying protections that are narrower in scope and would be enforced primarily by states that adopt their own coal ash management programs.
However, both options would require, for the first time on a national basis, that liners and groundwater monitoring be in place at new landfills handling coal ash to prevent leaching of contaminants to groundwater, and resulting risks to human health.
“Subtitle C — the strong option — would provide basic environmental and public health safeguards backed up with federal enforcement and financial accountability,” Moseley said. “It is far more protective than the other option, because it covers coal ash cradle to grave.”
Health and environmental activists say each step of the coal life cycle — mining, transportation, washing, combustion and disposal of post-combustion wastes — impacts human health.
Coal is gathered at a mining site.
Photo courtesy iStockphoto
Under the Subtitle C option, coal ash sites would have to be permitted and would be required to take basic safety precautions, such as installing liners and water run-off controls as well as groundwater monitoring and dust controls. Moreover, wet coal ash ponds — the most dangerous form of storage — would be phased out within five to seven years and replaced with safer dry storage, which would be closely monitored.
Residents of Caledonia, Wis., attend a Chicago EPA hearing in September. Some Caledonia residents are without drinking water because of contamination linked to a local power plant.
Photo by Christine Won, copyright The Journal Times
Additionally, companies operating coal ash sites when the rule goes into effect would be responsible for costs associated with closing ash ponds and dumps as well as post-closure care, and would be financially responsible for harms caused by their facilities, Moseley said.
In contrast, the guidelines issued as part of the Subtitle D option are not federally enforceable and would “enshrine the status quo,” said Moseley, calling them a weak and inadequate patchwork of measures.
In states that have no coal ash protections, violators could only be held accountable through difficult and expensive lawsuits or possible state regulations, she said. Additionally, the Subtitle D option applies only to the disposal of coal ash, not the generation, transportation, storage or treatment of the ash, and provides no financial assurances for communities that are contaminated.
All of this comes too late, perhaps, for the people of Uniontown, Ala., who are the unwilling recipients of a million tons of Kingston’s coal ash, hauled to the Arrowhead Landfill in a seemingly endless caravan of trucks and trains.
“This is a poor area, and the people don’t have a voice,” testified Michael Jackson, JD, district attorney for Alabama’s Fourth Judicial Circuit, at EPA’s hearing in Arlington, Va., in August. “These dumping grounds are often in minority areas. You never see it in a rich area.”
Jackson told The Nation’s Health that Alabama has no regulations governing coal ash, which he said is now so pervasive in Uniontown that residents can smell it and their drinking water has turned brown.
“I have the largest circuit in the state, and we prosecute murderers and rapists and gang members,” he said. “But what I’m trying to do is get help to prosecute these environmental criminals who are destroying the land, the water and the air.”
Coal ash linked to human health risks
Despite the widespread devastation brought on by the Kingston accident, most Americans are only beginning to comprehend the extent to which coal ash endangers their health. Coal pollutants affect all major body organ systems and contribute to heart disease, cancer, stroke and chronic lower respiratory diseases, according to a report released in September by Physicians for Social Responsibility. The report, “Coal’s Assault on Human Health,” found that coal pollutants can also damage the nervous system, contributing to the loss of intellectual capacity.
“The disaster that took place in Kingston a few years ago called attention to these problems, which had been there all along but people didn’t recognize it,” Alan Lockwood, MD, a professor of neurology at the State University of New York, Buffalo, and the report’s lead author, told The Nation’s Health. “A lot of these coal combustion waste products are being stored behind dams like the one that failed in Tennessee, and are sort of disasters waiting to happen.”
Environmental scientists agree that the most common threat that coal ash poses to public health comes from the slow leakage of toxic pollution from disposal sites such as ponds and landfills. But recycled coal ash poses another avenue of exposure to toxic materials, as some states allow coal ash to be spread on unpaved roads, added to concrete, used as structural fill or as cinders on school running tracks.
“It’s hard to defend applications where coal combustion waste is used as landfill around schools and in environments where children are going to be exposed to dust that comes from that,” Lockwood said. “Coal ash is also proposed for and is used in some places in cement that goes on the highways, but of course as trucks and automobiles and the like go down these roads, they grind off small particles that go into the atmosphere and are inhaled.”
While coal ash disposal sites are located in virtually every state, the threat is not shared equally. Another report, released in September by Earthjustice and Physicians for Social Responsibility, noted that many coal ash disposal sites are located in rural areas, where land availability and lower land prices make it inexpensive to purchase the multi-acre sites necessary for ash ponds and landfills, and where the power plants that generate the ash are also frequently located.
“It is grossly unfair that in fact many of these waste sites are in our poorer communities and disproportionately affect folks who have to live in them,” Peter Wilk, MD, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility, told The Nation’s Health.
For more, visit www.epa.gov/coalashrule.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
