http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07068/768097-113.stm Activists say EPA ignoring threat from coal ash
Waste is leaching into groundwater, posing health risks
Friday, March 09, 2007
By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Despite possessing data showing lagoons and landfills filled with coal ash present a cancer risk up to 10,000 times greater than federal rules allow, a coalition of environmental groups says, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has failed to fulfill a promise to adopt public health regulations for those sites.
A group of 27 environmental groups led by Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law firm, this week made public a summary of the EPA’s own cancer risk assessments for coal ash disposal sites and called on the agency finally to control the waste from coal-fired power plants.
“It’s very simple. Coal combustion waste currently disposed without adequate safeguards poses an imminent and substantial endangerment to health and the environment in dozens of communities throughout the country,” said Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans. “EPA has made no effort to protect the public against these pollution sources for over seven years. We believe it is time to act.”
The EPA’s report on coal combustion waste has been submitted to the federal Office of Management and Budget for review, according to Roxanne Smith, an EPA spokeswoman. No date is scheduled for its release.
Ms. Smith said the EPA has determined that the coal ash does not warrant regulation as hazardous waste. The agency has been working with the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, a lobbying consortium of 80 utility operating companies, to develop a voluntary plan for managing the waste.
Coal ash is one of the largest streams of solid waste in the United States and includes fly ash, bottom ash and air emission scrubber sludge. Analysis of the waste has found toxins including arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium, lead, selenium and boron that can cause deformities, reproductive problems and cancers in humans.
Each year, the nation’s 450 coal-burning utility plants produce more than 130 million tons of ash and dispose of it in 600 landfills and surface impoundments or lagoons. Pennsylvania produces more than 9.5 million tons of coal ash waste a year, more than every state but Kentucky, Texas and Indiana.
Nationwide, 40 percent of the landfills accepting coal waste and 80 percent of the impoundment lagoons do not have liners that would prevent pollutants from leaching into the groundwater. Fewer than half of the landfills and 1 percent of the impoundments have leachate collection systems.
There are seven permitted coal ash impoundments that are active in Pennsylvania, only one of which is lined. The unlined impoundments were all opened before 1992, when state regulations were changed to require a liner. Those state regulations mandate groundwater monitoring at all seven facilities, according to Helen Humphreys, a state Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman.
She said about 40 percent of the coal ash produced each year is used in wallboard and cement products. Over the last two decades, the ash also has been used to fill and reclaim more than 110 abandoned mine sites.
According to the EPA’s unreleased draft study summary, pollution from coal combustion waste dumps and lagoons has contaminated surface water and groundwater at up to 78 sites in 23 states.
The agency’s calculations indicate that the cancer risk for adults and children drinking groundwater contaminated with arsenic from those sites can be as high as one in 100. Most federal health regulations require that the risk of contracting cancers from pollutants be limited to one in 100,000 or one in 1 million.
None of the proven contamination sites is in Pennsylvania although a 1988 EPA report to Congress says monitoring wells around Reliant Energy’s Elrama power plant in Washington County found cadmium levels up to 20 times higher than federal Drinking Water Standards allow in a former strip mine used for coal ash.
The environmental groups have submitted a proposal to the EPA that recommends restrictions on lagoon and landfill locations away from groundwater aquifers, floodplains and wetlands; design criteria to prohibit new lagoon construction; and tougher groundwater monitoring rules.
The groups also called on the EPA to take immediate action to monitor, investigate and abate pollution from coal ash waste sites.
“Because of the lack of groundwater monitoring, we don’t know if there’s been damage or contamination of our groundwater. That’s a basic problem at almost all the sites,” said Lisa Graves Marcucci, a leader of the Jefferson Action Group, formed several years ago to oppose a coal ash landfill in southern Allegheny County.
She said that with 150 new power plants planned in the nation, eight of them in Pennsylvania, there is an urgent need for mandatory monitoring and regulation of what will be a growing coal ash waste stream.
(Don Hopey can be reached at dhopey@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1983. )
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