CHICAGO (CN) — Environmental activists and concerned U.S. residents from 21 states and Puerto Rico gathered in Chicago on Wednesday to urge the federal Environmental Protection Agency to adopt stricter regulations on coal ash sites.
Coal ash is the waste left over from coal-fired power generation, a thick gray sludge containing multiple toxic elements such as lead, mercury and selenium. Studies have linked the material to cancers and organ damage, and the danger is amplified by how close to drinking water sources many coal ash dump sites lie.
Despite this, environmentalists have accused the EPA of toothlessness when it comes to regulating the pollutant. With the right permits, it’s legal for power plant operators to discharge coal ash directly into waterways. According to the environmental nonprofit EarthJustice, there are 566 coal ash dump sites in 40 states that are currently excluded from EPA regulations — almost half the total coal ash sites in the U.S.
As of December 2022, the Financial Times reported that the world’s largest coal companies had reached profits in excess of $97 billion.
“You have allowed these [coal ash dumping] companies to operate on an honor system,” one public commenter told an assembled EPA panel on Wednesday morning, after which she accused the agency of systemic negligence. “This agency has failed under both parties for years. … Some people call it corrupt, I call it broken.”
The EPA adopted its first national coal ash regulations in April 2015 under the Obama administration, following the 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash spill that dumped over a billion gallons of coal ash into the Tennessee town of Kingston’s drinking water and caused an increase in fatal cancer rates among its residents.
“Coal ash is toxic. Clean coal is a lie, it doesn’t exist,” said Julie Bloodsow, a Kingston disaster survivor, on Wednesday.
The 2015 rules required regular monitoring and maintenance of coal ash dump sites, and mandated closure of sites found unable to safely contain the waste. The catch was that the regulations only applied to existing and newly planned coal ash dumps. The agency exempted so-called legacy coal ash sites at power plants that had stopped producing electricity, and at landfills that had already shuttered, by October 2015.
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups sued the EPA in D.C. federal court in August 2022 to address this oversight, eventually reaching a consent decree compelling the EPA to revise its coal ash regulations and close the loophole for legacy sites. Under the proposed new rules, which the EPA announced in May and for which it is currently gathering public comments, regulation would extend to “inactive power plants with surface impoundments that are no longer being used, and historical coal ash disposal areas at power plants with [currently] regulated coal ash units.”
For the environmental activists gathered in Chicago on Wednesday — including local community organizers, national climate change advocates and representatives from indigenous tribal councils — this change does not suffice to address the dangers posed by coal ash. The risk is especially acute, they said, to low-income communities and communities with a legacy of enduring environmental injustice.
“This [revision] is a big leap for environmental justice, but the EPA needs to commit to enforcement and complete the job to include ALL toxic coal ash sites,” EarthJustice said in a press release ahead of Wednesday’s event. “The current proposal unacceptably fails to extend regulations to landfills at former coal plant sites that do not have legacy ponds, and also exempts ponds that did not have water in them since 2015.”
“There’s still some loopholes in it,” agreed Cerissa Brown, a representative of the environmental justice group The People's Justice Council from Birmingham, Alabama. She and her colleague Meron Tebeje from the environmentalist group Climate Justice Alliance - of which Brown is also a member - pointed to a lack of consideration for soil remediation and coal ash site maintenance complications arising from climate change. They also pointed out the regulatory omission of “dry” coal ash ponds.
“They're not talking about soil remediation. They’re not looking at the issue holistically,” Tebeje said. “The biggest thing we're saying is to clean up all the coal ash sites.”
Brown also said the EPA needed to commit to harsher enforcement — she accused the agency of failing to hold coal ash polluters accountable even under its current regulations. Her sentiment was echoed by another speaker, Ashley Williams, the founder of environmental group Just Transition Northwest Indiana and a declarant in the Sierra Club’s D.C. lawsuit against the EPA.
Williams said Wednesday that her town of Michigan City, Indiana is still under constant threat of a coal ash rupture similar to that which occurred in Kingston due to a lack of EPA enforcement action. Michigan City, situated on the southern shore of Lake Michigan just over the border from Illinois, is home to a large coal-fired power plant operated by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company. An estimated two million tons of coal ash waste is currently being held in “fill” pits on the lakeshore near the plant; pits which Williams said are visibly degrading without EPA enforcement action.
“Millions of tons of toxic coal ash is seeping into Lake Michigan … and the EPA has done nothing about it,” Williams said. “This coal ash is going to rupture into the lake and cause another catastrophe.”
A representative of the EPA declined to provide comment on Williams’ and the other speakers’ criticisms.
Those criticisms come as Chicago languishes under hazardous air pollution for the second day in a row, and only months after an independent study by the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project accused the EPA of allowing fossil fuel companies to dump toxic metals into Americans’ drinking water with relative impunity.
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