Coming Clean
Published May 24, 2014
Editorial by Greensboro News-Record, May 24, 2014.
It’s still too early to declare a happy ending. But in a heartening step forward, Duke Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have agreed on a plan that will remove the tons of the toxic coal ash that have tainted the Dan River and dispose of it in lined landfills.
The ash seeped through a ruptured pipe into the river from an open and unlined storage pond at a shuttered Duke power plant near Eden on Feb. 2, leaking as many as 39,000 tons of ash and 27 million gallons of wastewater.
The formal agreement requires scientific and ecological best practices. The pact also conveys an appropriate sense of urgency. “Actual or threatened releases of hazardous substances from this site, if not addressed by implementing the response action selected in this Action Memorandum, may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health, welfare or the environment,” it reads in part.
Whatever expenses the EPA incurs in the oversight and implementation of this process will be reimbursed by Duke Energy.
In a prepared statement, Duke officials hailed the agreement as “a significant milestone.” But other critical problems and pertinent questions remain unresolved.
Foremost, Duke still has no plan to close ash ponds at 13 other sites throughout the state. All need to be emptied and the ash transported to safer, lined landfills away from lakes and rivers such as the Dan, which provides drinking water to several North Carolina and Virginia communities. Whether that happens will be left to the state to resolve. A bill, co-sponsored by state Senate leader Phil Berger of Eden adopts the plan proposed by Gov. Pat McCrory to close some coal ash storage ponds gradually and would place a temporary moratorium on the recycling of coal ash as “structural fill product” for roads and other types of construction.
Nor does the EPA agreement address an ongoing criminal investigation by the U.S. Justice Department into the nature of the relationship between Duke Energy and state regulators and lawmakers. Those ties have been too close for comfort during both Democratic and Republican administrations, which have been reluctant over the years to enact tougher rules on coal ash storage.
Finally, even as the EPA agreement was announced, The News & Observer of Raleigh was raising further concerns about a variety of other sites that were supposed to store coal ash intended for construction reuse. The newspaper reports that 2.6 million cubic yards of the ash remains in unlined pits and continues to pose a contamination hazard in rural communities. “We thought maybe we might use it for something one day,” one contractor said. “But there’s no use for it. Nobody wanted it.”
So, while the EPA announcement is welcome and hopeful, it’s only one chapter in a very long story with more plot twists than we can count. This mess wasn’t created in a day, and it won’t be fixed in one.
