When people’s health and clean water are at stake, the state and Duke Energy have to do better.
We were pleased to hear about Duke Energy’s announcement earlier this month that it will remove coal ash from three waste pits at the Buck Steam Station in Salisbury, as the Journal’s Bertrand M. Gutierrez reported. This ended a federal lawsuit that’s been waging for more than two years, brought by conservation groups that included our own Yadkin Riverkeeper.
But this is only a partial solution. “This shows that the community, environmental groups and investors are telling Duke Energy the same thing: People around these sites need to have clean water and they (Duke Energy) need to clean this up,” Will Scott, the Yadkin Riverkeeper, told the Journal.
He’s right. Coal ash waste was discovered spilling into the Dan River near Eden in February 2014. And coal ash was found to be threatening water supplies in other locations, and still remains in places such as Belmont, Goldsboro and at the Belews Creek Steam Station in Stokes County. A final resolution and a permanent cleanup through excavation is long overdue. Instead, it looks like Duke Energy will be delivering bottled water to households in several locations for some time to come.
The whole situation has been messy, involving valid claims of tainted water being passed off and a public battle of words between Gov. Pat McCrory’s office and officials within the N.C. Division of Public Health. The governor’s chief of staff, Thomas Stith, dropped jaws by accusing state toxicologist Ken Rudo of lying under oath. Rudo’s boss, Megan Davies, the epidemiology section chief and state epidemiologist, resigned in protest, saying that the administration was deliberately misleading the public.
There have been allegations of preferential treatment from the governor, a former Duke Energy executive. The legislature empowered a management commission to handle coal ash that the governor then vetoed. They compromised on a bill in July that leaves coal ash in about half of the utility’s 14 sites.
The publicity has brought Erin Brockovich and the Washington-based Environmental Working Group to our state. A state representative and conservation activists have called for an independent investigation by either the state or federal justice departments. It’s galling that Duke Energy wasn’t required to clean its coal ash sites more rapidly, when the problems first arose. We realize that Duke Energy is a behemoth that is not nimbly steered, and it takes time and money to do the job right, but public patience is wearing thin.
This shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Democrats and Republicans had failed to put in place better safeguards. It’s much more costly to clean up an environmental mess than to prevent its occurrence. We appreciate the legislature’s desire to cut red tape and redundant regulations, but not having adequate environmental protections in place is like jumping out of an airplane then looking for a parachute.
North Carolina has historically guarded our pristine environmental resources. It’s time we got back to that emphasis.
