February spill Environmentalists: Coal ash layers still evident in Dan River

 

Posted: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 2:01 pm

Government authorities should scrap a recent decision halting Dan River cleanup efforts and make Duke Energy recover more of the coal ash that spilled this winter from its closed power plant near Eden, environmentalists say.

Contrary to what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said last week, there are plenty of spots along the river where coal ash threatens the public health by lurking just beneath the surface of the riverbed, said Pete Harrison, an attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance conservation group.

Harrison said he found evidence of lingering coal ash in a sample he took last week from the river bottom near Draper’s Landing in Rockingham County, a few miles downstream from the Feb. 2 spill at the utility’s retired Dan River Steam Station.

“I pulled it up, and, sure enough, you can see 1½ inches of coal ash buried under the sedi-ment,” Harrison said. “Folks have told me that 2- to 4-inch layers of ash are evident (else-where).”

EPA regulators and their counterparts in North Carolina and Virginia authorized Duke Energy to suspend removal efforts after recovering about 3,000 tons of a total spill estimated at be-tween 30,000 and 39,000 tons.

That’s between 7.7 percent and 10 percent of the total, and not at all sufficient, Harrison and some other critics said.

In fact, the Tennessee Valley Authority recovered a much higher percentage of the millions of tons of ash that escaped from the nation’s largest such disaster, the 2008 spill into the Clinch and Emory rivers near Kingston, Tennessee, said Amy Adams of the Appalachian Voices environmental group.

“It was a six-year cleanup, but they were able to recover 90 percent of it,” Adams said. “It’s been described even by the nearby residents as a good cleanup.”

But the EPA stands by its assessment that the remaining Dan River ash has been dispersed so widely now that removing buried ash would cause more trouble for the river than it would prevent, said Ken Rhame, an on-scene coordinator for the EPA.

“It doesn’t surprise me that they found ash. We know that the ash is out there,” Rhame said of Harrison’s discovery.

But the ash in many of those places is too diluted by river sediment and other material to be a threat, Rhame said. In other cases, it’s buried deeply enough — 6 inches to a foot — in the river bottom that it makes more sense to just leave it alone, he said.

Other considerations Rhame said should be included:

   » whether a small deposit poses a realistic threat to wildlife,

   » whether the deposit will remain in its current location long enough to get removal equipment in position to recover it,

   » whether dredging would stir up other industrial contaminants not related to the Eden spill,

   » and whether the river geography in a particular area is suitable for dredging equipment to work properly.

Harrison countered that Duke Energy seems to have an uncanny ability to work with regula-tors and make things come out favorably for the company.

He cited several past coal ash decisions by North Carolina regulators that he felt took Duke Energy’s side over reasonable objections raised by environmental groups.

But Rhame said that in deciding to stop cleanup activities recently, regulators gave no consideration to the impact on Duke Energy, including how much it would cost the utility to tackle any smaller deposits or whether those expenditures made sense economically in comparison to the amount of retrievable coal ash.

“It’s all driven by ecological threat,” Rhame said about the decision-making process.

EPA wouldn’t hesitate to order Duke to resume dredging and other removal efforts if a new deposit emerges that meets the minimum threat level, he added.

Regulators will continue testing the river indefinitely to detect such accumulations, he said.

The regional Dan River Basin Association has taken a middle-of-the-road position.

The nonprofit advocacy group agrees that the ash has been dispersed so widely now that a wait-and-see approach makes sense, said Tiffany Haworth, its executive director.

But the group also plans to monitor the river closely in the coming months. And it will be quick to demand renewed cleanup efforts if and when new clumps of ash form, Haworth said.

“Our monitoring is showing the same thing as theirs, that it (the ash) has spread,” Haworth said of the EPA findings.

The group remains disappointed that Duke Energy and regulators did not move more quickly to begin digging out ash immediately after the spill, when there were visible deposits in the river, Haworth said.

Regulators later required the utility to remove three substantial deposits of coal ash, including one near the plant that the river had greatly eroded by then.

Haworth said she remains convinced that the river’s volatile nature will stir up submerged stores of ash and that, eventually, a new deposit will accumulate in Danville at the site of the largest of the three deposits.

Adams said she, too, believes the coal ash will re-emerge to threaten the environment.

“It’s only 2 or 3 inches down,” she said. “You and I could go swimming, wiggle our toes in the sand, and we could get to it.”

The arsenic, selenium and other contaminants in coal ash do not go away, said Adams, a former state regulator who left the N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources be-cause she believed it had grown too industry friendly.

EPA’s Rhame said it’s possible that coal ash might re-emerge in significant amounts some-where along the Dan, but he doubts it.

“I think it will be so diluted and commingled with other sediments that it’s not going to meet the criteria,” he said. “We’re going to continue to sample. We’ll know.”

GoDanRiver.com, Danville, VA © 2014 BH Media Group Holdings, Inc.

http://www.godanriver.com/news/coal-ash/environmentalists-coal-ash-layers-still-evident-in-dan-river