Little Blue Run: Coal Ash Worries Residents As EPA Mulls Regulation

The Center for Public Integrity:

Stand before the pond known here in southwestern Pennsylvania as Little Blue Run, and you'll see nothing that resembles its bucolic-sounding name.

The one-time stream is now an industrial pond, filled with arsenic-laced waste from a coal-fired power plant. The pond spans nearly 1,000 acres of rolling, rural landscape in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, along the Ohio River. Millions of tons of coal ash have landed in the 35-year-old dump, looming over some 50,000 people in southeastern Ohio, held back by a 400-foot-tall dam, that federal regulators have deemed a "high hazard" to human life if it ever let loose. [...]

"It will keep rising," says Marci Carpenter, who lives in a neighborhood dotted with vacant properties and abandoned homes, "and soon it'll be above my house."

Unless, that is, coal ash is regulated by the federal government.

Read the whole story: The Center for Public Integrity

Comments

[jsgaetano]

05:33 PM on 11/18/2010

I support allowing the Pollution Industry to do this kind of thing in EVERY Red State.

[sheila]

11:17 AM on 11/18/2010

and who do they keep voting for? i mean, you gotta connect the dots. if you don't want coal ash, support renewable energy and stronger regulations on fossil fuels. you can't have "small government" and clean drinking water. we could, however, slash the Bush Big Government Legacy, Homeland (duh) Security (not), so we could actually do something that saved lives instead of violating the constitution.

[motoGpifupleez]

10:27 AM on 11/18/2010

Jeez people, it's just water. You'd think something important to the existence of life were in jeopardy, like tax cuts or quarterly dividends.

[jsgaetano]

05:34 PM on 11/18/2010

And hey, the kids of Pollution Industry moguls have to eat, too.

[gsmp]

10:20 AM on 11/18/2010

One more reason why uniform federal regulations are imperative! Pollution cannot be dealt with state by state because it may be produced in one state, but is does not respect state borders by air land or water!

[lightningbolt]

10:17 AM on 11/18/2010

Residents who live near a coal ash area should leave to save their lives.  The government isn't going to do anything that hurts coal industry profits.

[lightningbolt]

10:16 AM on 11/18/2010

Clean renewable energy is the ONLY reasonable solution to our energy problems.  All other sources of energy will run out and leave the planet in ruins.