The recent profiles published in the Sierra Club's Compass blog of communities affected by toxic coal-ash waste sites can make grim reading. Some excerpts:
Chester, WV: "With no family history of thyroid problems, her endocrinologist has assessed that environmental exposure as the cause and told her, 'You need to move or you will never survive this stuff.'"
Bokoshe, OK: "Dozens of people in Bokoshe have died of cancer or are battling it right now, and children with asthma wake up in the middle of the night, struggling to breathe, afraid that they're going to die."
Colstrip, MT: "After watching a deer refuse to drink water from a reservoir on a hot summer day last August, Colstrip, Montana area ranchers knew something was wrong. The water, found to contain toxic levels of sulfates, was traced back to a coal ash dump."
Riverside Gardens, KY: "Resident Terri Humphrey expressed a common sentiment when she told a community meeting, 'I believe the companies think that it's already so bad down there that it doesn't matter if they dump something else on us.'"
Coal ash is laced with dozens of toxic chemicals like mercury, selenium, lead, and arsenic. Last week, I toured a local community located next to a coal ash dump outside Asheville, NC -- you could see the ash from the dump site coating the siding and windowsills on houses up and down the street. When it rains, the poisons from the dump site can migrate into local drinking water supplies. Imagine if an international terrorist organization injected arsenic into our drinking water. It'd be an act of war. But for coal-burning utilities, it's just part of the business.
What's even more scary is that most of us live a lot closer to a toxic coal-ash waste site than we realize. There are more than 2,000 of these toxic sites, after all -- all over the country. More than 600 of them are "wet dump" sites like the one that failed catastrophically in Kingston, Tennessee, two years ago -- and forty-nine of those are considered so hazardous that the EPA believes an accident would result in the loss of human life.
So we should all be glad that the people in coal-ash communities are fighting back. The EPA has been holding public hearings around the country since August 30th on how coal-ash waste should be regulated. (Currently, household garbage is regulated more strictly than coal-ash waste.) Not surprisingly, people from communities already affected by toxic coal ash have packed these hearings. I attended the one in Dallas, and people came from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and all across Texas, in spite of torrential downpours and floods.
But the folks on the front lines need help from the rest of us. Coal-ash waste may be a local issue, but it's a nationwide local issue. We need to spread the outrage of the people who have been immediately affected to everyone who's at risk -- which includes a lot of people who don't even know yet what toxic coal ash is.
So, besides sending your own comment on coal-ash waste directly to the EPA, why not take a moment to let your friends on Facebook know that you've got their backs? The Sierra Club's Coal Ash Tool will show you which of your Facebook friends live near toxic coal-ash sites -- and make it easy for you both to alert them and tell them how to take action. Because, in this case, what your friends don't know could someday hurt them.
Follow Michael Brune on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bruneski
That's the national way "I think it". On the local level, I would try to ban the coal company at any cost!
The irony for this excerpt is that the WV legislature voted to uphold a moratorium on building nuclear power plants in their state, siting among other things, health and environmental concerns.
I wish you luck in this endeavor, but merely regulating ash is not the answer. (It is better than nothing, which is more or less what we are doing at present.)
We must get off coal completely as soon as possible.
Additional regulations of sulpher emissions will add to coal energy production costs.
Additional Regulation of mercury emissions from coal energy facilities will increase coal energy costs.
Modifications to meet those requirements may trigger new source review and significant facility upgrades.
Vigorous enforcement of MSHA safety standards will increase coal energy costs.
Madifications and enforcement of new source review regulatory requirements will increase coal energy costs.
EPA application of their new mountaintop mining guidance will decrease permitting opportunities and increase coal energy costs.
The obama administration is undertaking many activities on the regulatory enforcement front under existing law which will increase the cost per KWh of producing coal energy enhancing other energy source attractiveness and price competition. There is a reason corporate money is flooding this race obama isn't just using congress to enhance our agenda.
Obama's proposed budget also reduces coal subsidies.
Any analysis of the number of senators that represent states with significant coal production will tell you this is the most likely way to diminish the importance of coal energy in the US.
It decreases it's attractiveness as an investment/financing candidate by adding significant uncertainties and negatives as well as removes the effective pollution subsidies.
Individually any single act is hard to argue is onerous by the right. Cumulatively the world coal operates in is changing.
What a perfect way to describe this issue. It is true, this IS domestic terrorism of a sort. It is sick what we will allow corporations to do, all in the name of unfettered capitalism.
Additionally, this push of marketing for "green coal" that I have been seeing is sickening and wrong. I pass countless billboards claiming that coal burning can be done in a green way and it is simply not true.