Is coal ash poisoning Charlotte-area drinking water?

Creative Loafing Charlotte

If you're like most people, you turn on lights and your collection of electronics without giving much thought to where electricity comes from or how it's created. And, until December 2008, when an earthen dam burst in Tennessee spewing more than one billion gallons of coal ash sludge into a river and across 300 acres of land, not many people thought about the waste generated by energy production either. "It was completely under the radar," says David Merryman, our Catawba Riverkeeper.

Coal ash, most simply, is what remains after coal is burned to generate electricity; like burning wood in a fireplace, there's a little something left over after coal is incinerated. But because there are many sources of coal, and because each coal plant has different technologies in place to manage the waste, it's difficult to say definitively what any given pile of coal ash contains. In general, it's understood that coal ash is a mix of a variety of heavy metals, including, but not limited to, arsenic, mercury, lead, chromium , barium, selenium and cadmium — all of which are recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as hazardous heavy metals individually. "The thing about coal ash," says Donna Lisenby, an activist with the Waterkeeper Alliance and Appalachian Voices, "is it's a toxic soup of all of them."

There is no doubt regulating coal ash is one of the major issues facing our nation today, but it's also a massive issue for Charlotte — and not only because Duke Energy, which is headquartered here, will be impacted. In response to the Tennessee coal ash spill, the Environmental Protection Agency identified 49 high-hazard coal ash ponds across the country, a dozen of which are in North Carolina. (Duke Energy owns 10.) Four are near Charlotte, and two of those discharge wastewater just upstream from where Charlotte Mecklenburg Utilities withdraws 80 percent of the area's drinking water from Mountain Island Lake.

That's why, with an eye on protecting the nation's fresh water supply, the EPA decided to regulate coal ash waste for the first time in its 40-year history and after only three decades of debating whether or not coal ash is hazardous. The agency's proposed regulation includes two options: One will categorize coal ash as "special" (or "hazardous") waste, require federal oversight and set a timetable for clean-up. The other won't. Under the non-hazardous option, the state is in charge; this bothers Merryman, who says the state had its chance to regulate the heavy metals that flow into our water daily and have proven its unwillingness to do so.

In an effort to decide which option is best, the EPA is hosting a series of seven public hearings across the U.S., one of which will be in Charlotte on Sept. 14.

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