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As the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) prepares to regulate coal ash, the waste product of
coal-burning power plants, it confirmed Thursday that ash is polluting local waters
at 18 sites across the US.
The Environmental Integrity
Project (EIP) announced the EPA’s findings in a report that maintains there are
at least 20 other locations where coal ash is contaminating local groundwater.
In a statement, EIP Director Eric Schaeffer said, “EPA’s list of polluting coal
ash dumps barely scratches the surface.”
This comes after House
Republicans successfully passed a bill in July, in a 265-155 vote largely along
party lines, that would preclude federal regulation of ash and leave it to the
states.
Regulation is already
largely left to the states, Lisa Evans, Senior Administrative Counsel at
Earthjustice said in an email, and “as a result, the nation is a patchwork of
programs, with many states imposing few, and sometimes, no, regulatory
safeguards.” As ThinkProgress has reported, federal coal ash regulation
would create jobs in
addition to safeguarding health.
The House bill, H.R. 2218,
purports to give states greater authority to regulate coal waste but even its
supporters recognize its aim of preventing EPA regulation. Republicans framed
the bill as a way to avoid the costs of federal regulation. Rep. John Shimkus
(R-IL) told The Hill that opposing the measure means “less durable, more
expensive highways, schools, and green buildings.”
Evans said the bill would
prohibit the EPA from ever setting a minimum standard for coal ash disposal.
The bill “intentionally fails to define key terms and set deadlines, which
would give states the flexibility to exempt units and allow the current norm of
leaking units, poorly maintained dams and contaminated groundwater to continue
unabated.”
Senate Majority Leader
Harry Reid (D-NV) started the motion necessary to have the bill considered by
the Senate, but Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who chairs the Senate Environment
committee, wrote a strongly-worded letter to colleagues opposing it. “I will oppose this bill at every turn
because, if it became law, coal ash would continue to pose a grave threat to
public health and safety,” her letter read in part.
Boxer went on to invoke 2008′s Kingston, Tennessee tar
ash spill, where about a billion gallons of liquefied ash from a
Tennessee Valley Authority coal plant poured out over 400 acres, destroying and
damaging homes, and contaminating rivers including the Emory and Clinch. A 2010 Physicians for Social
Responsibility and Earthjustice report on coal
ash named arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium and selenium as typical
components, which “can cause cancer and neurological damage in humans,” and
harm and kill wildlife.
Rep. Shimkus, for his part,
disagrees that there are negative health effects from coal ash pollution.
“Three decades of science point the other way, that coal ash is not hazardous,”
he told The Hill.
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