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Trump admin wants to roll-back coal ash regulations that protect waterways
2015 EPA rules were in place because of Dan River spill, which put 39,000T of coal ash into NC/VA drinking water
Spill disproportionately affected drinking water in poor/POC communities
Interview with grassroots organizer about environmental injustice in crises
The toxic spackle that coalesces when coal ash meets river water. [via]
In October 2019, the Trump EPA signaled it would roll back coal ash regulations that the Obama-era agency put in place after a pair of high-profile spills.
One of those was in Tennessee, where at least 40 people have died as a result of getting exposed to a literal billion gallons of heavy-metal poison. The other was the Dan River spill at Eden, North Carolina, where one of the world’s biggest utilities hemorrhaged 39,000 tons of toxic coal ash into a river community struggling to reinvent itself in the face of economic decay. Fun!
Nik Belanger is an organizer with Virginia Organizing, a non-profit grassroots group, and was living 20 miles downriver of Eden, in the Virginia city of Danville, when the spill happened.
I’d interviewed him about the Dan River spill and his group’s response to it earlier this year, but had yet to publish it on The Heat Beat. Recently, I reached back out to ask Belanger what he thought of the Trump administration’s latest coal-ash rollback.
“My reaction won't surprise you much,” he told me. “The last thing we need is fewer regulations of coal ash. It's all about companies paying the full cost of their business—and that includes handling the waste appropriately.”
Here’s JUST ONE example of what happens when they don’t.
Coal ash is nasty shit, folks. The gunk that’s left over when you burn coal contains arsenic, mercury, lead, and boron, all of which can fuck you right the hell up. Some coal ash is safely recycled into concrete or drywall or other construction materials; over half of the country’s supply of it is not.
Lining ash ponds is safer, but costs more than just dumping ash slurry into the ground. Perhaps you won’t be shocked to learn that 95% of ponds in the US are unlined. [via]
Power companies have to find somewhere to store it, and they usually opt to dump them in coal ash ponds (basically just big ditches next to coal plants.) This is what Duke Energy did for years at its Dan River Steam Station in Eden.
But in 2012, the same year the town’s last big textile mill closed, Duke Energy retired its coal plant there. It left behind the hulking structure (eventually demolished in 2016) and a 27-acre pond filled to the brim with toxic coal slurry. (At the time, Duke owned 31 of these “impoundments” in NC alone; today across the country, there are over 700 of them. But I digress.)
Coal companies control the levers of power in so much of Appalachia.
In 2009, the EPA warned Duke to keep an eye on that corrugated metal pipe beneath the Eden pond. You would think that as one of the most valuable utility companies in the world with a current market capitalization of $52B, Duke would be able to do more than just keep an eye on that pipe, which its own engineers had flagged as far back as 1986.
But you’d be wrong, because they didn’t, and in February 2014, the pipe failed. Boom: 39,000 tons of coal ash poured straight into the Dan River. Reports later deemed it the third-worst coal-ash spill in US history.
Belanger had been living downriver in Danville for four years at the time of the spill. He first heard about the spill on Facebook. “[I] thought it was just a small leak or managed spill,” he remembered, but “[o]ver time, it became obvious that Duke Energy didn't know what was going on and neither did anyone in Danville. The river ran gray.”
43,000 people live in Danville, and slightly more black than white. Like Eden upriver, the city doesn’t have a ton going for it, with shuttered tobacco warehouses and mills standing as monuments to one of highest unemployment rates in the state. But it’s always had the river.
If the coal plant had been upriver of the Duke executives' homes, they would have taken environmental safety more seriously.
In 2014, said Belanger, Danville’s community leaders had “a vision for a city centered around the Dan River.” Now, after having slowly recovered from a century of industrial abuse, it was thick with toxic sludge for 70 miles. “Economically, the river became unusable for recreational purposes for locals and potential tourists alike,” Belanger remembered.
More pressing: most of Danville’s drinking water flowed from the Dan River. “Danville is the first municipal drinking water intake downriver from the coal ash pond where all of this started,” said Belanger, who now lives in Washington, D.C. “People, understandably, began asking questions about our drinking water.”
Not to be glib but… rivers aren’t supposed to look like this! [via]
The uncertainty was warranted. State officials waited more than 24 hours to alert the public to the spill, and in the following days and weeks, Duke’s assessments of the hazard often differed wildly from those of citizen watchdog groups and nonprofits.
“It’s an abject failure of government to do it’s [sic] job of protecting the public when citizen groups are able to obtain water quality data faster than regulators,” said one attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance, one group conducting water-sample testing.
Because the immediate response was so technical, Virginia Organizing took a support role for groups like the Waterkeeper. “As the only organization with staff [based] in Danville, we were able to connect [outside experts] with personal stories of how the spill affected real people, bring local residents to public meetings, and participate in facilitated community discussions months later,” said Belanger.
There’s an old grassroots adage that goes “no decisions about us, without us.” Danville’s residents hadn’t wanted a power plant upriver in the first place. In the wake of the 2014 crisis, Belanger and his team made sure the community’s voices weren’t swept away with the sludge—or drowned out by swirling misdirection and outright chicanery.
Speaking of chicanery, holy shit there was a lot of it! “Coal companies […] control the levers of power in so much of Appalachia,” Belanger told me. In North Carolina, fossil-fuel corporations are particularly dug in (mining joke!)
In 2017, The Atlantic dug deep into the close relationship between North Carolina’s Republican party and Duke Energy, which was ongoing at the time of the 2014 spill.
It's very hard to play catch-up on environmental disasters.
It’s like a 9,000-word article, but the TL;DR is that NC GOP politicians ran cover for the massive utility for years. The rot went to the top: then-governor Pat McCrory worked at Duke for 28 years before taking the statehouse in 2013, and appointed a bunch of the company execs to official positions in his administration. He owned around $10,000 of Duke stock while in office, but sold it off quietly after the spill.
Eventually, Duke Energy would plead guilty to environmental crimes for its negligence at the Dan River Steam Station. The company agreed to pay $102M in fines and restitution, plus $3M in clean-up efforts.
But listen to this shit, via that The Atlantic story:
In its plea agreement, Duke said that its own engineers had asked for funding to run a camera up a pipe at Dan River to inspect it for corrosion but that the company had refused the request. The camera inspection would have cost Duke $20,000, according to the plea agreement.
That detail, which emerged in the 2017 settlement, squares with Belanger’s on-the-ground assessment of the company’s motives three years prior. Even amidst the crisis, the utility downplayed the risks and underperformed the triage effort, he said.
“Duke wasn't serious about addressing the situation,” Belanger recalled. “With all of the resources they had, they were more interested in protecting their profits than doing right by the city of Danville.”
This picture is heartwarming until you learn that the sign was part of a much larger one that used to read “Home of Dan River Fabrics.” That one was perched atop a massive mill building that shut down in 2005. [via]
Would the response have been different if Danville was a wealthier, whiter community? It’s hard to say for sure.
Just kidding, it’s actually pretty easy to say, and the answer is: “hell yeah, buddy, of course, you seriously even asking that?”
“If the facility had been upriver of the Duke executives' homes, I have to imagine they would have taken maintenance and environmental safety more seriously,” speculated Belanger. “I don't know the history of their decision to build a coal-fired plant there, but they are very often built at the expense of poor folks, people or color, and people who live in rural areas.”
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The spill at Dan River made it clear to Belanger that grassroots organizations like his need to be prepared to hold companies accountable for the environmental damage they cause—particularly in marginalized communities.
“It's very hard to play catch-up on environmental disasters,” he said. “That's why we are doing a series of workshops across the state: so that we are better prepared, more well-versed in the issues, and working proactively to build the environmentally just society we want.”
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