Glynn Wilson / Southwings

A close view of the growing coal ash mountain in Perry County, Alabama (click on image for more photos)

by Glynn Wilson

Attorney David Ludder has filed an administrative complaint against the Alabama Department of Environmental Management that could result in a federal takeover of the state’s enforcement of national environmental laws by the Environmental Protection Agency and result in a loss of federal funding for the state.

The formal complaint was filed with EPA’s Office of Civil Rights on behalf of the people of Perry County in Alabama’s Black Belt. According to Ludder, they have been the subject of an environmental injustice due to their racial and economic disadvantage by the permitting and placement of a landfill near them that is now full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s major environmental disaster in the Cinch River in 2008.

Ludder’s complaint alleges that the landfill and its contents pollute the environment in a poor, minority area without the means to fight it politically. In addition to potential health problems from the air and water pollution, the landfill exposes local residents to a constant bad odor, lowers property values and causes dangerous traffic problems in the area.

“If EPA determines that ADEM did violate EPA’s regulations without ‘justification,’ EPA must initiate proceedings to deny, annul, suspend or terminate EPA funding to ADEM,” Ludder said in an e-mail interview. “This could cripple ADEM, and no doubt would require ADEM to surrender EPA-authorized programs.”

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Glynn Wilson / Southwings

A close view of the growing coal ash mountain in Perry County, Alabama

A new study finds that state regulations for coal ash disposal are inadequate to protect public health and drinking water supplies for nearby communities.

The information comes as federal regulations — the first of their kind — are under attack by a hostile Republican Congress bent on derailing any effort to ensure strong, federally enforceable safeguards for coal ash, America’s second largest industrial waste stream.

Earthjustice and the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment released State of Failure: How states fail to protect our health and drinking water from toxic coal ash, an exhaustive review of state regulations in 37 states, which together comprise over 98 percent of all coal ash generated nationally.

Twelve Worst States Highlighted

The study highlights the lack of state-based regulations for coal ash disposal and points to the 12 worst states when it comes to coal ash management and disposal: Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina and Virginia.

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Glynn Wilson / Southwings

A close view of the growing coal ash mountain in Perry County, Alabama

There will be a community listening session about the Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown, Alabama hosted by Environmental Protection Agency Region 4 administrator Gwen Keyes Fleming on Wednesday, June 15 from 7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. at the Uniontown Elementary School, 425 West Ave, Uniontown, Ala. 36786 (near Old Thomaston Road).

During the past year, EPA has received several community letters from Uniontown, Alabama concerning the Arrowhead Landfill and the shipments of Coal Ash into the community after the TVA spill, according to an EPA press release. On March 6-7, 2011, Region 4 EPA’s Chief of Staff, Javoyne Hicks White alongside her staff conducted a pre-planning meeting with community leaders from Uniontown to utilize their feedback on the best ways to implement a successful Listening Session reaching the different populations that live close to the Arrowhead Landfill.

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Letter to the Editor
Eva Dillard, staff attorney
Black Warrior Riverkeeper

The stated position of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, the Alabama Department of Transportation and the Alabama Public Service Commission that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should not classify coal ash as hazardous waste has more to do with the cozy relationship between those regulators and Alabama Power Co. than it does with facts, science or economics.

Alabama Power’s coal-fired steam plants in the Black Warrior watershed are recognized as among the dirtiest in the nation. Of the top 50 U.S. power plant mercury emitters by pounds in 2009, Alabama Power’s Miller Steam Plant ranked fourth and Greene County Steam Plant ranked 49th.

In January 2009, the Institute of Southern Studies compiled a list of the 100 most polluting coal plants in the United States in terms of coal ash stored in surface impoundments. Gorgas Steam Plant ranked seventh, with 2,888,290 pounds, Miller ranked 15th, and Greene County ranked 30th. The very size of these three impoundments suggests any breach or spill could dwarf the size of the catastrophic TVA’s Kingston release into the Emory River.

According to the National Inventory of Dams database, the Gorgas ash pond is rated a “significant hazard;” its failure would lead to a low probability of loss of life but to likely significant environmental and economic damage. The Miller ash pond is rated a “low hazard,” which means its failure would most probably result in damage to affected area property owners.

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The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

The birds are singing. The bees are buzzing, and the dogwood blooms are popping out here on the official first day of spring, known in science as the vernal equinox, the day each year when the day and night are almost exactly 12 hours long as the Sun crosses the celestial equator going northward, rising exactly due east and setting directly in the west.

Click for large view

Sitting here contemplating the surroundings in this little human-engineered slice of suburban heaven, if one can call it that, it is temping to sip the good coffee and imagine that all is right with the world, as the saying goes.

But of course, as much as we would like to put the problems of the world out of our minds and escape, we know all is not right with the world, our country or our state.

As I write this there is another large oil slick spreading in the Gulf of Mexico, while the poor people of Japan are dealing with another nuclear holocaust — and not just the result of a double-whammy natural disaster, the major earthquake and tsunami.

If it wasn’t already obvious, it is now as clear as a crystal ball that no matter how sophisticated humans become at engineering electrical power systems, they are all bound to fail at some point, to kill a bunch of people — and cost way more than the economists can ever predict. That goes for coal as well as oil and nuclear power. It’s just that we haven’t suffered from a major coal mine collapse — this week.

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The Black Warrior Riverkeeper non-profit environmental group, part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, is still putting the pressure on the University of Alabama not to lease land for a coal mine on the Mulberry Fork directly across from a Birmingham drinking water source.

The group emailed an open letter to University of Alabama President Robert E. Witt Wednesday asking that the board of trustees make a public decision on whether the university will lease its land and mineral rights to Shepherd Bend, LLC, a subsidiary of Drummond Coal, for coal mine directly across the river from the Birmingham Water Works’s Mulberry Fork drinking water intake, which supplies tap water daily to about 200,000 customers.

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The U.S. House of Representatives will vote this week on a continuing resolution to keep the government operating for the remainder of the fiscal year, but the Republican bill slashes critical funding for water and other environmental protections, and includes language that would prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act or regulating coal ash as a hazardous waste.

Several environmental groups are asking the public to get involved to fight these proposals.

According to Eva Dillard, the staff attorney for the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, the proposed budget cuts $3 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency budget, which is already 29 percent below fiscal year 2010. It also cuts 1.4 billion from the Department of Interior, including $532 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. It cuts $5.2 billion from the Department of Agriculture, including $190 million from the Farm Services Agency and $173 million from the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

“In addition to these dramatic budget cuts to critical environmental programs, the House CR includes two provisions – one that would prohibit EPA from taking administrative action to clarify the definition of ‘waters of the U.S.’ and another that would prohibit EPA from regulating greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act,” Dillard said in a press release. “These provisions have nothing to do with saving money and don’t belong in a spending bill. They are simply attacks aimed at preventing EPA from doing its job, which is to protect public health and the environment.”

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Pledges Total Nearly One Million Dollars a Semester

After announcing their intent to boycott university services should the school’s administration decide to strip mine its property along the Black Warrior River, students at the University of Alabama began gathering signatures of students across the Tuscaloosa campus a few months’s back.

To date, the pledges total nearly a million dollars that students could remove from the university by choosing to reduce meal plans, to not buy a parking permit, to take summer courses at another institution, or to buy books and supplies at off-campus locations, according to a press release from the The Coalition of Alabama Students for the Environment. And they could continue to take that money from UA each semester they attend in the future.

“We didn’t realize how much our individual contributions can add up to. In just over two weeks, we got pledges that added up to about half a million dollars,” said Michelle Hindman, a student working with the Coalition of Alabama Students for the Environment, and Treasurer of the UA Environmental Council. “Our voice does matter, and we’re not going to invest our money in an institution that chooses something that’s clearly harmful to the community.”

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Glynn Wilson

Two Alabama environmental groups are appealing an administrative law judge’s approval of a permit for a massive strip, auger and underground coal mine in Blount County, Alabama.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the Black Warrior Riverkeeper and Friends of the Locust Fork River, filed the necessary papers this week with the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals. Only a few coal mine permits have ever been appealed to this level in Alabama, according to a press release announcing the action.

The groups say the water pollution control permit for the Rosa Mine issued by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in October 2009 violates federal and state laws on multiple counts, and would fail utterly to protect water quality.

“The permit that ADEM issued for this huge industrial operation is woefully deficient — there are virtually no meaningful protections for the Locust Fork,” said SELC senior attorney Gil Rogers. “We are committed to protecting these resources and the communities that depend on them, and are not giving up the fight.”

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