WASHINGTON — The chemical spill that contaminated water for hundreds
of thousands of West Virginians was just the latest and most
high-profile case of coal sullying the nation's waters.
For
decades, chemicals and waste from the coal industry have tainted
hundreds of waterways and groundwater supplies, spoiling private wells,
shutting down fishing and rendering streams virtually lifeless,
according to an Associated Press analysis of federal environmental data.
But because these contaminants are released gradually and in some cases
not tracked or regulated, they attract much less attention than a
massive spill like the one in West Virginia.
"I've made a career of body counts of dead fish and wildlife made that
way from coal," said Dennis Lemly, a U.S. Forest Service research
biologist who has spent decades chronicling the deformities pollution
from coal mining has caused in fish. "How many years and how many cases
does it take before somebody will step up to the plate and say, `Wait a
minute, we need to change this'?"
The spill of a coal-cleaning
chemical into a river in Charleston, W.Va., that left 300,000 people
without water exposes a potentially new and under-regulated risk to
water from the coal industry, at a time when the federal government is
still trying to close regulatory gaps that have contributed to coal's
long legacy of water pollution.
From its mining to the waste created when it is burned for
electricity, pollutants associated with coal have contaminated
waterways, wells and lakes with far more insidious and longer-lasting
contaminants than the chemical that spilled out of a tank farm on the
banks of the Elk River.
Chief among them are discharges from
coal-fired power plants that alone are responsible for 50 to 60 percent
of all toxic pollution entering the nation's water, according to the
Environmental Protection Agency. And thanks to even tougher air
pollution regulations underway, more pollution from coal-fired power
plants is expected to enter the nation's waterways, according to a
recent EPA assessment.
"Clean coal means perhaps cleaner
atmosphere, but dirtier water," said Avner Vengosh, a Duke University
researcher who has monitored discharges from power plant waste ponds and
landfills in North Carolina.
In that state, Vengosh and other
researchers found contaminants from coal ash disposal sites threatening
the drinking water for Charlotte, the nation's 17th-largest city, with
cancer-causing arsenic.
"It is kind of a time bomb that can erupt
in some kind of specific condition," said Vengosh. The water shows no
signs of arsenic contamination now.
In southeastern Ohio, tainted
water draining from abandoned coal mines shuttered a century ago still
turns portions of the Raccoon Creek orange with iron and coats the
half-submerged rocks along its path white with aluminum.
And
public drinking water systems in 14 West Virginia counties where mining
companies are blasting off mountaintops to get to coal seams exceeded
state safe drinking water standards seven times more than non-mining
counties, according to a study published in a water quality journal in
2012. The systems provided water for more than a million people.
What's more, the water quality monitoring in mining areas is so
inadequate that most health violations likely were not caught, said
Michael Hendryx, the study's author and a professor of applied health at
Indiana University.
Even with those startling results, the effect of coal-fired power plants stands alone.
The
EPA in an environmental assessment last year identified 132 cases where
coal-fired power plant waste has damaged rivers, streams and lakes and
123 where it has tainted underground water sources, in many cases
legally, officials said. Among them is the massive failure of a waste
pond at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in 2008, which poured
more than 5 million cubic yards of ash into a river and spoiled hundreds
of acres in a community 35 miles west of Knoxville.
Overall,
power plants contributed to the degradation of 399 bodies of water that
are drinking water sources, according to the EPA.
But there are no
federal limits on the vast majority of chemicals that power plants pipe
directly into rivers, streams and reservoirs. The EPA just last year
proposed setting limits on a handful of the compounds, the first update
since 1982. And more than five years after the Tennessee spill, the EPA
has yet to issue federal regulations governing the disposal of coal ash.
Experts
say the agency is playing catch-up to solve a problem that began when
it required power plants in the 1990s to scrub their air pollution to
remove sulfur dioxide. An unintended consequence was that the pollutants
captured were dumped into landfills and ponds, many unlined, where they
seeped into underground aquifers or were piped into adjacent rivers,
reservoirs and lakes.
"As you are pushing air rules that are
definitely needed, you need to think of the water. And they didn't,"
said Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement official who now heads the
Environmental Integrity Project, a group whose research has uncovered
previously unknown sites of contamination from power plant waste pits.
"Now they are running after the problem."
The federal government
has in recent years issued the first-ever regulations for mercury
released from power plant smokestacks, the largest source of mercury
entering waterways. The EPA has also stepped up its review of
mountaintop mining permits, to reduce pollution.
Efforts by the EPA to ease the problem, by requiring mine permits to
be judged by a measure of the saltiness in downstream water, have been
vacated by a federal court. That decision is now under appeal.
A
spokesman for the National Mining Association said the industry operates
in accord with extensive and rigorous permitting guidelines.
In addition, pollution still enters the environment from coal mined decades ago.
The
EPA estimates 12,000 river miles are tainted by acid mine drainage from
long-shuttered coal mines. One of them is Raccoon Creek in southeastern
Ohio.
"These mines have been abandoned for a hundred years," said
Amy Mackey, Raccoon Creek's watershed coordinator. "There is no one to
fall back on."
States take the lead on the water pollution front,
but advocacy groups from at least three states in coal country -
Kentucky, West Virginia and Indiana - have asked the EPA to step in,
arguing that state officials aren't doing enough.
