Indiana town to Chesapeake: Fly-ash battle won’t be easy

TOWN OF PINES, Ind.

Jan Nona watched and carefully recorded what happened to her hometown when fly ash contaminated the water supply. Dangerous things came out of the wells. Regulators arrived. Legal fights began. Eight years passed. And the fly ash remains.

That is why she thinks she knows what will happen in Chesapeake, even though she lives about 850 miles away and has only driven through Virginia once.

“They’ve got so much coming their way that they don’t understand,” she said.

Nona lives in Town of Pines, Ind., an enclave of working-class people in post-World War II homes close to the shore of Lake Michigan.

It seems a world away from the wide-open spaces along Murray Drive and Whittamore Road in Chesapeake’s Fentress area . But e ach community has had to deal with ground water contamination either directly under or downstream from massive placements of fly ash, the powdery, contaminant-laden residue left from the burning of coal for electricity.

There are several overlapping plot lines: intervention by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency; Superfund connections; at least 1 million tons of fly ash placed near homes with wells; early assurances that fly ash is safe; extension of city water to residents, at power companies’ expense; and continuing investigations.

An EPA report released last year cited 67 cases nationwide of proven or potential damage to ground or surface water because of coal-combustion products. Town of Pines is one of them .

T here is no federal regulation for the disposal of fly ash. It’s left up to each state, leaving a patchwork quilt of widely varying policies nationwide.

After years of complaints and suspicion by Town of Pines residents that something was wrong with the water in the community, Indiana state officials found benzene, a known human carcinogen, in the well water of one resident in 2000.

Follow-up tests on the wells of others in the area found high levels of arsenic, lead and manganese.

Three years later, the EPA designated the affected parts of town as an “alternative approach agreement” Superfund site – a Superfund category reserved for responsive “potentially responsible parties.”

Last summer, tests at Chesapeake’s Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville, which opened a year ago, revealed elevated levels of arsenic, lead, manganese, chromium and other contaminants in groundwater under the course.

Two rounds of city-funded tests to determine whether contaminants had affected any residential wells nearby found some evidence of boron – a well-known marker of fly-ash contamination.

Boron levels at Town of Pines ranged as high as 16,000 parts per billion, dwarfing the highest boron reading posted near the Chesapeake golf course as of last spring – 905 parts per billion.

The EPA’s “removal action level” for boron in drinking water is 900 parts per billion .

Those familiar with the situations in Indiana and Virginia, however, caution that the contamination under the golf course may be just getting going. The fly ash at the golf course was placed there between 2002 and 2007. A sh dumping in Town of Pines began decades ago, by at least the mid-1970s , records show.

An Oct. 7 EPA p ollution r eport about the golf course site found that the boron results “thus far are not indicating a definite pattern.”

Further assistance from an EPA team is being requested to determine the relationship of the boron results to the fly ash.

“I’m concerned about Chesapeake, I really am,” said Nona, who became the driving force behind a grass-roots community organization called People In Need of Environmental Safety, or PINES, which formed after reports surfaced of well contamination .

Members of the Indiana group took their fight to Washington . They pushed for and won support from members of Congress and state representatives.

They applied for and won grants , enabling them to conduct independent water testing that challenged EPA conclusions about the extent of the contamination in their community.

The number of homes that eventually received connections to city water – 270 – was more than double the 130 first ordered.

They were parties to a civil lawsuit against the utility and other firms. The suit was settled and the plaintiffs received some money, though a confidentiality agreement prevented anyone from discussing it in detail.

The extension of city water may offer some relief, but it doesn’t address the problem of future contamination, Nona said.

“It’s just going to seep into your groundwater and go wherever your aquifers take it,” she said.

The dispute started eight years ago. In the spring of 2000, Phyllis DaMota bought a small, comfortable two-story home on Walnut Street.

She didn’t know it, but her house sits about a quarter-mile north of Yard 520, a roughly 50-acre, state-regulated landfill. Over roughly two decades, 1 million tons of fly ash and other coal-combustion products from Northern Indiana Public Service Co.’s Michigan City and Bailly power plants had been placed there, according to the EPA.

The landfill was active until 2001.

DaMota was troubled by an unusual odor that seemed to come from the tap water, which came from a well.

“It smelled like walking into a hair salon,” she said.

She called the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. State officials responded promptly and tested her water; they quickly found high levels of benzene, which can cause cancer . Testing of other homes in the area soon found high levels of arsenic, lead and manganese.

DaMota’s call to the state triggered a series of events that included more extensive testing , eventual extension of city water to her home and many others, and Superfund status for the town.

Public records and news clips, however, show that fly ash, the landfill and questions about water quality had been on the radar screen of the EPA, local officials and town residents for decades.

In January 2003, the EPA signed a consent order with Northern Indiana Public Service Co. and three other companies, including the owner of the landfill and a trucking firm.

The 2003 order specifically states that the firms’ participation “shall not constitute an admission of liability.”

Officially designated “potentially responsible parties,” the firms paid $1.8 million that year to extend Michigan City water lines to 130 homes in Town of Pines, according to utility officials.

After independent test s paid for by the community group showed that contamination was wider than first thought, EPA amended the order to require the companies to extend city water to another 140 homes.

The total cost was $3.6 million, according to utility officials, who declined to comment on any other costs incurred, such as legal expenses, or whether any of the costs were covered by insurance.

In September, Dominion Virginia Power – the source of the 1.5 million tons of ash used to build the golf course – committed to paying up to $6 million to bring city water to affected residences in Chesapeake .

Debbie Loyd keeps a small Canada Dry bottle filled with a final sampling of water from her well. The date “11/26/05” is scrawled on the bottle cap – the date her well was sealed.

When the bottle is shaken slightly, the water turns black, thick with charcoal-colored flakes.

“It’s not a fix-it for the contamination,” Loyd said of the city-water extension. “They have not even begun to start to fix it.”

Loyd and other residents are now focused on the latest phase of the Town of Pines case – a “remedial investigation” of the area ordered by the EPA.

Town residents say fly ash was dumped not only in the nearby landfill, but all over the town as roadbed material and as fill for swampy areas.

Northern Indiana Public Service Co. is still looking into the scale and scope of fly-ash dumping decades ago in Town of Pines.

“We’re going about that process, to investigate those claims right now,” said Dan Sullivan, a utility engineer. “That’s part of what’s ongoing and still has a lot of work to go.”

An EPA update on the site, released in June, reported that coal-combustion products “were hauled from the generating plant to the Town of Pines area and were used as roadbed and fill for driveways and residential yards.”

Not every resident in the area was offered a city-water hook up .

Peggy Richardson and her family have lived in their home just outside Town of Pines since 1976.

EPA testing of their well in 2003 found boron at 1,950 parts per billion.

When Richardson turns on her kitchen tap, a faint scent of sulfur hangs in the air.

Though she and her family use their well water to clean dishes and for bathing, they rely on a dozen 5-gallon bottles of water, delivered every two weeks, for everything else.

It’s paid for by the “potentially responsible parties.”

Her county assessment has remained unchanged since 2002 – fixed at $75,000.

Gordon Tharp, 66, spent 24 years working for U.S. Steel in Gary, Ind. He lives just across the railroad tracks from Richardson’s home and now is connected to city water.

“Just because they have monitoring wells in a place doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything if the readings are bad,” he said.

Asked what advice, if any, he might offer to Chesapeake residents living near the golf course, Tharp was blunt.

“Tell them the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” he said. “If they don’t squeak loud enough and long enough, they won’t get the grease.”

Robert McCabe, (757) 222-5217, robert.mccabe@pilotonline.com