Tennessee spill brings fly ash dangers to forefront

CHESAPEAKE

A few days before Christmas, a breach at an eastern Tennessee disposal facility sent a billion gallons of wet coal ash into nearby rivers.

The incident also galvanized efforts to push the issue of coal-ash disposal higher up on the national agenda, particularly as a new administration prepares to take over the White House.

"If this doesn't wake people up, I don't know what will," said Lisa Evans, a former EPA attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm.

About 1.5 million tons of fly ash was used to build a Chesapeake golf course suspected of contaminating groundwater. The same power plant that provided the ash for the project has a retention pond holding other coal ash and waste from a metal -cleaning facility, though Dominion Virginia Power's coal-ash pond at its Deep Creek plant is not on the same scale as the Tennessee site.

Since the Dec. 22 collapse of the disposal site there, environmental groups nationwide have intensified efforts to get the Environmental Protection Agency to enact national regulations for coal-ash disposal, an issue now left up to the states.

The groups are calling for federal regulations to be in place by 2010, Evans said.

For decades, fly-ash at Dominion's Chesapeake plant was disposed of in an industrial-waste pond along the Southern Branch of the Elizabeth River. In the mid-1980s, the facility was converted into a dry fly-ash landfill, visible off the northwest end of the High Rise Bridge.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Integrity Project released seven years' worth of federal data, through 2006, that it used to identify scores of U.S. "wet dumps" comparable with the Tennessee Valley Authority's recently failed site, in terms of the amount of contaminants received.

Some have received significantly larger amounts of contaminants than the Tennessee site, said Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement officer who is director of the nonprofit environmental project.

Schaeffer said the ash ponds pose risks not just through spills but through slow leakage. "Anytime you're putting toxic contaminants in open lagoons you're risking having them escape into groundwater or surface water," he said.

Two Virginia operations were cited in the data released Wednesday: Dominion's Chesterfield plant and Spruance Genco LLC in Richmond. Dominion's Chesapeake facility was not.

About 42,000 pounds of arsenic was dumped into the wet-coal-ash operation in Chesterfield in 2006 - about 2 tons more than was dumped into the failed Tennessee pond the same year, according to the environmental group's report.

The Chesterfield wet-ash operation made five national "Top 50 Waste Polluters" lists compiled by the group.

The Chesterfield site, as well as the coal-ash pond in Chesapeake and four other Dominion wet-ash facilities in Virginia, is in compliance with all state regulations and is regularly inspected, said Dan Genest, a Dominion spokesman.

A hearing on the Tennessee spill is planned today before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.

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