Safety, drinking water sources at risk as Trump administration caves to coal ash polluters

Proposal eliminates protections against coal ash fought for by southern communities after contaminated water and disastrous spills

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Granting the wishes of politically powerful polluters, the Trump administration issued a proposed rule to eliminate common-sense, nationwide minimum safeguards that protect clean water against coal ash pollution and prevent catastrophic coal ash spills and other disasters. Communities across the South fought for protections against contamination of drinking water sources from toxic coal ash that utilities stored in leaking, unlined pits next to rivers and lakes. 

“Letting coal-burning utilities set the agenda has been a disaster for communities across the South, resulting in coal ash spills and hundreds of families forced to live on bottled water for years under the threat of coal ash pollution,” said Nick Torrey, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, which represented community groups and secured commitments to clean up over 270 million tons of coal ash in southern communities. “The Trump administration and coal ash polluters want to take us back to the bad old days of arsenic, lead, and mercury from coal ash contaminating our water.” 

Both North Carolina and Tennessee suffered catastrophic coal ash spills—TVA spilled over a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into people’s homes and the Emory River in Kingston, TN, in 2008 and Duke Energy spilled coal ash and millions of gallons of polluted wastewater into the Dan River in North Carolina and Virginia in 2014, shutting down the water intake for a community hundreds of miles away, Virginia Beach. In addition, Duke Energy pleaded guilty 18 times for nine Clean Water Act crimes throughout North Carolina.  

Because the Trump administration knows people will not stand for eliminating these important protections outright, this draft rule does it stealthily, by allowing states and EPA to create site-specific “flexibilities” that allow utilities to avoid important, nationwide minimum standards that the coal ash rule was created to put in place.  

As one example, the Trump administration reverses current requirements by proposing to allow “flexibilities” that could let utilities leave their leaking toxic coal ash submerged in water next to rivers and lakes that serve as drinking water sources, forever. An important feature of the current federal coal ash rules is that utilities cannot just cover up coal ash in their unlined, leaking lagoons sitting in groundwater, allowing the saturated ash underneath to keep leaking toxic metals like arsenic and mercury into the surrounding rivers and drinking water sources forever. Utilities tried to challenge this common-sense requirement for years and lost every time in court, but now the Trump administration proposes to do their bidding.  

To exemplify that states can handle the problem, EPA falsely points to coal ash cleanups in the Carolinas that resulted after many years of legal battles by the Southern Environmental Law Center on behalf of community groups against politically powerful coal-burning utilities like Duke Energy—litigation necessitated because states actually failed to handle the problem of coal ash pollution. North Carolina also now has a unique coal ash law that no other state has, which was enacted after Duke Energy’s disastrous Dan River coal ash spill and community outcry.  

“Doing the bidding of industrial polluters instead of protecting ordinary families and clean water is shameful, but we are ready to keep fighting against coal ash pollution on behalf of communities,” Torrey added.  

Coal ash contains arsenic, lead, mercury, and many other heavy metals and toxic pollutants that are particularly harmful to young children and contaminate our drinking water sources, rivers, lakes, and groundwater.