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Jan 7, 2009 10:21 pm US/Eastern
Environmentalists Concerned About Fly Ash Dump
PITTSBURGH (KDKA) ―
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First Energy, which operates a coal-fired power plant along the Ohio River, traps the fly ash and sulfur dioxide in the combustion process and pumps it through an underground pipe into the Little Blue Reservoir.
KDKA
An environmental group is calling a local fly ash dump one of the worst in the nation.
It comes on the heels of the disaster in Tennessee last month where fly ash from a ruptured reservoir engulfed an entire town.
Little Blue Run is a fly ash containment reservoir in Beaver County that covers 130 acres – about 30 times the size of the reservoir in Tennessee.
An environmental group says Little Blue is not only bigger – it contains higher levels of dangerous chemicals and is potentially a greater disaster waiting to happen.
The scenes from Tennessee are as horrific as they are incredible – houses engulfed with a landslide of fly ash sludge – the byproduct of the coal combustion.
For more than three decades, Little Blue Run has served at the repository of fly ash produced form the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant seven miles away.
It's an incredible sight -130 acres of dumped fly ash which environmentalists say contains dangerous chemicals and metals like arsenic and lead. They say this site is a disaster waiting to happen.
"If it would break because of a 100 year rain it would wipe out East Liverpool, East End, Chester, lot of damage," Ralph Hysong, from Hopewell, said.
Hysong, who lives near Little Blue, worries that if the dam holding it in place breaks, the environmental disaster that would dwarf the one in Tennessee. But he also worries about chemicals leaching in the ground water everyday.
"It killed all the trees around here. There's not too much wildlife," Hysong said. "There's everything in this lake there's mercury, there's high levels of arsenic, thallium, you name it it's in the lake."
While fly ash itself may not be hazardous, environmentalists say when it's captured in the coal combustion process, it contains dangerous materials.
The Environmental Integrity Project said Little Blue leads all other sites in the country in selenium, a chemical it says is highly toxic to fish.
They say the plant dumped 167,000 pounds of selenium in Little Blue between 2000 and 2006.
"I can only tell you that the testing that we've done at the wells around our Little Blue Run facility might show some slightly elevated levels of some sulfides or chlorides but as far as any of the other compounds we're just not seeing it," Mark Durbin, from First Energy, said.
And the plant operators say there will not be a disaster on the order of Tennessee. They say the dam holding Little Blue in place is intact and is inspected several times a year by an independent company.
Still, residents and environmentalists are calling for more regulation and oversight.
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