According to the Weather Channel Website, Duke Energy is reporting that due to the flooding from Florence (remember her), a dam at its Wilmington facility has breached and is spilling tons of Coal Ash into the Cape Fear river. The Weather Channel reporter is characterizing this as a pending Environmental Emergency!
Here are some details from the Weather Channel:
“The impacts from Hurricane Florence remained severe in the Carolinas on Friday, as officials at an energy plant said a dam breach might have caused a hazardous spill into a nearby river.
Duke Energy confirmed the dam breach to the Associated Press late Friday morning at the L.V. Sutton Power Station located to the northwest of Wilmington, North Carolina. Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan told the AP that floodwaters from Lake Sutton had overtaken the earthen dam, and she couldn't rule out that coal ash might be flowing into the nearby Cape Fear River.
The 1,100-acre reservoir contains some 400,000 cubic yards of coal ash, which is what remains after coal is burned to generate electricity. The ash can contain a slew of toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead and mercury.”
It doesn’t get much worse than this!
Here’s a little political history about this stuff.
We knew that these coal ash dumps, which are really ponds filled with rainfall soaked coal ash, were environmental time bombs back during the Obama days when such a pond let go and contaminated miles of river-way in coal country. Obama had his EPA begin promulgating regulations that would ensure that coal ash would be properly and securely stored/disposed of, so as to prevent a future accident. However, as part of Trump’s “Bring Back Coal” policies, the regulations on coal ash, which I believe were part of the Clean Water initiative, were among the “job-killing” regulations walked back by the Trump administration.
So this latest release of coal ash can be directly liked to Trump’s pro-Coal policies. I only hope that water supplies down stream are not poisoned by this release.
Heaven Help Us!