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Letters-to-the editor tips
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CHARLESTON, WV — “When we last left West Virginia Republication Rep. David McKinley, he was using his stacked discussion panel to pretend there’s no scientific consensus about man-made global warming. Well this week, Rep. McKinley is bringing back a somewhat reworked version of his coal-ash legislation (see the bill here and a summary here). He says in a prepared statement:
Coal ash is widely reused in construction products such as cement, concrete, wallboard, and roofing materials. This bill will preserve this beneficial reuse and help keep electricity costs low for American businesses and families. It provides a workable alternative to EPA’s 2010 proposal to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste, which put hundreds of thousands of jobs in jeopardy and threatened to drive up electricity and construction costs.“
— Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette
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 Small passage in solution-enlarged joint, north of main cave. This passage is similar to the other, but is smaller and has been largely filled with residual soil. The width of the open passage is about one foot. TRIMBLE CO, KY — “LG&E has another problem with that cave in Trimble County that’s been holding up construction of a coal ash landfill.
It may have been a hiding place for the Underground Railroad, a network that helped slaves move from the South to freedom in Northern states in the 1800s.
‘In the opinion of this investigator, the ‘Wentworth Lime Cave’ serves as a very real example of a ‘holding’ or way station to aid slave escapes along the Ohio River,’ concluded Alicestyne Turley, a historian and contractor hired by LG&E consultants to review markings found inside the cave.
The U.S. Army Corps is reviewing the study and other information as part of a wetlands destruction permit required for the landfill.”
— James Bruggers, Louisville Courier-Journal
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 Yard signs like this one can be seen along Pyramus and Johnsonville roads, in Chester, where residents are concerned about the environmental effects of coal ash being disposed of at the nearby Little Blue Run impoundment. PITTSBURGH, PA — “FirstEnergy Corp. will put more than 3 million tons of coal ash and smokestack scrubber waste a year into barges and ship it 96 miles up the Ohio and Monongahela rivers to a new disposal site when it is forced to close its massive Little Blue Run coal ash impoundment on the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border at the end of 2016.
The electric utility company, based in Akron, Ohio, announced earlier this week it will ship “coal combustion by-products” produced by the Bruce Mansfield power plant in Shippingport, Beaver County, to an existing unlined ash disposal site in LaBelle, Fayette County, owned by Matt Canestrale Contracting Inc.
…’We are encouraged that FirstEnergy has decided to close Little Blue and abandon plans for expansion,’ said Roni Kampmeyer, a spokeswoman for the Little Blue Regional Action Group, which opposed the expansion plans. ‘But we don’t want FirstEnergy to just push the problem onto somebody else.’”
— Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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GREENE TWP, PA — “FirstEnergy has abandoned its plan to replace Little Blue Run with a dry storage disposal facility, company officials said in a news release Tuesday.
FirstEnergy formally withdrew its permit to replace the wet coal-ash waste facility with a dry disposal system in Greene Township adjacent to the existing impoundment, the statement said.
FirstEnergy plans to give the coal ash from the Bruce Mansfield Power Plant in Shippingport to a coal mine reclamation project in La Belle, Luzerne Township, Fayette County, beginning Jan. 1, 2017. According to the release, the material will be transported via barge. The waste will continue to be stored at Little Blue Run until that date, the release said.”
— By Rachel Morgan and Patrick O’Shea, Calkins Media
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 ARLINGTON, VA — “The Environmental Protection Agency still cannot provide a ‘definitive time’ for promulgating final regulations on the management of coal ash from power plants, an agency senior official told BNA.
Mathy Stanislaus, EPA assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response, said Jan. 7 the agency needs to issue an additional notice of data availability prior to issuing final regulations because of new information that ‘could potentially influence our risk analysis and cost estimates.’
Stanislaus said EPA is working to issue the notice ‘as soon as we can.’”
— Anthony Adragna, Bloomberg News
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 Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans WASHINGTON D.C. — “A congressional effort to rein in federal regulation of coal ash could result in little or no regulation at all, a new report from the Congressional Research Service warns.
The bills, H.R. 2273 and S. 3512, would set up a plan for states to regulate coal ash like landfill waste — pre-empting an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to designate the often toxic combustion byproducts as hazardous waste. But the proposals’ vague language would make it difficult to tell if states are correctly implementing their own programs, says the report, which the green group Earthjustice made public Monday.
Among other fuzziness, the bills leave unclear ‘key issues such as how, when or to which facilities the [state] permit program would apply,’ the report says. ‘That level of uncertainty defeats the purpose of a permit program,’ it adds.”
— Erica Martinson, Politico
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 A collapsed house inundated by a spill of coal ash near Knoxville, Tenn., in 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) WASHINGTON, DC — “Despite its efforts to unseat President Obama, the coal sector is now working closely with the White House on certain issues. The Obama administration, in fact, may acquiesce to the industry’s concern over how coal ash would be regulated.
While its environmental backers won’t be happy, the president and his Environmental Protection Agency will probably opt to continue regulating that coal combustion byproduct as a solid waste, as opposed to a hazardous waste. The difference is that solid wastes are allowed to be recycled and used in such things as cement and dry wall. A hazardous waste ruling would stigmatize that coal ash and would essentially dry up those secondary markets, which would also increase the amount of refuse that must be dispensed.”
— Ken Silverstein, Forbes
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 This coal ash slurry near the Kingston Fossil Plant in Harriman. Federal studies have long shown coal ash to contain significant quantities of heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium, which can be a threat to water supplies and human health. WASHINGTON, DC — “The Congressional Research Service issued an analysis of two pending pieces of coal ash legislation—H.R. 2273 and S.3512—finding that the bills lack a clear purpose and would not ensure state adoption and implementation of standards “necessary to protect human health and the environment.” These bills—one passed by the House of Representatives in October 2011 and the other now pending in the Senate—would prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from ever setting federally enforceable safeguards for the disposal of toxic coal ash.”
— Earthjustice
link to article
 Step 1: Decide what your message to Sen. Sherrod Brown will be.
It is always better to use your own words, of course, with your own perspective. If you’d like a sample to get you thinking about it, here’s one –
Dear Senator Brown:
If 2012′s bad coal ash bill was an indication, there will be another bad bill in 2013 that would prevent the U.S EPA from regulating the toxic waste known as coal ash. Every year, U.S. coal plants produce 140 million tons of coal ash, filled with lead, arsenic, mercury, and other toxic heavy metals. I urge you to oppose any effort to pass a bad, weak coal ash bill and any effort to sneak the language of the bills into “must-pass” legislation. Please let me know what you will do.
His address is — U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, 713 Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510.
Step 2. Pick a photo to send.
Maybe you already have a photo in your computer to send, like one of your house, or your family. Or maybe take a new picture of air pollution out your window, or the coal plant you pass by every day. Or, as always, you can’t go wrong with a photo of a child’s drawing about the issue.
Step 3. Now you are ready to send it.
Open the link to the Postagram postcard service and follow the steps from there. You may want to print this page first for reference, or open the Postagram link in a separate tab or window.
We’re very interested in what you hear back from Senator Brown. Please let Sandy Buchanan know, (216) 861-5200.
Good luck and thanks.
 A collapsed house inundated by a spill of coal ash near Knoxville, Tenn., in 2008. WASHINGTON, DC — “Despite its efforts to unseat President Obama, the coal sector is now working closely with the White House on certain issues. The Obama administration, in fact, may acquiesce to the industry’s concern over how coal ash would be regulated.
While its environmental backers won’t be happy, the president and his Environmental Protection Agency will probably opt to continue regulating that coal combustion byproduct as a solid waste, as opposed to a hazardous waste. The difference is that solid wastes are allowed to be recycled and used in such things as cement and dry wall. A hazardous waste ruling would stigmatize that coal ash and would essentially dry up those secondary markets, which would also increase the amount of refuse that must be dispensed.
‘About 40 percent of all coal ash is recycled,’ says Rick Boucher, former Democratic lawmaker on the House Energy and Commerce Committee who spoke at an EnergyBiz forum last week. ‘No one would use hazardous waste in a commercial product.’ He goes on to say that a final ruling, which could get published next summer, will fall into the non-hazardous category but with ‘stricter’ disposal provisions.”
— Ken Silverstein, Forbes
link to article
KINGSTON, TN — “… just because cleanup efforts have ceased, that does not mean that the pollution problem is gone.
In fact, quite the opposite is true. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reached a deal with the TVA to allow the company to stop their cleanup efforts and allow ‘natural river processes‘ to dispose of the remaining toxic sludge.
Reports say that as much as 500,000 cubic yards of coal ash sludge remain in the Emory River, a result of the 2008 dam rupture that released the coal ash from the processing plant. According to the EPA and TVA, it’s perfectly fine to allow those contaminants to remain in the river. As the EPA puts it, dredging up the remaining coal ash would actually release even more pollutants into the water – including contaminants left over from previous industrial accidents and Department of Energy projects.
To put it more succinctly: The ‘leave it lie’ mindset occurred in the past, making it impossible to clean up current spills without disturbing previous contaminants that weren’t cleaned. Pollution will now be left piled on top of other pollution, and so on and so on.
— Farron Cousins, Desmogblog
link to article
 Avner Vengosh is professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. RALEIGH, NC — “Unfortunately, we may be saving our skies at the expense of our water.
Earlier this month, my research team at Duke University published a peer-reviewed study that found high levels of arsenic, selenium and other toxic contaminants in coal ash residues and wastewater discharges generated by coal-fired plants. We found that these contaminants are getting into the water and sediments of lakes and rivers located downstream from coal ash ponds across North Carolina.
It turns out the EPA-required air pollution scrubbers and other contaminant-trapping technologies used at many power plants, such as fabric-filter baghouses, are keeping many toxic contaminants out of our air, which is good. But the contaminants don’t just disappear. They remain, trapped but largely untreated, in concentrated solid form as coal ash or in liquid form as scrubber wastewater and ash-transport slurries. And they’re accumulating in the lakes and rivers into which the plants directly discharge these wastes.”
— Avner Vengosh, Op-Ed, The News Observer
link to letter
CHARLESTON, WV — “There’s plenty of evidence that EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson has never been all that hot to do anything about coal ash in the first place.
The TVA coal-ash disaster in Tennessee occurred in December 2008, a couple of weeks after the election. Only a few months into the Obama administration, in March 2009, EPA promised it would propose a rule by the end of that year. But come December 2009, as the first anniversary of the TVA disaster approached, Lisa Jackson was backing off that timeline.
… EPA didn’t announce a proposed rule until May 2010, and even then, it wasn’t so much a proposal as an outline of what we already knew: There were two major options for how the agency could go about regulating coal ash, and EPA couldn’t decide which one it wanted to use. And then, in May 2011, EPA announced it wasn’t going to complete a final rule in 2011 … So after talking pretty big about coal ash concerns, the Obama EPA has now spent four years thinking about it, and has no final rule to show for it.”
— Ken Ward, Jr., Charleston Gazette
link to article
 Dr. Avner Vengosh, Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Duke University, author of a new coal ash study. WASHINGTON D.C. — “Sunday’s Washington Post included the following update from environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin on the important issue of regulating the handling and disposal of toxic coal ash from our nation’s power plants:
In Maryland’s Zekiah Swamp, one of the Chesapeake Bay’s most important tributaries, 8.4 million tons of coal ash in pits from former operations of the Morgantown power plant are leaking into groundwater. Residents on the Moapa River Reservation north of Las Vegas blame a spike in respiratory illnesses on the uncovered ash ponds and ash dump from a generating station nearby.
The ash left after burning coal includes toxic elements such as arsenic, lead, cadmium, selenium and mercury. Produced by 431 coal-fired power plants, which supply 36 percent of the nation’s electricity, coal ash piles up at the staggering rate of 140 million tons a year
More than 40 percent of it is recycled to help make concrete, gypsum wallboard and pavement. But utilities store the rest in landfills, ponds or mines, and evidence has been growing in recent years that leakage is a problem.
‘The time has come for common-sense national protections to assure safe disposal of these materials,’ Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson said. That was in 2010.
…Study author Avner Vengosh, professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said:
We are saving the sky by putting in more scrubbers to remove particulates from power plant emissions. But these contaminants don’t just disappear. As our study shows, they remain in high concentrations in the solid waste residue and wastewater the coal-fired power plants produce. Yet there are no systematic monitoring or regulations to reduce water-quality impacts from coal ash ponds because coal ash is not considered as hazardous waste.
— Ken Ward Jr., Charleston Gazette
link to article
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Letters supporting the Fracking Emergency Medical Right to Know Act 9,241 neighbors have sent handwritten letters and made personal phone calls urging state legislators to support the Fracking Emergency Medical Right to Know Act as of June 10, 2013.
Ohio coal-fired power plants
Letters to Senator Sherrod Brown and Senator Rob Portman 6,615 members have sent handwritten letters and petitions to Senator Brown urging him to support US EPA rules that will protect our health from polluting coal plants as of January 24, 2012.
3,751 members have petitioned Senator Portman urging him to support US EPA rules that will protect our health from polluting coal plants as of January 24, 2012.
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