By Peter Galuszka
More and more, “The War on Coal.” seems like “The War On Us.”
Just a few weeks after 300,000 people in the Charleston, W.Va. area were without drinking water because of a coal preparation chemical leaked into the Kanawha River system, another spill involving coal could threaten the drinking water of Danville and, even worse, the cities of Tidewater which get their drinking water from Lake Gaston.
On Sunday, Duke Energy found that 82,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water had leaked from an obsolete coal-burning power plant into the Dan River at Eden , N.C.
The Dan flows to nearby Danville and supplies it with drinking water. To be safe, officials in Virginia Beach stopped drawing water from Lake Gaston which is also fed by the Dan.
Officials can’t seem to say for certain just what the danger is from the spill. The Waterkeeper Alliance, a national environmental group, has done its own testing and reports:
“Laboratory results of Waterkeeper’s samples, also show that, compared to the levels found in a “background” water sample taken upstream of the spill, arsenic levels immediately downstream of the spill are nearly 30 times higher, chromium levels are more than 27 times higher, and lead levels are more than 13 times higher because of Duke Energy’s coal ash waste.”
As BusinessWeek points out, the two spills involving coal materials seem like a bad joke.
An even bigger joke is that activists have been warning Duke for 40 years of the dangers from coal ash, which is the waste from burned coal. There’s plenty of it in Virginia, too.
Where are the Koch brothers when you need them?
