Zeno Swijtink
07-27-2008, 02:08 PM
As fly ash piles up, the challenge for safe disposal rises (https://hamptonroads.com/2008/07/fly-ash-piles-challenge-rises-safe-disposal)
https://media.hamptonroads.com/cache/files/images/138531.jpg
Fly ash is a superfine, powdery byproduct of burning coal for electricity. It can contain heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury, which pose risks to the environment. (Bill Tiernan | The Virginian-Pilot)
By Robert McCabe
The Virginian-Pilot
© July 27, 2008
Coal provides more than half of the nation's electricity and will continue to be the fuel of choice for generating power. In raw terms, it makes sense: The United States sits on a quarter of the world's coal reserves, making it a cheap and abundant energy source.
But as demand mounts, so do the byproducts from burning coal. Millions of tons of "fly ash" - a powdery substance laced with heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury and lead - have piled up in landfills. For power companies, those are costly disposal options, because the fly ash placed there must be treated as a potentially toxic industrial waste.
Coal-power producers and environmental regulators formed a partnership, trying to figure out a cheap and safe way to dispose of the residue.
They shaped a mishmash of rules that vary from state to state, with no federal oversight. They encourage the recycling of fly ash through "beneficial uses," ranging from concrete block and wallboard manufacturing to a variety of in-ground, structural fill uses that include such local projects as Norfolk's Harbor Park baseball stadium and embankments on parts of the Chesapeake Expressway and the Southwest Suffolk Bypass.
Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville, a course in Chesapeake built with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, is the biggest of them all - one of the largest ash reuse projects of its kind in the nation.
City officials began testing water at the site and the homes of nearby residences after The Virginian-Pilot reported March 30 that the soil cap on top of the fly ash had eroded in places and that a series of man-made "lakes" on the course lacked liners that could prevent the leaching of any contaminants. The Pilot also reported that while groundwater-monitoring wells were not required for the course, they were at Dominion Virginia Power's Chesapeake Energy Center, which supplied the fly ash for the project. Construction of the course began in 2002; it opened in fall 2007.
Test results disclosed July 17 confirmed the fears of nearby residents, prompting city officials to request help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Arsenic levels are more than eight times and lead levels more than five times the municipal drinking water standards. Aluminum, one of the other contaminants, exceeds drinking water standards by 500 times.
The site is now on the radar of the EPA's Superfund program and exemplifies a little-known, but growing, problem: how to deal with a mountain of ash generated by the nation's roughly 440 coal-fired power plants.
Fly ash used to sculpt the 18-hole golf course sits on wet soil and over aquifers that supply drinking water to roughly 200 wells within a radius of about a half-mile. Elevated levels of arsenic have been cited in on-site monitoring wells at Dominion's state-regulated fly-ash landfill in Chesapeake.
Buzz about the use of fly ash in Chesapeake and elsewhere reached Washington and Richmond in late spring.
Congress, Virginia regulators, industry officials and environmental experts met to weigh whether rules governing fly-ash disposal are adequate.
A key question facing regulators is whether "beneficial uses" of fly ash in cases such as the Chesapeake golf course - involving massive amounts of the material spread over land, near groundwater - should face more scrutiny.
"The current approaches to evaluating risks are very limited, and they may underestimate the true risks," Dr. Thomas Burke, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, told a congressional panel in June.
The foundation for the "beneficial use" provisions of coal-ash regulations was laid in 1980. That's when Congress temporarily exempted coal-combustion byproducts from classification as hazardous waste pending further study by the EPA.
What this meant, effectively, was that coal-ash products would be subject to state - not federal - regulation.
With nearly 20 major coal-fired power plants in Virginia, the disposal of coal ash had become a problem. It was dumped in pits, old mines or landfills. In York County, fly ash placed in abandoned sand and gravel mines between 1957 and 1974 polluted groundwater, and the dump site later gained Superfund status.
"Water in adjacent residential wells actually turned green," according to a recent National Research Council study requested by Congress. The site since has been cleaned up.
Nationwide, as regulators began to recognize the air-pollution threat from burning coal, emissions standards required that fly ash be captured and stockpiled on the ground. This, however, intensified the threat to groundwater.
Landfill controls eventually became stricter, requiring protective liners, well monitoring and other safeguards to contain a growing amount of fly ash. Power and coal companies teamed with construction businesses to find creative ways to reuse the material. Virginia embraced the notion, so much so that its governor appointed a coal-ash industry leader to head the state's newly formed Department of Environmental Quality.
The new hire was Peter W. Schmidt. While a graduate student and assistant football coach at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, he had become friends with George Allen, a transfer student from UCLA.
Not long after being elected governor of Virginia in 1993, Allen tapped Schmidt to head the fledgling DEQ.
Schmidt was an executive with Agglite Corp., which had an operation on the grounds of Dominion's coal-fired power plant in the city. The company used fly ash generated at Dominion's operation, where it was mixed with cement. Agglite aggressively pursued using fly ash in place of dirt for fill projects. In the early 1990s, before Schmidt's stint at the DEQ, he met with Virginia regulators and successfully pushed for changes in the state's solid-waste regulations that would allow beneficial uses of fly ash in construction projects.
Early in 1995, roughly midway through Schmidt's time at the DEQ, an additional set of regulations was adopted that expanded beneficial-use provisions for fly ash. Schmidt said those regulations were "already in play" when he arrived at the department the year before. It was under those regulations that the Chesapeake golf course project eventually moved forward. Before and after his term as DEQ director - which lasted from June 1994 to June 1996 - Schmidt's businesses were involved in an array of beneficial-use fly-ash projects in Hampton Roads, including Harbor Park, Tidewater Community College's Virginia Beach campus, Portsmouth Naval Hospital, a stretch of Providence Road in Chesapeake and DEQ's offices in Virginia Beach.
For almost 30 years, Schmidt has been affiliated with a constellation of concrete companies based in Charlottesville, with local offices at Money Point in the South Norfolk section of Chesapeake. He recalled his term as DEQ chief as "an enormously contentious time," during which he was labeled a "fox in the chicken house" and pilloried by the media and the heavily Democratic General Assembly.
He said he saw his job then as a managerial challenge, pulling together a handful of previously free-standing state agencies into a unified DEQ.
Schmidt denies there was ever any conflict between his role at the department and his fly-ash-related business ventures before and after his term.
"For someone to imply that I used my position in an inappropriate manner is completely false and inaccurate," he said.
https://media.hamptonroads.com/cache/files/images/138461.jpg
For decades, Washington has sent mixed signals regarding the environmental risks posed by fly ash. The EPA missed deadlines to report to Congress and issue a ruling on fly ash in the 1980s. Later, it twice determined - in 1993 and 2000 - that fly ash and related coal-combustion byproducts should not be regulated as hazardous waste. But it made clear that fly ash was subject to landfilling requirements and couldn't be disposed of freely; the EPA also committed to developing federal regulations for states regarding fly-ash disposal.
The agency has been consistent in one way: It never has stopped telling the public that it is studying fly ash's potential risks to the environment and human health.
In 2004, the EPA held a series of meetings "to learn more about the use and disposal of coal-combustion byproducts," according to a regulatory timeline posted at https://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/other/fossil/regs.htm.
"The Agency remains concerned about coal combustion byproducts because of the potential for environmental damage, the lack of groundwater protection via monitoring and/or liners, and widely varying state regulatory programs," according to a note on the EPA's Web page.
Those concerns have heated up as news of the prolific use of fly ash and water contamination has circulated nationally.
At the House subcommittee hearing last month on fly-ash disposal rules, a former EPA attorney cited the Chesapeake golf course as another example of why a federal regulatory baseline needs to be established.
"With no minimum federal standards, the states have been free to regulate as they please, or more often, abstain from effective regulation altogether," said Lisa Evans, now with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, in written statements submitted to the panel.
"If one compares how EPA regulates the disposal of ordinary household trash with its hands-off approach to (coal-combustion waste), the results defy logic."
At the same hearing, the head of the American Coal Ash Association, a Colorado-based trade group, said the current system is working just fine.
"It is our opinion that most states want to continue their role in the oversight of management, recycling and beneficial uses" of coal-ash products, said David Goss, the group's executive director, in a written statement.
Others at the hearing, however, particularly those from Maryland, pushed for a minimum set of nationwide safeguards. Last year, state regulators imposed a $1 million fine on a Baltimore-area utility and the local owner of a dump site after contamination in at least 34 wells in Gambrills, Md., was linked to fly ash.
"I really hear a need for some kind of federal baseline, because I think that federal regulations of some kind have the effect of saying, 'Stop, look, listen,' before you go to dispose of this kind of waste," said Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, whose district includes Gambrills.
"This is a classic instance in which later we'll look back and we'll say, 'You know, we had all the warning signs to put some kind of regime in place and we didn't take advantage of it.' "
The effects of the uncontrolled use of fly ash on air and groundwater are well-documented. Cases involving fly-ash contamination of groundwater have been cited in Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Wisconsin and Virginia.
Always a wild card is the level of risk in a particular setting, because the constituents in fly ash can vary widely and so can soil conditions, hydrology and other environmental factors.
Every fly-ash disposal site presents a unique puzzle.
To see one coal-waste site is not to see them all, but only the one you're looking at, Burke, the Johns Hopkins professor, told the recent congressional panel. "You need to have the tools to be able to evaluate them," he said.
The Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville was sculpted from fly ash that Dominion Virginia Power paid to have trucked from its Chesapeake Energy Center.
People with direct knowledge of the deal said that a Dominion subcontractor paid the original developers an initial fee of about $4.50 per ton for the fly ash to be placed on the golf course. At that rate, the deal would have cost the utility nearly $7 million.
A toxicity test, widely accepted by regulators nationwide, was conducted by Dominion's lab in 2001 and used to convince environmental officials and the public that the project was safe. However, the EPA has acknowledged the test used was designed to assess the leaching risk of contaminants from "garbage juice" in municipal solid-waste landfills - not heavy metals from fly ash.
The results from another leaching test recently requested by the city and reviewed by a fly-ash chemist and expert arrived at a very different set of conclusions.
"It is his opinion that levels of constituents of concern are high," wrote City Manager William E. Harrell, in a July 16 letter to the EPA. "Further, high levels of vanadium were detected in the groundwater recovered from the monitoring wells. It is the opinion of our fly ash expert that vanadium is an element associated with and found in fly ash."
The levels of other contaminants - arsenic, lead, manganese and chromium - also were high, exceeding municipal drinking water standards. The question for regulators and residents now is whether these contaminants have infected their water supplies or eventually will.
Virginia regulators, prompted in part by what has occurred in Chesapeake, now are looking at the adequacy of the tools used to assess the safety of fly-ash projects and whether changes are necessary. The 217-acre golf course is among the largest known fly-ash projects in the state of Virginia - bigger than Dominion's regulated fly-ash landfill in Deep Creek, which has about 1.1 million tons of ash. Yet it was built under a relaxed set of rules that exempts projects from DEQ permitting requirements because it met the tests for beneficial-use status.
The developers of the golf course and Dominion say the ash placed there was mixed with a binding agent, either cement kiln dust or lime kiln dust, that prevents leaching. Some environmental experts countered that cement kiln dust is an industrial waste and that the existence of unlined lakes on the course and questions about the location of the water table means all bets are off.
Dominion Virginia Power officials said the utility conducted extensive environmental testing before moving ahead with the project seven years ago but on the advice of its attorneys has declined to release any of the findings.
Dominion's Chesapeake plant no longer has a need to landfill the fly ash it generates. An on-site vendor further processes virtually all of the fly ash and markets it to regional companies that use it to make concrete products.
This year, the company has won two environmental awards, one from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and another from the EPA.
The Chesapeake City Council unanimously approved the Battlefield Golf Club project in June 2001 and, in April, after a story in The Pilot about the golf course, the city offered tap-water testing to more than 75 homeowners who use wells and live near it.
Those tests showed no sign of contamination but detected boron, a possible marker for fly-ash contamination.
After the recent discovery of contaminants in the shallow aquifer under the course, the city began retesting the tap water at nearly 30 homes downstream from the golf course.
Though the environmental risks posed by fly ash have been known for years, the golf-course developers were required only to "notify" the state of their plans and to verify certain items.
They did that in March 2002.
Among other things, certifications had to be submitted showing that the developers had legal control of the property, that the project met all city ordinances and that certain "locational restrictions" would be met, including a 2-foot vertical separation between any fly ash and the "maximum seasonal water table," though the regulations do not specifically define what that means.
The DEQ had 30 days to review the papers and get back to the developers. The department was not required to - and did not - double-check the information provided.
"There is no technical review," said Milt Johnston, of the DEQ's Tidewater office.
Johnston said that, technically, the state environmental agency did not approve the golf course.
In a recent in-house e-mail directive, DEQ officials were instructed to avoid using terms such as "approval" in relation to coal-combustion byproduct projects.
"The wording has been changed to 'acknowledged' or 'deemed' to be consistent with the regulations," wrote Jason E. Williams, the DEQ's solid-waste permit coordinator, in a May 29 e-mail to department staff.
The golf course is one of 14 projects in Virginia to be built under state rules adopted in early 1995. No such project has yet been denied by the state.
Together, the sites account for about 5 million tons of ash.
More than a quarter of it is under the golf course in Chesapeake.
That is only a fraction of the fly ash used elsewhere across the state, under another set of state regulations.
The DEQ does not track those uses.
Robert McCabe, (757) 222-5217, [email protected]
--
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
https://media.hamptonroads.com/cache/files/images/138531.jpg
Fly ash is a superfine, powdery byproduct of burning coal for electricity. It can contain heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury, which pose risks to the environment. (Bill Tiernan | The Virginian-Pilot)
By Robert McCabe
The Virginian-Pilot
© July 27, 2008
Coal provides more than half of the nation's electricity and will continue to be the fuel of choice for generating power. In raw terms, it makes sense: The United States sits on a quarter of the world's coal reserves, making it a cheap and abundant energy source.
But as demand mounts, so do the byproducts from burning coal. Millions of tons of "fly ash" - a powdery substance laced with heavy metals such as arsenic, mercury and lead - have piled up in landfills. For power companies, those are costly disposal options, because the fly ash placed there must be treated as a potentially toxic industrial waste.
Coal-power producers and environmental regulators formed a partnership, trying to figure out a cheap and safe way to dispose of the residue.
They shaped a mishmash of rules that vary from state to state, with no federal oversight. They encourage the recycling of fly ash through "beneficial uses," ranging from concrete block and wallboard manufacturing to a variety of in-ground, structural fill uses that include such local projects as Norfolk's Harbor Park baseball stadium and embankments on parts of the Chesapeake Expressway and the Southwest Suffolk Bypass.
Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville, a course in Chesapeake built with 1.5 million tons of fly ash, is the biggest of them all - one of the largest ash reuse projects of its kind in the nation.
City officials began testing water at the site and the homes of nearby residences after The Virginian-Pilot reported March 30 that the soil cap on top of the fly ash had eroded in places and that a series of man-made "lakes" on the course lacked liners that could prevent the leaching of any contaminants. The Pilot also reported that while groundwater-monitoring wells were not required for the course, they were at Dominion Virginia Power's Chesapeake Energy Center, which supplied the fly ash for the project. Construction of the course began in 2002; it opened in fall 2007.
Test results disclosed July 17 confirmed the fears of nearby residents, prompting city officials to request help from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Arsenic levels are more than eight times and lead levels more than five times the municipal drinking water standards. Aluminum, one of the other contaminants, exceeds drinking water standards by 500 times.
The site is now on the radar of the EPA's Superfund program and exemplifies a little-known, but growing, problem: how to deal with a mountain of ash generated by the nation's roughly 440 coal-fired power plants.
Fly ash used to sculpt the 18-hole golf course sits on wet soil and over aquifers that supply drinking water to roughly 200 wells within a radius of about a half-mile. Elevated levels of arsenic have been cited in on-site monitoring wells at Dominion's state-regulated fly-ash landfill in Chesapeake.
Buzz about the use of fly ash in Chesapeake and elsewhere reached Washington and Richmond in late spring.
Congress, Virginia regulators, industry officials and environmental experts met to weigh whether rules governing fly-ash disposal are adequate.
A key question facing regulators is whether "beneficial uses" of fly ash in cases such as the Chesapeake golf course - involving massive amounts of the material spread over land, near groundwater - should face more scrutiny.
"The current approaches to evaluating risks are very limited, and they may underestimate the true risks," Dr. Thomas Burke, a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University, told a congressional panel in June.
The foundation for the "beneficial use" provisions of coal-ash regulations was laid in 1980. That's when Congress temporarily exempted coal-combustion byproducts from classification as hazardous waste pending further study by the EPA.
What this meant, effectively, was that coal-ash products would be subject to state - not federal - regulation.
With nearly 20 major coal-fired power plants in Virginia, the disposal of coal ash had become a problem. It was dumped in pits, old mines or landfills. In York County, fly ash placed in abandoned sand and gravel mines between 1957 and 1974 polluted groundwater, and the dump site later gained Superfund status.
"Water in adjacent residential wells actually turned green," according to a recent National Research Council study requested by Congress. The site since has been cleaned up.
Nationwide, as regulators began to recognize the air-pollution threat from burning coal, emissions standards required that fly ash be captured and stockpiled on the ground. This, however, intensified the threat to groundwater.
Landfill controls eventually became stricter, requiring protective liners, well monitoring and other safeguards to contain a growing amount of fly ash. Power and coal companies teamed with construction businesses to find creative ways to reuse the material. Virginia embraced the notion, so much so that its governor appointed a coal-ash industry leader to head the state's newly formed Department of Environmental Quality.
The new hire was Peter W. Schmidt. While a graduate student and assistant football coach at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, he had become friends with George Allen, a transfer student from UCLA.
Not long after being elected governor of Virginia in 1993, Allen tapped Schmidt to head the fledgling DEQ.
Schmidt was an executive with Agglite Corp., which had an operation on the grounds of Dominion's coal-fired power plant in the city. The company used fly ash generated at Dominion's operation, where it was mixed with cement. Agglite aggressively pursued using fly ash in place of dirt for fill projects. In the early 1990s, before Schmidt's stint at the DEQ, he met with Virginia regulators and successfully pushed for changes in the state's solid-waste regulations that would allow beneficial uses of fly ash in construction projects.
Early in 1995, roughly midway through Schmidt's time at the DEQ, an additional set of regulations was adopted that expanded beneficial-use provisions for fly ash. Schmidt said those regulations were "already in play" when he arrived at the department the year before. It was under those regulations that the Chesapeake golf course project eventually moved forward. Before and after his term as DEQ director - which lasted from June 1994 to June 1996 - Schmidt's businesses were involved in an array of beneficial-use fly-ash projects in Hampton Roads, including Harbor Park, Tidewater Community College's Virginia Beach campus, Portsmouth Naval Hospital, a stretch of Providence Road in Chesapeake and DEQ's offices in Virginia Beach.
For almost 30 years, Schmidt has been affiliated with a constellation of concrete companies based in Charlottesville, with local offices at Money Point in the South Norfolk section of Chesapeake. He recalled his term as DEQ chief as "an enormously contentious time," during which he was labeled a "fox in the chicken house" and pilloried by the media and the heavily Democratic General Assembly.
He said he saw his job then as a managerial challenge, pulling together a handful of previously free-standing state agencies into a unified DEQ.
Schmidt denies there was ever any conflict between his role at the department and his fly-ash-related business ventures before and after his term.
"For someone to imply that I used my position in an inappropriate manner is completely false and inaccurate," he said.
https://media.hamptonroads.com/cache/files/images/138461.jpg
For decades, Washington has sent mixed signals regarding the environmental risks posed by fly ash. The EPA missed deadlines to report to Congress and issue a ruling on fly ash in the 1980s. Later, it twice determined - in 1993 and 2000 - that fly ash and related coal-combustion byproducts should not be regulated as hazardous waste. But it made clear that fly ash was subject to landfilling requirements and couldn't be disposed of freely; the EPA also committed to developing federal regulations for states regarding fly-ash disposal.
The agency has been consistent in one way: It never has stopped telling the public that it is studying fly ash's potential risks to the environment and human health.
In 2004, the EPA held a series of meetings "to learn more about the use and disposal of coal-combustion byproducts," according to a regulatory timeline posted at https://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/other/fossil/regs.htm.
"The Agency remains concerned about coal combustion byproducts because of the potential for environmental damage, the lack of groundwater protection via monitoring and/or liners, and widely varying state regulatory programs," according to a note on the EPA's Web page.
Those concerns have heated up as news of the prolific use of fly ash and water contamination has circulated nationally.
At the House subcommittee hearing last month on fly-ash disposal rules, a former EPA attorney cited the Chesapeake golf course as another example of why a federal regulatory baseline needs to be established.
"With no minimum federal standards, the states have been free to regulate as they please, or more often, abstain from effective regulation altogether," said Lisa Evans, now with Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, in written statements submitted to the panel.
"If one compares how EPA regulates the disposal of ordinary household trash with its hands-off approach to (coal-combustion waste), the results defy logic."
At the same hearing, the head of the American Coal Ash Association, a Colorado-based trade group, said the current system is working just fine.
"It is our opinion that most states want to continue their role in the oversight of management, recycling and beneficial uses" of coal-ash products, said David Goss, the group's executive director, in a written statement.
Others at the hearing, however, particularly those from Maryland, pushed for a minimum set of nationwide safeguards. Last year, state regulators imposed a $1 million fine on a Baltimore-area utility and the local owner of a dump site after contamination in at least 34 wells in Gambrills, Md., was linked to fly ash.
"I really hear a need for some kind of federal baseline, because I think that federal regulations of some kind have the effect of saying, 'Stop, look, listen,' before you go to dispose of this kind of waste," said Maryland Rep. John Sarbanes, whose district includes Gambrills.
"This is a classic instance in which later we'll look back and we'll say, 'You know, we had all the warning signs to put some kind of regime in place and we didn't take advantage of it.' "
The effects of the uncontrolled use of fly ash on air and groundwater are well-documented. Cases involving fly-ash contamination of groundwater have been cited in Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Wisconsin and Virginia.
Always a wild card is the level of risk in a particular setting, because the constituents in fly ash can vary widely and so can soil conditions, hydrology and other environmental factors.
Every fly-ash disposal site presents a unique puzzle.
To see one coal-waste site is not to see them all, but only the one you're looking at, Burke, the Johns Hopkins professor, told the recent congressional panel. "You need to have the tools to be able to evaluate them," he said.
The Battlefield Golf Club at Centerville was sculpted from fly ash that Dominion Virginia Power paid to have trucked from its Chesapeake Energy Center.
People with direct knowledge of the deal said that a Dominion subcontractor paid the original developers an initial fee of about $4.50 per ton for the fly ash to be placed on the golf course. At that rate, the deal would have cost the utility nearly $7 million.
A toxicity test, widely accepted by regulators nationwide, was conducted by Dominion's lab in 2001 and used to convince environmental officials and the public that the project was safe. However, the EPA has acknowledged the test used was designed to assess the leaching risk of contaminants from "garbage juice" in municipal solid-waste landfills - not heavy metals from fly ash.
The results from another leaching test recently requested by the city and reviewed by a fly-ash chemist and expert arrived at a very different set of conclusions.
"It is his opinion that levels of constituents of concern are high," wrote City Manager William E. Harrell, in a July 16 letter to the EPA. "Further, high levels of vanadium were detected in the groundwater recovered from the monitoring wells. It is the opinion of our fly ash expert that vanadium is an element associated with and found in fly ash."
The levels of other contaminants - arsenic, lead, manganese and chromium - also were high, exceeding municipal drinking water standards. The question for regulators and residents now is whether these contaminants have infected their water supplies or eventually will.
Virginia regulators, prompted in part by what has occurred in Chesapeake, now are looking at the adequacy of the tools used to assess the safety of fly-ash projects and whether changes are necessary. The 217-acre golf course is among the largest known fly-ash projects in the state of Virginia - bigger than Dominion's regulated fly-ash landfill in Deep Creek, which has about 1.1 million tons of ash. Yet it was built under a relaxed set of rules that exempts projects from DEQ permitting requirements because it met the tests for beneficial-use status.
The developers of the golf course and Dominion say the ash placed there was mixed with a binding agent, either cement kiln dust or lime kiln dust, that prevents leaching. Some environmental experts countered that cement kiln dust is an industrial waste and that the existence of unlined lakes on the course and questions about the location of the water table means all bets are off.
Dominion Virginia Power officials said the utility conducted extensive environmental testing before moving ahead with the project seven years ago but on the advice of its attorneys has declined to release any of the findings.
Dominion's Chesapeake plant no longer has a need to landfill the fly ash it generates. An on-site vendor further processes virtually all of the fly ash and markets it to regional companies that use it to make concrete products.
This year, the company has won two environmental awards, one from Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and another from the EPA.
The Chesapeake City Council unanimously approved the Battlefield Golf Club project in June 2001 and, in April, after a story in The Pilot about the golf course, the city offered tap-water testing to more than 75 homeowners who use wells and live near it.
Those tests showed no sign of contamination but detected boron, a possible marker for fly-ash contamination.
After the recent discovery of contaminants in the shallow aquifer under the course, the city began retesting the tap water at nearly 30 homes downstream from the golf course.
Though the environmental risks posed by fly ash have been known for years, the golf-course developers were required only to "notify" the state of their plans and to verify certain items.
They did that in March 2002.
Among other things, certifications had to be submitted showing that the developers had legal control of the property, that the project met all city ordinances and that certain "locational restrictions" would be met, including a 2-foot vertical separation between any fly ash and the "maximum seasonal water table," though the regulations do not specifically define what that means.
The DEQ had 30 days to review the papers and get back to the developers. The department was not required to - and did not - double-check the information provided.
"There is no technical review," said Milt Johnston, of the DEQ's Tidewater office.
Johnston said that, technically, the state environmental agency did not approve the golf course.
In a recent in-house e-mail directive, DEQ officials were instructed to avoid using terms such as "approval" in relation to coal-combustion byproduct projects.
"The wording has been changed to 'acknowledged' or 'deemed' to be consistent with the regulations," wrote Jason E. Williams, the DEQ's solid-waste permit coordinator, in a May 29 e-mail to department staff.
The golf course is one of 14 projects in Virginia to be built under state rules adopted in early 1995. No such project has yet been denied by the state.
Together, the sites account for about 5 million tons of ash.
More than a quarter of it is under the golf course in Chesapeake.
That is only a fraction of the fly ash used elsewhere across the state, under another set of state regulations.
The DEQ does not track those uses.
Robert McCabe, (757) 222-5217, [email protected]
--
NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C., section 107, some material is provided without permission from the copyright owner, only for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of federal copyright laws. These materials may not be distributed further, except for "fair use," without permission of the copyright owner. For more information go to: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml