Coal ash watchdog responds to DEP charges of 'misinterpretation'

The following is from the Web site of Dante Picciano:

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RESPONSE TO LETTER OF DEP SECRETARY
Posted - October 16, 2007

On September 18, 2007, the Clean Air Task Force and EarthJustice held a press conference and released a 2,009-page report showing that the dumping of coal ash into mines in Pennsylvania is contaminating groundwaters and surface waters in ten of fifteen mines studied.

On October 5, 2007, Kathleen A. McGinty, Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, published her response to the coal ash report in the Pottsville Republican & Herald newspaper.

That same day, Jeff Stant, one of the co-authors of the coal ash report, submitted a letter to the editor in response to Secretary McGinty's letter. To date, the Pottsville Republican & Herald has failed to publish Jeff Stant's letter. It appears that the newspaper has a pro-dumping agenda and being fair and balanced is not part of that agenda.

Here is the letter of Jeff Stant that the Pottsville Republican & Herald refuses to publish:

CONTAMINATION DATA IS NOT MISINTERPRETED

To the Editor:

As a contributing author to the report about the minefilling of coal ash in Pennsylvania, I would like to respond to PADEP Secretary McGinty's October 5 letter to the Republican & Herald.

Contrary to McGinty's statement that this report was prepared by outsiders, one of its authors is Robert Gadinski, a retired PADEP hydrogeologist. Mr. Gadinski monitored minepools for 20 years and has never seen such high levels of lead as are now found in the minepools underneath the ash dump sites in the Ellengowan and BD Mines. Further, PADEP input was solicited on drafts of the report, and the report was written under the guidance of a distinguished Advisory Panel that included representatives from the Western Pennsylvania Watershed Program, Mountain Watershed Association, PennFuture, academic experts from Penn State, Washington and Jefferson College and West Virginia Water Research Institute, the Vice President of the Tamaqua Borough Council and a former Carbon County Commissioner.

Secretary McGinty's assertion of "numerous cases where the group incorrectly used a single anomalous reading to declare a reclaimed mine site polluted" is untrue. She cannot point to a single incidence of this claim in the report. Furthermore all of the data is from PADEP monitoring reports.

The report undertook an exhaustive, four year examination of PADEP's claim that coal ash does not pollute water in coal mines and found substantive evidence to the contrary. At ten of fifteen sites, monitoring data shows many more higher concentrations of lead, cadmium, arsenic, selenium, nickel, sulfate, manganese and other pollutants than occurred at these sites from mine drainage. While the evidence is strong, the report avoided stating that these data proved conclusively that ash is contaminating the water because the sites are not "carefully monitored" as McGinty claims. Large sites often have no upgradient monitoring. Some sites collect only a few baseline (before ash) water samples. Monitoring is too short, expiring long before the worst leaching of contaminants would be expected. When high ash contaminant levels are measured, increased monitoring does not occur, what landfills do to find sources of contamination.

The federal government is developing regulations for minefilling because the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science determined such regulations are needed. The state program studied in greatest detail to make this recommendation was that of the PADEP. Similar to the NRC's study, our report finds that without adequate mandatory safeguards in regulations, PADEP's ash minefilling is replacing a problem from the past with a larger problem in the future. The report is at: www.catf.us.

Jeff Stant, Director
PA Minefill Research Project
Clean Air Task Force

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Here's what Stant et al.'s report has to say (and that DEP's McGinty disputes) about the Big Gorilla coal combustion waste dump next to the Northeastern Power Co. waste coal power plant. The dump is adjacent to the Ben Titus Road community where high rates of polycythemia vera were first observed by local residents. Those rates are now the subject of a federal study, the findings of which are expected to be announced publicly next week.

Information in the permit files for the Silverbrook Refuse Site and the Big Gorilla Demonstration Project is very scattered and disorganized and essential data and information are absent. Details describing when, where, and how much ash was disposed on the site are either missing or inadequate. Descriptions of monitoring wells are also missing and their locations (latitude/longitude) are in some instances incorrectly depicted or not even shown on the permit maps.

For such a large and important project, the paucity of data and absence of essential information is disconcerting. The predominant pathways for groundwater movement from the Big Gorilla Pit have yet to be delineated. Other than at the Silverbrook Outfall, the permit files give little indication that there is any surface water monitoring either on the premises of the permit area beyond the Silverbrook Outfall or in the surrounding lotic environments such as Quakake Creek, Still Cree, or the Little Schuylkill River. There are no loading data being collected at the Silverbrook Outfall.

Nonetheless the data show that concentrations of several constituents (calcium, chloride, magnesium, sodium, aluminum, manganese, iron, total dissolved solids, sulfates, chromium, arsenic, selenium, and zinc) became substantively higher in pit water and/or at downgradient monitoring points after ash placement started in the Big Gorilla project. The increases of these constituents are above background concentration fluctuations that might have been caused by the culm disturbances, remining, and ash placement that began in the 1989. Increases in these constituents after 1997 at the lowest downgradient monitoring point for the entire area, the Silverbrook Outfall, include rises in pH and ash-specific constituents such as calcium, chloride, magnesium, potassium, and sodium. Rises in these constituents implicate ash as a source of rises in more troublesome trace elements such as selenium, arsenic, lead and chromium at this outfall or at other downgradient points.