Appalachian Water Watch is our newest program designed to address the single largest source of environmental degradation to our region. The entire lifecycle of coal—mining, processing, burning, and waste disposal—seriously threatens Appalachia’s biodiversity, ecosystems, and people.State agencies in the Appalachian coal-bearing regions have failed to hold the coal industry accountable for inaccurate and sometimes unlawful record keeping of surface water impacts. This lack of enforcement highlights the need for independent monitoring, in the form of reviewing existing records as well as actual water testing.
Citizen Empowerment: Community-Based Water Testing
Appalachian Water Watch is designed to fill the vacuum left by the lack of state government enforcement by empowering local communities to monitor their own water, piecing together a broad scope view of coal-related contamination across the entire region, and leveraging the findings to advocate for the creation of new and the enforcement of existing laws.
Proud Sponsors of
Appalachian Water Watch
Accountability through the Courts
To supplement our field water monitoring, we also review Clean Water Act records that coal companies are required to turn over to state agencies. We have taken legal action against two coal companies in Kentucky for over 20,000 violations of the Clean Water Act.The information collected through both our citizen and “paper monitoring” will be used to enact local, state and national policies to better and more permanently protect our waterways.
Coal Ash
The catastrophic TVA coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee in 2008 that released over a billion gallons of coal sludge into the Emory River was a national wake-up call about the dangers of coal ash. In 2009, Appalachian Voices’ Watauga Riverkeeper program sifted through pages of data to find that 13 out of 13 coal ash ponds in the state of North Carolina had leaked toxic pollution into nearby waterways.Coal Combustion Residuals (CCRs), commonly referred to as coal ash, are the waste left over when coal power plants and other facilities burn coal to produce electricity. The two most common types of CCRs are fly ash and bottom ash: fly ash is the byproduct of burning finely ground coal in a boiler, and bottom ash forms in furnaces that use pulverized coal. CCRs contain several toxic substances including arsenic, selenium, cadmium, lead, and mercury to name few; despite this they are relatively unregulated.
Coal Ash and the EPA
In the summer of 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued two competing proposals for the storage and disposal of dirty coal ash waste, one which would treat coal ash under the more stringent “hazardous waste” designation, the other as more common household waste.Both provisions ignore a loophole that has terrible implication for Appalachian coal regions– there are no standards for minefilling. The practice of minefilling is where coal companies dump coal ash waste into abandoned mines without liners or federal oversight, where it can leach heavy metals when it comes in direct contact with groundwater. Without addressing this issue simultaneously, the EPA is allowing a loophole that will actually encourage coal companies to dump more coal ash into abandoned mines, as other options are more tightly regulated.
We are currently awaiting the EPA’s decision.
