The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: dan river
Duke Energy Ignored Warnings Before Ash Spill, Prosecutors Say

Duke Energy Ignored Warnings Before Ash Spill, Prosecutors Say

By Bruce Henderson, The Charlotte Observer (TNS)

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Duke Energy ignored repeated warnings before a broken pipe dumped tons of coal ash into the Dan River last year, prosecutors said Thursday as the company faced a federal judge.

Duke twice refused to spend $20,000 on video inspections of the pipe that would have shown it to be made of a weaker-than-believed material, a government lawyer told Senior U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard.

Instead, the company filed guilty pleas to nine criminal charges that it has agreed to settle for $102 million.

Duke’s chief legal officer, Julia Janson, quietly acknowledged the company’s guilt in a 10-minute recitation of nine misdemeanor counts against three Duke subsidiaries. Chief executive Lynn Good did not appear in court.

Sentencing was set to begin Thursday afternoon.

Duke has agreed to pay $68 million in fines, which it can’t pass to customers and is one of the largest under the 43-year-old Clean Water Act.

Duke also agreed to serve five years of probation under a court-appointed monitor and pay $34 million for environmental projects.

Two stormwater pipes ran under a 27-acre ash pond at the Dan River plant.

Installed in 1954, the part of the 48-inch pipe that failed on Feb. 2, 2014, was made of corrugated metal — a fact that plant employees knew but engineers and budget writers did not, attorney Banu Rangarajan of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Raleigh told the judge. They believed the whole pipe was stronger reinforced concrete.

Duke had repaired leaks in both pipes in 1979, Rangarajan said, and independent consultants had identified the aging pipes as potential problems since 1981.

But Duke didn’t measure the water flowing from the pipes, to detect leaks, as consultants repeatedly recommended, she said.

“Duke continued to not address warnings of the potential for problems of this type,” Rangarajan said.

When plant officials asked for $20,000 internal video inspections of the aging pipes in 2011 — which would likely have shown heavy corrosion in the pipe that failed — Duke’s corporate office twice denied the request.

The money was denied again in 2012, when Dan River’s coal unit was retired.

“Had they done so, the actual composition of the 48-inch pipe would have been made known and the leaks would have been detected in the 36-inch pipe,” Rangarajan told Howard.

Video inspections of the 36-inch pipe that didn’t break, done days after the spill, found water jetting into it from the ash pond above it.

“This closes an important chapter for the company and is allowing us to focus on the future,” Duke spokeswoman Paige Sheehan said in a brief statement during a break in the hearing.
The company has emphasized the steps it has taken since the spill. Those include an overhaul of coal ash management, including the naming of an outside advisory board, and closing ash ponds in both Carolinas.

The Dan River spill was the nation’s third-largest of the past decade. Neither of the other two spills, in Tennessee and Pennsylvania, resulted in criminal investigations.
Duke also pleaded guilty to ash violations at four other power plants.

Those charges involve improper maintenance of equipment at a power plant in Chatham County, leading to ash pond leaks into the Cape Fear River. Duke had also failed to do a recommended inspections of leaking pipes called risers, prosecutors said.

At three other plants the charges say Duke illegally channeled seeps from ash ponds into the rivers.

The federal grand jury investigation that resulted in Thursday’s expected plea began two weeks after the Dan River spill.

Wide-ranging subpoenas went to Duke, 18 current or former state environmental regulators and the Utilities Commission. The subpoenas demanded inspection records, correspondence and enforcement files for the 108 million tons of ash Duke stores in 32 ponds.

U.S. attorneys in Charlotte, Greensboro and Raleigh filed charges against Duke in February.

The $68 million in fines appears to be the second-largest penalty ever assessed under the landmark Clean Water Act, which was enacted in 1972. It’s also the largest environmental penalty the century-old Duke has paid, dwarfing the $8 million in fines and environmental projects in a 2009 air-pollution case in Indiana.

Duke, which earned nearly $1.9 billion in 2014, recorded a 14-cent charge on its fourth-quarter earnings to reflect the fine.

The settlement doesn’t resolve state investigations of groundwater contamination from coal ash. Duke is fighting a $25 million state fine levied in March for contamination at the Sutton power plant in Wilmington. The state has also cited Duke for violations at its Asheville plant, but has not issued a fine.

Duke also faces more than a dozen lawsuits over ash contamination filed by North Carolina and advocacy groups, and six shareholder suits claiming company officers and directors placed Duke at financial risk.

(c)2015 The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Duke Energy has pled guilty to nine criminal charges stemming from a broken pipe that dumped coal ash into the Dan River last year. Photo Stuart McAlpine via Flickr https://flic.kr/p/9nF5gN

Rural N.C. Sites Become Dump Grounds For Unwanted Coal Ash

Rural N.C. Sites Become Dump Grounds For Unwanted Coal Ash

By John Murawski, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Years before the accidental coal ash spill into the Dan River in February, the waste was being dumped into creeks, wetlands and vacant fields across North Carolina.

Scores of private ash sites were originally proposed for legitimate construction use — such as building an airstrip or a parking lot — but the construction didn’t always take place.

More than 70 ash sites statewide hold about 11 million cubic yards of ash, much of it used in building roads, parking lots and other projects.

But nearly a quarter of the waste sits at six of the largest sites, where about 2.6 million cubic yards of coal ash lies in unlined pits, largely unmonitored for potential groundwater contamination.

Over the years the sites have been cited by the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources with violations for creating dust clouds, for being placed too close to water sources, and for ash erosion into water drainage areas. At one site the ash was dumped into a wetland area.

“When they said they had an end use, they didn’t have an end use — it was a form of disposal,” said Ellen Lorschneider, planning and programs branch head of the solid waste section within DENR. “There was abuse of our regulations — the coal was a disposal site they called structural fill.”

As public officials grapple with a solution to safe coal ash storage, the focus has largely been on the future of the 33 ash pits and ponds at power plant facilities that are contaminating nearby groundwater. These sites are operated by Charlotte-based Duke Energy and its Raleigh-based subsidiary, Duke Energy Progress, formerly called Progress Energy.

But the 70-plus ash sites throughout the state, many on private property in eastern North Carolina, are also drawing attention after years of neglect. Even where the ash was used as “structural fill” — to level roadways, for road beds and to stabilize soil under buildings — the concern doesn’t go away.

Gov. Pat McCrory’s proposed Coal Ash Action Plan, now under review by lawmakers in Raleigh, includes a temporary moratorium on the use of coal as structural fill in amounts of 5,000 cubic yards or more.

McCrory’s coal ash proposal would also start regulating structural fill as landfilled solid waste. It would require state permits, leak-proof liners and groundwater monitoring for structural fill sites, none of which has been required in past years.

“Under current law, passed by previous administrations, there are more stringent requirements for the disposal of household garbage than there are for certain coal ash applications,” said DENR spokesman Drew Elliot.

The state’s six biggest ash dumps, including four about 90 miles northeast of Raleigh in Halifax County, contain anywhere from 10 times to 100 times more coal ash than is typically needed for construction. The six sites range in size from 127,176 cubic yards to 905,238 cubic yards, according to state records.

The structural fill sites documented by DENR were mostly built after North Carolina adopted regulations in 1994 to promote the “beneficial reuse” of coal ash as structural fill. The use of ash for construction fill is widely accepted and encouraged by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The state’s structural fills contain coal ash disgorged by Duke and Progress and reused at their own power plants and other construction sites, as well as waste from smaller industrial operations. Duke once sold the ash for 50 cents to $1 a ton, but ash producers also paid to have it hauled away.

It’s not clear how many total structural fill sites exist in the Triangle area or statewide or where they are located, however, because sites built before the 1990s are not documented.

What is clear is that the state’s historic dependence on coal as an energy source to generate electricity produced more ash than the construction industry could use. Duke and Progress for decades have stored excess ash on site in pits and lagoons.

Some enterprising locals saw an opportunity and agreed to haul ash away for a fee, hoping to find a buyer or to use it for development projects.

“It was just a great big huge hole there, and we filled it in,” said Blackwell Bennett Pierce, owner of Utilities Transport, a trucking company that hauled coal ash between 2004 and 2007 to the Arthur’s Creek disposal site in Northampton County, about 90 miles northeast of Raleigh. The site holds 480,612 cubic yards of ash, according to a county deed in the DENR records.

Plumbline Engineering, which designed the ash retention site, paid an administrative penalty of $9,154.88 in 2011 for a number of violations at Arthur’s Creek that included erosion problems and coal ash washing into a nearby creek. DENR officials say the problems have been resolved.

“We thought maybe we might use it for something one day,” Pierce said. “But there’s no use for it. Nobody wanted it.”

Research biologist Dennis Lemly, who works for Wake Forest University and the U.S. Forest Service, has studied the effects of coal ash contaminants and said dry ash storage sites are long-festering problems and overdue for stricter oversight.

“The two operative words are unregulated and mostly unmonitored,” Lemly said. “It raises the larger underlying issue with the state regulatory system.”

Photo by Mr T in DC/Flickr

Want more environmental news? Sign up for our free daily newsletter.