EDEN, NORTH CAROLINA — Six years ago, a stormwater pipe failed and tens of thousands of tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River at a Duke Energy power plant steam station near a town called Eden.
The environmental disaster paints a stark portrait of what happens to a watershed and the people who live there when coal ash escapes the ponds and dumps where it’s stored.
In Michigan, power companies store toxic coal ash from their generating plants alongside the Great Lakes and their connecting waters. As the coal-powered plants close in favor of clean-energy options, those coal ash sites are supposed to be monitored for at least 30 years.
There hasn’t been a major coal ash spill in Michigan, but in North Carolina, the spill by some accounts was called an environmental catastrophe.
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“Anybody who drove over that river every day, you could take one look at it and know something was wrong,” said Amy Adams the North Carolina program manager for Appalachian Voices, a group advocating clean energy.
“The river had turned, for lack of a better term, ashy gray. It looked like chocolate milk, but not quite as brown as chocolate milk,” she said. “It just looked like sort of gunk floating on the top.”
She said her group was among the first taking water samples and documenting the spill on the Dan River. She recalls seeing dead turtles and crayfish.
After the Dan River spill, “ash, or ash-like material, mixed with native sediment in North Carolina and Virginia as far as 70 river miles downstream,” according to the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality.
Eden, population 15,000, is 128 miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina, and lists among its attractions tourism and activities in the rivers that run through it.
Three Rivers Outfitters, which offers canoeing and kayaking trips throughout the year on the Dan River and others, noticed an immediate effect on business.
“We saw a temporary impact that was dramatic,” said co-manager Mark Bishopric. “There’s no way to know whether there’s continuing to be impact because you do not know who doesn’t call you or email you or book a trip.”
Of the 25 trips Three Rivers Outfitters offers, only three were on sections of the Dan River that were impacted by the spill while the others were upstream of the spill site or on different rivers, Bishopric said. Still, the business took a hit in the short run because “people just weren’t calling for any of our trips.”
Now, he can’t say whether the business has fully recovered, whether things would be different had the spill never happened.
“You don’t know what potential customers are not calling you because of what they perceive to be a coal ash problem or any other kind of problem,” he said.
Since the spill, state regulators have held Duke Energy accountable and a company spokesman said Duke Energy has become an industry leader in safe coal ash management.
Duke Energy has completed excavation of its Dan River coal ash basins and installed ash handling technology upgrades and is closing all coal ash basins systemwide, the spokesman said.
Adams said in communities affected by coal ash spills, or even simply located near coal ash ponds, people have become ill, homeowners have struggled to sell their homes, residents have resorted to drinking bottled water, sometimes for years, and water recreation and tourism have suffered.
Duke Energy officials, however, dispute those claims.
The North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality found Duke Energy violated the federal Clean Water Act. In 2016, it fined the company $6.8 million, the second-largest fine for environmental violations in state history. The company challenged the fine but ultimately agreed to pay $6 million for the spill.
In addition, “the company agreed to a $102 million settlement for nine federal misdemeanor violations related to the Dan River incident and coal ash operations,” said Duke Energy spokesman Bill Norton.
State regulators ordered Duke Energy to excavate all remaining coal ash impoundments in the state and dispose of the coal ash in a lined landfill to satisfy the requirements of the Coal Ash Management Act and to protect public health. Norton said the company’s “Dan River cleanup work was completed years ago” and “studies by NC State University, the state of North Carolina and others demonstrate that the environment and ecosystem in and around the Dan River is thriving and there is no known impact from the 2014 incident.”
North Carolina’s coal ash spill in February 2014 was one of a few that have occurred over the last dozen years across the country including a 2008 spill at Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant and a 2011 spill in Wisconsin into Lake Michigan.
Coal ash contains mercury, cadmium and arsenic. Without proper management, these contaminants can pollute waterways, groundwater, drinking water and the air, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Environmentalists say coal ash has affected human health, property values, river recreation and tourism in North Carolina, but Duke Energy officials say that’s not the case.
“There is a lot of misinformation in this discussion, spread by a small group of paid activists,” said Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan. She did not specifically say who is allegedly being paid or by whom. “Utilities like Duke Energy are highly regulated and held accountable for what we say and how we operate.”
Duke Energy’s Norton said the 2014 coal ash spill happened when a stormwater pipe under an ash basin at the retired Dan River coal plant failed. The company immediately accepted responsibility and conducted a comprehensive review of its ash basin systems. Water quality in the Dan River returned to normal within days of the spill and drinking water was always safe, he said.
“Today, our company is an industry leader in the safe management of coal ash and the permanent closure of ash basins, using science and engineering to guide plans that ensure people and the environment remain well protected,” Norton said.
Now, six years later, the river looks like it did before the spill, but “We know that all that coal ash is still moving its way along the bottom of the river,” said Adams of Appalachian Voices.
“Once it escapes into the environment…once it’s in there, it’s damned near impossible to get up,” she said. “So a spill prevention plan or a clean-up plan is moot if you can’t enact it.”
“Duke Energy was only able to recapture a fraction of the ash, the 39,000 tons,” added her colleague Xavier Boatright, environmental justice organizer and researcher with Clean Water for North Carolina. “Scientists are still finding ongoing concerns that linger after these events.”
Boatright said it changes the way people think about their communities.
“In many ways, folks have gained a new sense of awareness about environmental justice and environmental conservation, especially when it comes to coal ash and water and air protections,” he said.
There’s the social stress, too, of feeling as though one must “pick a side.”
“They’ve been, in a way, torn apart by coal ash,” he said.
Adams said the key to preventing future coal ash spills is storing the stuff dry in lined landfills. Without that, “water’s going to go where it wants to go,” she said.
“One of the things we’ve just got to stop doing is using wet storage of coal ash. There are smarter ways to store coal ash,” she said.
Terry Shelton is Eden, North Carolina’s public utilities director. He said, despite public concern to the contrary, Eden’s “drinking water was never in any peril as a result of the spill.”
“Our water intake was upstream and above a dam...and people still did not understand that their water supply was safe,” he said.
Shelton said the spill’s greatest effect on Eden was the damage it did to water recreation and tourism in the short term. In the months immediately following the spill, people didn’t want to come in contact with coal ash-contaminated water, which hurt the companies that offered canoe and kayak tours, restaurants, motels and other businesses, he said.
“That probably had a greater impact on Eden than the spill itself,” Shelton said. “Everybody downstream of where it came in, farming operations and stuff, were worried that the coal ash was going to just lay in the river. The Dan River is subject to floods when you have heavy rains...and it can flood some farmland on adjacent areas to the river itself.”
“I would guess that some of the things they’ve done in North Carolina will become a model for other utility companies and the regulatory agencies in other states to set up monitoring operations and decide how to deal with this issue in the long term,” Shelton said.
Sheehan said Duke Energy’s cleanup effort on the Dan River was performed under strict EPA supervision.
"The river has a long history of being impacted by industrial operations (not ours) and the EPA determined that dredging more ash from the river bottom would cause more harm than good by stirring up the historic contamination (not caused by Duke),” she said. “Independent studies continue to demonstrate that the ecosystem is thriving and there is no measurable impact from the incident in 2014.”
Bishopric said would-be kayaking and canoeing customers still ask about coal ash from time to time, particularly after the topic appears in the news.
“From our perspective, the coal ash spill itself didn’t cause as much damage to our canoe and kayak business as did the stories about the coal ash spill,” he said.
Bishopric said the river is constantly changing, as rivers do. So it can’t be said that it looks just as it did before the spill, but there’s no longer any obvious sign of the spill.
“Visually on the river you cannot, and this has been for a long, long time, you would not see any visual reference to the spill. That was through within, certainly, months of the event.”
Neville Hall is mayor of Eden. He said the spill’s effect on the environment was “fairly limited” and the tourism industry rebounded, in part, because of the funding Duke Energy provided the city for its marketing and media campaigns to promote the rivers.
“They’ve done everything they could to help us get beyond it,” Hall said. “Our rivers are being used more than ever now.”
He’s sure the EPA is “keeping a good close eye on coal ash facilities throughout the country.”
“It’s been a while and we’re trying to move past it and move on,” Hall said. “We’re fortunate that it had as little impact as it ultimately did.”
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