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Duke’s Dan River Coal Ash Disaster – Crucial Conversation with Amy Adams and Rep. Pricey Harrison

Posted on by Chris Fitzsimon
Duke’s Dan River Coal Ash Disaster – Crucial Conversation with Amy Adams and Rep. Pricey Harrison

Duke’s Dan River coal ash disaster: What happened? How big is the problem? What’s next?

Coal — for thousands of years, humans have found it difficult to live without this cheap and combustible sedimentary rock. They’ve burned it to stay warm and for transportation, and in recent decades, to produce much of the electricity on which modern society depends. But, of course, even from the beginning, people knew they were dealing with a nasty and harmful substance.

Today, coal combustion endangers human health and well-being via the production of vast quantities of greenhouse gas that promote global warming. It also injects immense amounts of toxins into the atmosphere that ultimately settle out into the air we breathe and the water and food we consume.

And that’s not the end of it. Once you’ve burned the stuff (and hopefully used modern technology to "scrub" some of the exhaust flowing up the smokestack), you’re still left with yet another mess: the byproduct of the combustion process. In the United States, coal combustion produces nearly 140 million tons of waste — "fly ash," "scrubber sludge," and other combustion byproducts — each year. These byproducts remain near to or on the site of the coal fired power plant — sort of like an especially vile version of the leftovers in your fireplace.

In February 2014, 82,000 tons of this stuff under the control of Duke Energy spilled into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina. As North Carolina comes to terms with this disaster, several questions arise: What happened? How bad are things? Where else might this happen? What can and should be done?

On February 27, we explore these and other questions with two of our state’s best known experts, Amy Adams of Appalachian Voices (http://appvoices.org/) and State Representative Pricey Harrison (Guilford, NC).

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