One out of every 50 Americans living near landfills or ponds used to store ash or sludge from coal-fired power plants has a high risk of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated with arsenic, according to government research that environmentalists say the Bush administration kept secret for years.
The data, compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency and made public Thursday by two watchdog groups, also links other health and environmental risks to coal-combustion waste and suggests that environmental contamination from the storage sites could last for a century or longer.
"We now have the full picture about coal-dump sites across America, and it is not pretty," said Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project.
The group and another environmental watchdog, Earthjustice, analyzed the EPA data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and issued a report detailing the dangers of exposure to coal-combustion waste at 210 storage sites across the country.
Based upon their analysis, the groups concluded that there are high-risk coal-ash sites in at least three-dozen states that lack effective synthetic liners to prevent the leakage of carcinogens or other toxic metals.
Twenty-one states are each home to five or more of the high-risk sites.
The disposal of waste from coal-fired power plants gained national attention after a massive coal-ash spill last December that flooded more than 300 acres of land in East Tennessee, damaging homes and other property.
The accident occurred when a 40-acre holding pond ruptured near the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant, sending some 1.1 billion gallons of coal ash spilling into a nearby river and the surrounding countryside.
The spill prompted calls for the federal government to regulate the storage of coal ash, which currently is subject only to a patchwork of state regulations that vary from one state to another.
The EPA announced in March that it is conducting a safety review of coal-ash storage ponds across the country and said it plans to develop new regulations for coal ash by the end of the year.
The federal government had been concerned about the storage of coal-combustion waste as far back as 2002, when the EPA studied the health and environmental dangers and compiled the results in a report.
Much of the data, however, was never made public.
Some of the health concerns were released when the EPA published a draft risk assessment on coal-combustion waste in 2007. But some details, such as the danger to wildlife, were omitted from the report.
That information was not made public until March, when President Obama's administration finally released the records to the environmental groups.
The records indicate that EPA researchers had concluded that people who live near a coal-ash storage pond that has no protective liner have a 1-in-50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated by arsenic, one of the most common and most dangerous pollutants found in coal ash.
Living near ash ponds also increases the risk of damage to the liver, kidney, lungs and other organs as a result of exposure to toxic metals like cadmium, cobalt, lead and other pollutants, the government researchers concluded.
"While the Bush administration was hiding the data, we saw human lives threatened," said Lisa Evans, an attorney for Earthjustice.
Coal ash also poses a serious danger to aquatic wildlife and ecosystems, the report said. One contaminant -- boron -- can be expected to leach into the environment at levels 2,000 times the threshold generally considered safe for aquatic life.
The danger to wildlife also presents a serious human health risk because people could end up eating contaminated fish, Schaeffer said.
Coal-ash landfills are less of a danger to human health than the storage ponds, the report said, but the risk of getting cancer or other health problems is still significantly higher for nearby residents exposed to the waste.
Some of the EPA data goes back to the mid-1990s, so some of the storage sites evaluated in the report may no longer be active.
But environmentalists warn that those sites can still present a significant risk because exposure to storage ponds can continue for 78 to 105 years after the facilities first began operation. Exposure to landfills may occur for even longer periods.
Environmental groups are pressuring the federal government to phase out the use of storage ponds -- and require them to be cleaned up -- within five years. They also are pushing for the landfills to be regulated as hazardous-waste-disposal sites.
(On the Web: www.environmentalintegrity.org.)
(E-mail Michael Collins of Scripps Howard News Service at collinsm(at)shns.com.)
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