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In this photo drone published by Duke Energy, flooded by the river Cap Fear, swollen by the fire, it exceeds an earthen dyke at Lake Sutton, at the height of L.V. Sutton Generating Station near Wilmington, NC (Duke Energy via AP)
Brady Dennis
Journalist specializing in environmental policy and public health issues
Steven Mufson
Reporter covering energy and other financial issues
The waters flooded a dam near a Duke Energy power station on Friday, the company said, and materials from an adjacent toxic ash pond spilled into the Cape Fear River.
Rising water also flooded a 625-megawatt natural gas plant on the site, forcing it to close. Duke spokeswoman Paige H. Sheehan said the water in the plant was at least six inches deep.
Fears about the situation at L.V. Duke The Sutton Generating Station, near Wilmington, has been growing since before Hurricane Florence touched land. The storm dumped so much rain that the wall of a coal ash dump near the old coal-fired power plant, which sits on the shores of Sutton Lake and near the Cape Fear River, has failed in several places. A special black membrane installed to hold the waste was torn in at least two places.
Duke estimated last weekend that the storm had taken more than 2,000 cubic yards of coal waste – enough to fill more than 150 dump trucks.
Friday came more bad news. The company said the dam separating the Cape Fear River from Sutton Artificial Lake, which retains water used to cool the plant, has suffered a significant breach and several smaller ones. Meanwhile, a steel wall separating the oldest of the four coal ash ponds from the site was submerged by floodwater, leaving only a small berm in the ground to prevent toxic waste from entering the lake more freely and the Cape Fear River.
Duke said the berm was two feet above the water and stable. Environmental groups estimated that the water was less than 18 inches from the top of the berm. The National Meteorological Service said that water levels in the river would continue to increase until Saturday.
"We can not rule out coal ash moving in the river," Sheehan said in an email.
The coal ash is what remains after the coal has been burned in a power plant, and it contains a variety of heavy metals, including arsenic, lead, mercury and chromium. The Sutton plant went from coal to natural gas years ago, but the waste remains on the site.
The company has tried to distinguish between the types of waste in the coal ash. Duke said the waste that had been found up to now in the lake and river was a lighter material known as cenospheres – small glass beads made of aluminum and silica after the coal combustion. However, heavy and toxic metals often attach to cenospheres and environmental groups claim that the distinction is not significant.
Pete Harrison, an attorney at the legal aid firm Earthjustice, said on Friday that the material dumped by ash pits at the Sutton plant was covered with the kind of toxic metals posing a serious risk to public health.
"The cenospheres are the lightest form of coal ash," said Harrison, who is based temporarily in North Carolina. "Just like coal ash, they are also responsible for all these other elements. They are not really different in this respect.
Last week, Earthjustice sampled cenospheres from three flooded coal ash pits at Duke Energy's HF Lee plant near Goldsboro, North Carolina, and sites after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. tested positive to toxic contaminants.
"For them, to say that the cenospheres are not coal ash, it's like saying that a poodle is not a dog," he said, referring to those responsible from Duke Energy.
Further inland, pits at the company's power station at Lee were covered with earth and trees, but heavy rains carried the coal ash from the pits into the nearby Neuse River.
The issue of coal ash leakage is of particular concern in North Carolina, where Duke Energy's Dan River steam generating station experienced a massive spill in February 2014. This accident, caused by the failure of a drainage pipe in 48-inch metal beneath a coal ash pond, dumped up to 82,000 tonnes of waste about 70 miles from the Dan River.
In May 2016, Duke Energy entered into a $ 102 million agreement with the federal government regarding criminal charges arising from the incident. Two years earlier, the company had agreed to pay $ 6 million to the Environmental Protection Agency to cover both the response effort, clean-up and on-site monitoring.
The $ 102 million penalty, after federal prosecutors informed the court that Duke Energy had illegally dumped coal ash discharges into neighboring streams since at least 2010,
In recent years, the company has moved coal ash from watersheds to safer, paved landfills.
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