A new proposed legacy rule (the Coal Combustion Residuals Rule or CCR rule) by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded its public comment period on Monday, July 17—an historic opportunity to ensure that corporations are held responsible for cleaning up their mess and ensuring my community and many others have access to clean drinking water.
With each passing day, I fear that another industrial disaster will be too much for our lake and community to bear, a community where half of our population struggles to meet their basic needs.
Hundreds of toxic sites containing coal ash, the harmful waste from burning coal, sit just feet from the Great Lakes, including in Michigan City. Coal ash includes a poisonous soup of substances harmful to human health: arsenic, chromium, lead, and mercury among them. For decades, Northern Indiana Public Service Company has been operating its Michigan City Generating Station coal-burning plant along the lakeshore and is due to shut down by 2028. Here, a deteriorating steel seawall, battered by rising lake levels and shoreline erosion brought on by the worsening climate crisis, is the only barrier between the onsite coal ash fill and imminent catastrophe.
The CCR rule (the original 2015 rule governing coal ash waste disposal) was enacted in response to a
lawsuit following the 2008 Kingston, Tennessee, coal ash spill that left more than 50 workers dead, hundreds ailing, and caused mass contamination across Uniontown, Alabama, a predominantly Black community. National Geographicreported this spill as the “largest industrial spill in the nation’s history–nearly ten times the size of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill two years later in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Despite this tragedy, and the ever-present reminders of the dangers of coal ash, many loopholes remain today that exempt half of the country’s toxic coal ash from federal regulation. Of the estimated 566 noxious landfills and ponds at 242 coal plants in 40 states that were excluded from the original rule, the vast majority of them are contaminating our drinking water, rivers, streams, and Great Lakes and harming the health of residents, environment, and economy nationwide.
You might live near one without knowing it.
These loopholes have direct implications for us here in Michigan City. With each passing day, I fear that another industrial disaster will be too much for our lake and community to bear, a community where half of our population struggles to meet their basic needs. We do not have to look far to know what happens when disaster strikes the Great Lakes. In 2011,
a bluff collapsed at the We Energies Oak Creek Power Plant in Wisconsin, dumping a pickup truck, dredging equipment, soil, and 120 yards of coal ash debris into the lake.
The clock ticks as the pollution in Michigan City continually seeps through the aging seawall. Yet the EPA has continuously stood idly by, failing in its mission to protect both people and the environment. So we sued them.
In 2023, led by Earthjustice, the Hoosier Environmental Council on behalf of Just Transition Northwest Indiana, the NAACP, and numerous other groups, we reached a
settlement and won a commitment from the EPA to revisit the federal coal ash rule to consider closing the loopholes. This is our collective moment to get a law that truly protects communities, not corporations.
The EPA must close the remaining loopholes, most notably addressing inactive landfills at old power plant sites and ensuring robust implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of the CCR Rule. Otherwise, it will be more of the same, a useless draft rule that is only words on paper.
On June 28 the EPA held its first in-person hearing on the new proposed legacy rule. We mobilized hundreds of impacted residents and leaders from across the country, including our fellow members from the Climate Justice Alliance, to EPA’s public comment hearing in Chicago. Together,
we braved the world’s worst air quality that day to share our stories and the impact of regulatory inaction. For nearly 8 hours, individuals from marginalized communities to health professionals, academics, organizations, and working-class residents took to the mic to give testimony. One by one, we bore witness to heart-wrenching accounts of cancers, rampant infertility, spoiled quality of life, loss, and betrayal.
This week, as public comment draws to a close, we demand, along with countless environmental justice communities, to see the EPA enact the strongest possible ruling. The EPA must close the remaining loopholes, most notably addressing inactive landfills at old power plant sites and ensuring robust implementation, monitoring, and enforcement of the CCR Rule. Otherwise, it will be more of the same, a useless draft rule that is only words on paper.
To date, the Biden Administration has set up historical commitments and resources to address environmental injustices such as Justice40 (reshaping hundreds of federal programs to ensure that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to “disadvantaged communities”) and the first-ever White House Office of Environmental Justice. Yet, we have not seen more vigorous enforcement and accountability of polluters and corporations who continue to profit at the expense of community and environmental health.
In fact, we have seen more support for the ailing fossil fuel industry from the Biden Administration, like relying heavily on carbon capture and storage (CCS) strategies and tax handouts that extend the life and profits of the fossil fuel corporations. Just one week before we rallied support at the EPA hearing, our fellow Climate Justice Alliance members were in Phoenix, Arizona, calling on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council to stop the Biden Administration’s overreliance on CCS and hydrogen projects to reduce emissions. These commitments mean nothing if the Biden Administration does not listen to those they are sworn to protect.
As the CCR Rule public comment period ends, this is a critical opportunity for the Biden Administration and the EPA to LISTEN to the powerful messages of impacted communities, meaningfully demonstrate their commitment to environmental justice, close ALL the loopholes in the federal rule, hold polluters accountable, and clean up our nation’s coal ash crisis for good.
