Toxic coal ash was dumped
by Ken Ward Jr.
There’s an incredible story out today in the Miami Herald about the boy pictured above, and other residents of a small Dominican Republic town where toxic coal ash was dumped. Here’s the lead, by reporter Frances Robles:
ARROYO BARRIL, Dominican Republic — Maximiliano Calcaño is 2 and was born with no arms.
“When I was pregnant, I was dizzy, vomiting and could barely walk,” said Maximiliano’s mother, Anajai Calcaño, 20. “My tooth cracked and fell out. Then my baby was born like that, without arms. Nothing like that had ever happened here before.”
By “before,” Calcaño means before a U.S. power company’s coal ash arrived at a nearby port, sitting there for more than two years.
She lives in a small wooden house with no indoor plumbing in a rural village in northern Dominican Republic, not far from where coal ash generated by Virginia-based AES Corp. wound up at the edge of the sea. More than 50,000 tons of coal ash laden with heavy metals was left at a port abutting local homes for years while the company, politicians, prosecutors, environmental activists and bureaucrats argued — and residents got sick.
The story goes on:
It has been six years since a contractor from Delray Beach brought the black dusty residue to the province of Samaná, and three years since the ash was cleaned up. Several civil lawsuits and criminal cases later, just when everyone thought it was over, the other shoe has dropped.
A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Delaware charges that toxic levels of waste dumped at the Arroyo Barril port has made people nearby sick. After years of repeated miscarriages, women whose blood levels show abnormal levels of arsenic are giving birth to babies with cranial deformities, with organs outside their bodies or missing limbs.
The case highlights the debate over coal ash, an unregulated byproduct of coal energy, which when processed and recycled is used in everything from cement to the foundation for golf courses. Popular Mechanics magazine this month calls a concrete made from coal ash one of the “10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009.”
The Miami Herald site also has video and you can read documents in the lawsuit and see more photos (like the one below, of the dump site) at this site, set up by a PR firm working with lawyers for the residents.
Photos by PRforLAW LLC
In other coal-related news and commentary this week:
– The operator of an eastern Pennsylvania coal mine has been sentenced to prison and the owner to house arrest in connection with a mine explosion that killed a man three years ago.
– The Rural Blog reported: A forum yesterday on the role of coal in Kentucky was highlighted early by a prediction of major changes in the way strip mining is regulated, and near the end by an explanation of the changes and a debate on the future of how coal is used.
“The way coal has been mined over the last 30 years is not going to happen anymore,” Joe Blackburn, director of the Lexington field office of the U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told the crowd during the afternoon session at the University of Kentucky.
– The Beckley Register-Herald reports that local school officials have submitted their application for state money for a new Marsh Fork Elementary School.
– Forbes had this story about how “coal bosses of Shanxi are tired of being the government’s whipping boys.”
– The Center for Public Integrity reports on “How industry pressures and national agendas dim prospects for a Climate Treaty.”
