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When Brian Williams heads to the banks of the Dan River, he sees the heart of his community. It's a home for fish, a source of drinking water and, after years of hard work with the Dan River Watershed Association, he said it has become one of Rockingham County's greatest assets. "It's 214 miles of sightseeing," he said. Today, you'll see picnics along the banks, canoes and kayaks all summer long, and businesses popping up overlooking the river. As the murky water flows, Williams said he's grateful to not see much trace of the spill that made the river famous 10 years ago. "It was just a river of ashes," he said. “Anxiety over the Dan, we call it.” February 2, 2014 It happened on a Sunday. A pipe passing under a coal basin at the former Dan River Steam Station, a Duke Energy power plant, broke. Thousands of tons of coal ash were absorbed by the river. “We actually got a call from a mailman who used to dine by the river and he said, 'Hey, the river is black and gray. What's going on?'” Williams said. SEE MORE >> 9 Investigate: Coal ash site exposed near Lake Norman High School For decades, the ash had been sitting in an unlined pit, meaning there was nothing between the material and the ground.
The ashes were known to carry heavy metals, dangerous to human health. The Dan River Basin Association, along with several other environmental organizations, had been warning Duke Energy for years that there were two major risks associated with uncased wells, like the one at the Dan River Steam Station. Coal ash was slowly seeping into the ground, threatening nearby groundwater, and these unlined pits, which are almost always near large America Mobile Number List bodies of water, could rupture, spilling tons of ash into that water at once. "Our roads had specifically targeted this coal ash pond as a potential problem and no one had taken us seriously," said Tiffany Haworth, executive director of the Dan River Basin Association. "It wasn't a question of if this would happen, but when." Immediately after the spill, the nearby city of Danville, Virginia, shut down its water intake from the river. Haworth and Williams found dozens of dead mussels and macroinvertebrates buried in the ash, Williams said, referring to elements such as selenium, lead, mercury, chromium and arsenic.
We have corn fields, tobacco fields, cow fields, we have all these agricultural things along the river. “So you have all this ash there mixing with the sediment, rising and possibly settling on agricultural fields… there were so many unknowns.” LOOKING BACK: Hazmat team finds coal ash in Dan River Duke Energy worked with the EPA and state regulators to plug the leaking pipeline and come up with a plan to excavate ash from the river, but delays due to weather and bureaucracy associated with complying with North Carolina and Virginia regulations slowed it down. the process. Meanwhile, ash flowed 70 miles downstream; Only a fraction of the 39,000 tons of spilled ash could be removed during the months-long excavation process. Ash from the spill traveled 70 miles downstream from the initial breach. Ash from the spill traveled 70 miles downstream from the initial breach. A battle of years At the same time, people across the state were paying attention to the coal ash problem. Duke Energy had 14 sites in North Carolina and people who lived near those sites were asking if this could happen again.
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發表於 2024-2-19 11:35:03