Maryland Coal Ash Spill
Approximately 4,000 gallons of coal ash slurry spilled into the North Branch of the Potomac River at the start of this week. The coal ash came from a NewPage Corporation pulp and paper mill in Luke, Allegheny County in Maryland. The original “dime sized” leak began late Sunday night and was discovered early Monday morning. The pipe contains liquid ash that is carried from the paper mill in Maryland and travels to a storage unit in West Virginia. The leak was immediately cleaned, but efforts to cleanup the waste is still ongoing.
The Maryland Department of Envirnment (MDE) is the regulatory body over the coal ash even though it is stored in West Virginia. Further action needs to be taken to ensure that further incidents like this one do not continue to happen. After the TVA Coal Ash Spill at the beginning of this year, we need to be more careful in the regulations on how we are storing coal. Even though the Maryland spill was nowhere near the size of the TVA spill ( 4,000 gallons compared to several millions gallons ), it does not make a spill of this toxic material into our water ways any better. It just seems that spills like these are inevitable when handling such a dirty and toxic material such as coal.
This spill is really surprising, especially after several environment concerns have been raised about the safety of coal ash storage and disposal in Maryland. Maryland’s largest energy company, Constellation energy, was fined a large sum of money for dumping coal ash into a mine in western Maryland. Maryland really needs to rethink it’s environmental policies in terms of coal ash instead of worrying about insignificant issues as they always seem to do. Maryland coal plants generate approximately 2 million tons of coal ash every year. Wells are being contaminated and who knows what other affects storing coal ash in this manner is having on our environment…
