The Sun News: Coal Pollution Suit Filed as Deadline Nears

Here in Horry County, of our electrical production comes from coal. If you work the model right, it’s cheap. We are paying only 10 cents per Kilo-watt hour. The problem is that the model conveniently leaves out some of the secondary costs. All of a sudden, the back end cost of coal is coming due and our friends in in Conway are going to feel it. Read the original article by Sammy Fretwell of McClatchey Newspapers at this link and share!

COLUMBIA — Three environmental groups filed suit Wednesday against state-owned Santee Cooper over discharges of toxic arsenic, which they say are draining into the Waccamaw River from the utility’s power plant in Conway.

Lawyers sued the company in an attempt to beat a deadline that bars certain suits by citizens’ groups against companies for violation of South Carolina’s pollution control law. The 11th-hour filing angered business lobbyists, who said they had a compromise agreement with environmentalists to allow existing suits to continue while limiting any additional citizens lawsuits.

The Legislature banned pollution suits Wednesday, but environmentalists say their case is valid because it was filed before Gov. Nikki Haley signed the bill. Haley spokesman Rob Godfrey said the governor put her signature on the bill Wednesday afternoon but did not say what time.

Frank Holleman, an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said the legal action is important to help clean up pollution from Santee Cooper’s Grainger coal-fired power plant, a now-closed facility with a history of arsenic contamination to groundwater. Waste lagoons, which store 650,000 tons of coal ash, are leaking from the property, the suit says.

“This is the last chance for citizens to go to court in order to ensure the Waccamaw River is protected from these coal ash lagoons,” Holleman said Wednesday night. “Santee Cooper’s plan … is to leave this coal ash beside the Waccamaw River in perpetuity.”

Mollie Gore, a spokeswoman for Santee Cooper, acknowledged arsenic contamination in groundwater beneath the Grainger plant but said her company’s testing shows arsenic is not getting into the Waccamaw River.
“This is a situation that is confined to our property,” Gore said, noting that the company “has been actively working on a resolution for some time. But there is no issue of a threat to human health.”