Perhaps the greatest hurdle we will face this century will be how to reconcile our human ambition with our environmental health. At the fulcrum of this conflict rests the energy industry. No one enjoys polluting the air and waterways of our environment, but everyone enjoys light bulbs, air conditioning and automobiles.
Headline grabbing environmental disaster stories almost exclusively involve the energy industry. The parties named responsible in these cases are usually not considered criminals for valid reasons. They can usually plead ignorance or claim an honest mistake as the origin of the environmental disaster.
For example, the General Electric Co. dumped 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyl into the Hudson River throughout the middle of the 20th century. PCBs were widely used as industrial coolants and dielectric fluids in transformers. PCBs have also been shown to cause birth defects and cancer when consumed by humans.
When news of the harmful effects broke in the mid 1970s, PCBs were banned and GE stopped using them in their plant on the Hudson. Although GE legally dumped the chemicals in the river without knowledge of the environmental health consequences, the company has been involved in the effort to help clean up the river. Working with the Environmental Protection Agency, GE has committed to pay for this superfund site, a federal program instituted in 1980 to clean up the most dangerous hazardous waste sites in the U.S., with a price tag estimated at $750 million.
Probably the best-known environmental disaster is the Exxon Valdez oil spill that occurred in 1989. An over-worked and under-trained crew ran the oil tanker into a reef in the middle of the night. This resulted in 11 million gallons of crude oil being spilled along the pristine Alaskan coast. This natural disaster could not have been predicted and was certainly not planned by anyone.
The punitive damages that Exxon has to pay now total in the billions. Since then, great efforts have been taken by Exxon, as well as governmental regulatory bodies, to see that such disasters will not happen again.
Although companies such as GE and Exxon Mobil may not be eager to spend large sums of money on projects that have zero return on investment, we cannot fault them for being evil. As tragic as these disasters are, it can at least be said that the companies involved cared about their environmental impact, acknowledged their responsibility and are involved in the clean up efforts.
Unfortunately, not all companies in the energy industry will take this stance. Dominion Virginia Power, which produces most of the electricity for Virginia, is one of these companies. It hid 1.5 million tons of toxic coal fly ash under some turf near residential areas in Chesapeake, Va., and labeled it a golf course.
Fly ash is left over particles from parts of the coal that don’t burn in the furnace. It contains many heavy metals like lead, mercury and arsenic. These elements have been known to be toxic to humans for decades.
There are regulated and responsible ways of dealing with waste fly ash. It can be used as an ingredient in cement for construction projects, but is more commonly stored underground in lined landfills away from water supplies.
These landfills can be expensive and generally cannot be used for anything because they are full of toxic waste. If coal fly ash is not stored properly, then rainwater can leach heavy metals into the aquifer that is connected to the local water supply.
The Chesapeake Energy Center is a large coal fired power plant owned and operated by Dominion. With a net capacity of 760 megawatts, it consumes 4,500 tons of coal every day. All that waste fly ash needs to go somewhere. And in 2001, Dominion did not want to purchase a new environmentally safe landfill. Instead, it decided it would be cheaper to use the coal fly ash as filler in a golf course and tell people in the immediate vicinity that the toxic material is “safe as dirt.”
That was a lie. In 2001, Dominion hired outside contractors to assess the environmental risks associated with its golf course scheme. Those initial reports showed that local residential groundwater could become contaminated. Dominion cannot plead ignorance or blame an honest mistake on this issue.
In a textbook example from any engineering ethics class, Dominion decided to ignore those reports and instead shop around to other consulting firms until they could buy the results they wanted. To make matters worse, Dominion decided to keep those initial reports hidden from the public for seven years.
When news of the possible environmental disaster broke, local residents filed two class-action lawsuits totaling more than $2 billion. The money will be used to remove the toxic waste from their neighborhoods, monitor their drinking water and health and recover losses from their home values, which plummeted as a result of the news. Dominion has argued that the cases should be dropped because no specific health damage has been proven yet. The cases are still pending.
Recently the EPA has intervened and found elevated levels of arsenic and lead in groundwater at the golf course. These elevated levels were not there before the golf course was constructed. Although local drinking water did not show elevated levels of these toxic metals, it may only be a matter of time.
One might wonder why local government didn’t put a stop to this. Why did the Chesapeake city council allow Dominion to store their coal fly ash in their neighborhood? Maybe it has something to do with the $700,000 that Dominion donated to statewide political campaigns in the 2005 election cycle.
Battlefield Golf Club opened for business in 2007. The course does not have a liner, but does feature several lakes — bringing new meaning to the term “water hazard.” Chesapeake, and the whole Norfolk area, is home to thousands of our fellow Hokies, past and present. If anyone is going to hit the links there this year, err on the side of caution and bring some bottled water.