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“AmerenUE bought 1,000 acres adjacent to its Labadie power plant on the flood plain of the Missouri River. The company plans to use it to dispose of toxic coal ash. Some Franklin County residents are upset, and understandably so.”

Posted on Jun 11, 2010 in News

Franklin County zoning regulations say nothing about the construction of landfills. Not yet, anyway.  But that may change, and soon. On Tuesday, the county Planning and Zoning Commission will hear comments on changes to zoning regulations that would permit utility-waste landfills.  AmerenUE bought 1,000 acres adjacent to its Labadie power plant on the flood plain of the Missouri River. The company plans to use it to dispose of toxic coal ash.  Some Franklin County residents are upset, and understandably so. They don’t want toxic ash near their homes. They especially don’t want it in an area at risk for flooding.  For years, coal ash has escaped public or regulatory scrutiny. That began to change in December 2008 when a dam collapse at a Tennessee power plant unleashed a wave of wet coal ash that swept through a nearby town, poisoning water supplies and leaving a great gray scar.

Coal ash contains heavy metals, including lead and arsenic. It’s a noxious part of the Faustian bargain we’ve made for cheap energy. Most of the power used here is generated by burning coal.  We love inexpensive electricity. But no one wants to live near the ash. Last year, the Labadie plant produced about 350,000 tons of it. The ash now is stored in two containment ponds near the generating plan. Those ponds are nearing capacity, and contaminants are seeping into the river.  Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released proposed regulations for disposing of coal ash. One would classify coal ash as hazardous waste and require that special precautions be taken for its disposal. The other sets national disposal standards but relies on the industry to self-police disposal of the ash.
The decision on which one is adopted will have a significant impact on Franklin County.  If coal ash is classified as hazardous waste, the proposed landfill probably would store ash not only from the Labadie plant, but also from other plants.

The opponents ratcheted up even further two weeks ago, when the zoning commission published a vague public notice about Tuesday’s meeting. If you didn’t know why the meeting was called before reading the notice, you still didn’t after you read it.
Opponents say that the commission is moving too quickly. Commission staff say there’s a good reason. “We don’t have anything in our regulations” about landfills, senior planner Scottie Eagan explained. That doesn’t mean they cannot be opened, just that the county would have little say over where or how.  “Our main concern is getting something in” the regulations, she said. “We can come back and tweak it.”  The zoning changes would prohibit landfills in the flood plain. But even land right along the river isn’t considered flood plain if it is protected by a levee.

Unfortunately, as Metro East residents recently learned, levees don’t protect forever. Billions of dollars of industrial development — and the toxic waste it has produced — are behind Metro East levees that recently were “de-certified” by federal officials. The cost of replacing them will be high; the cost of a flood before the job is finished would be enormous.

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