This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 9, 2011 - Franklin County Presiding Commissioner John Griesheimer said Wednesday he didn't know how long it would take to decide whether to enact a measure to legalize landfills like the one Ameren Missouri wants to build for coal ash.
Fresh off a second commission hearing on the matter Tuesday night, Griesheimer told the Beacon Wednesday that the decision would likely take "two months or more," given how much feedback the commission has received from the public.
It could take three weeks just for transcripts of Tuesday night's lengthy County Commission public hearing on the subject to become available, he said. He also said the commission might invite witnesses from past public hearings to return at some point to be reinterviewed. He didn't offer specifics.
"There's some support in doing that, but beyond that I can't give you a timeline, because I just don't know," Griesheimer said.
Environmental groups and many local residents oppose approval of the measure because the landfill site, across from the Labadie power plant and along the Missouri River, is in a floodplain. They say they're not convinced Ameren's landfill can be built safely enough to prevent ground- and river-water contamination.
They want the commission to appoint a scientific advisory committee to study the issue further and delay action on the measure until the Environmental Protection Agency hands down rules later this year on coal-ash disposal.
Ameren officials maintain that the utility designing its landfill to make contamination virtually impossible. The company also says that it needs the new landfill because its other coal-ash disposal sites are almost full, and that its landfill would comply with EPA's new rules.
Read the Beacon's coverage of the commission meeting Tuesday night below.
UNION, Mo. - Dozens of local residents on Tuesday criticized Franklin County's recent tests that found that trace metals from Ameren coal ash wouldn't contaminate water enough to pose a health risk if the ash were to go in the utility's proposed coal-waste landfill.
Environmentalists, residents and legal and scientific experts said national organizations had shown the county's testing procedure to be unreliable at measuring the flow of trace metals from ash to liquid -- a process called "leaching." They also said other, more reliable testing methods had become available recently.
"Coal ash is toxic and dangerous," Michael Berg, a Sierra Club member from St. Louis, told the Franklin County Commission at the second public hearing on the issue, in which landfill opponents far outnumbered supporters. "It does not belong in the flood plain of the Missouri River."
The county's test found that levels of metals that leached from Ameren samples met U.S. drinking-water standards. Though he defended the tests when they first came out, Presiding Commissioner John Griesheimer told the Beacon Tuesday afternoon he had no idea other tests existed: "All I did was call the labs and said I needed a test. I didn't know what other tests there were. I relied on them to test the material. That's all that happened. If there was another test out there, I wasn't aware of it. If I knew about it, I would have had it done."
The criticism of the testing represented environmental groups' latest attempt to derail Ameren's proposal. Controversy has raged for months over the landfill, which Ameren wants to install near its Labadie coal power plant along the Missouri River as its current coal ponds approach capacity. Franklin County's commissioners have proposed changing the county's land-use code to allow such a landfill.
Opponents, led by the Labadie Environmental Organization, and Ameren representatives have long sparred over the toxicity of coal ash, the proposed landfill's safeguards and the risk of groundwater leaching. Opponents are concerned that landfill would go in a floodplain and be below the groundwater table. Ameren officials say the landfill's safeguards would minimize the risk of leaching.
Testing for Trace Metals
Tuesday night, however, the testing procedure came front and center, adding a new wrinkle to the debate.
Ameren's toxicologist, Lisa Bradley, noted in written testimony that trace metals in ash occur everywhere in nature, and that their toxicity occurs at a certain exposure level. But, she added, "the concentration of these materials in [coal combustion waste] is very low."
She said the county's test -- the toxic characteristic leaching procedure, or TCLP -- showed that trace metals in coal-ash samples from Ameren leached into water at levels below EPA safety standards, too low to be considered hazardous.
But landfill opponents, aided by Washington University's Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, cited a 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences that found the TCLP procedure to be unreliable. EPA, which is preparing to hand down coal-ash disposal regulations later this year, has also deemed the TCLP approach unreliable because the ash's acidity can distort results.
A new test, known as the leaching framework or LEAF, found that coal waste leached trace metals to levels thousands of times higher than federal drinking-water standards, and hundreds of times the level the TCLP procedure usually finds. EPA said in a 2010 paper that it considers the new test to be a promising tool and far more reliable than TCLP.
"These results show concentrations of toxic materials leaching from coal ash far higher than federal drinking-water standards and the threshold for hazardous waste classification," Mary Hinton, a Washington U. student consultant for the IEC, told the County Commission.
Landfill opponents said the new test comes with a premium: It costs tens of thousands of dollars.
Opponent Steve Gambaro of Labadie also trumpeted a Feb. 1 report by Lisa Evans, senior administrative counsel at the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, showing a cancer-causing form of chromium leached into water from groundwater at dangerously high rates.
Evans said in a telephone interview Tuesday that the county's TCLP test may have shown trace metal levels below federal standards, but even if the test was accurate, the results still didn't necessarily show Ameren's coal ash to be safe. The federal standard, the test used is from 1991 and doesn't account for chromium's recently discovered health risks, she said.
Building a Landfill in a Flood Plain
Witnesses also revisited their main concern from December -- whether Ameren's landfill could prevent trace metals from getting into groundwater, especially since the proposed site is in a floodplain and below the water table.
And that, Evans told the Beacon, is the major concern: "The crucial question of whether it makes sense to place toxic waste below level of water table should be the question that everybody's asking," she said.
Mike Menne, vice president for environmental services at Ameren, said the landfill would have safeguards to prevent leaching. The landfill would store the ash in a dry form, and it would be equipped with special liners and a leachate collection system, among other safeguards.
Many area residents said they weren't convinced.
No matter the safeguards and no matter the technological advances, Richmond Heights resident Mike Bush said, "You can't beat mother nature." He expressed concern about the safety of St. Louis' drinking water from the Missouri River.
Hinton testified that dozens of other landfills that stored the ash in a dry form have leached dangerous levels of trace metals. Charles Norris, a hydrogeologist for a Denver-based firm, testified in December that good safeguards can only slow down leaching, not prevent it.
Menne said that he couldn't guarantee that Ameren's landfill would never leach, but added that its safeguards would make leaching "virtually impossible."
"I cannot guarantee the Arch won't fall down tomorrow either," Menne told the Beacon, "but in terms of the current technology, the way these things are built, they're specifically designed to protect groundwater, to protect trace materials from ever leaching out of these into the environment."
He added that this facility addresses the concerns environmentalists raised with older coal-waste landfills. The alternative to the landfill could be even worse, he said: trucking the coal ash out of Franklin County, potentially introducing traffic problems and harmful chemicals to the air.
The health risks from trucking and the safeguards of the landfill, he said, are why "we think [the landfill] is the safest option, both from a public-health perspective and an environmental perspective."
Nearby residents also had economic concerns, however. "Common sense will tell you that a landfill reduces the value of your property," said John Yarbrough, a Labadie resident and restaurant owner.
Puneet Kollipara, a Washington University student, is a freelance writer and former Beacon intern.