This is post number 5 of our blog series explaining Alabama Power’s proposed capacity expansion. We're working to clarify the stakes of one of the biggest energy cases ever to be decided in Alabama history.
By Sari Amiel, Legal Fellow with the Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program
Alabama Power often claims to be helping communities across Alabama, but this narrative contradicts the company’s actions on pivotal issues that impact the health of Alabama communities. By purchasing fracked gas plants, not properly storing coal ash, and encouraging in-person meetings during a pandemic, Alabama Power continues to show a dangerous disregard for the public health of its customers.
First, as we covered in our early blog posts, the Alabama PSC has granted Alabama Power’s request to buy power from two aging gas plants and build another. This will result in Alabama Power burning dirty fracked gas for decades. How will this decision implicate public health? Unfortunately, it’s not a pretty picture.
According to the American Lung Association, burning gas floods the air with pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and other hazardous air pollutants. These pollutants cause serious health issues, including asthma, brain damage, birth defects, cancer, and cardiovascular problems.
To make matters worse, researchers at Harvard have already linked pollution to higher Covid-19 mortality rates. And with Alabama’s Covid-19 infection rate still on the rise, this is not good news for the communities near the gas plants.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that around 75% of the gas produced in the United States comes from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process of fracking, or using chemical-filled water to extract gas from rocks deep underground, creates still more public health issues. Studies have linked fracking to increased rates of asthma, premature births, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and more.
Let’s not forget that Alabama Power burns not just gas, but also coal. As a result, Alabama Power stores 597 acres of coal ash, or toxic waste from its coal production, in unlined ditches. The Company’s own monitoring reveals that the Barry coal ash pond is poisoning the groundwater with toxic chemicals, including lead, selenium, vanadium, barium, cadmium, cobalt, manganese, and arsenic.
“Contaminated groundwater may be unfit for certain uses and may become harmful to humans, animals, vegetation, and property,” reads an Alabama Department of Environmental Management report on groundwater contamination. That report illustrates how easily pollutants can spread through groundwater, stating as an example, “One gallon of gasoline can render more than one million gallons of water unfit to drink!”
Alabama Power threatens its customers’ health not only by poisoning the air and water, but also by holding in-person, indoor meetings during the ongoing pandemic. Alabama Power did the bare minimum to inform customers of its plans for disposal of the toxic coal ash it produced for decades. Alabamians want—and have a legal right—to attend Alabama Power’s meetings on coal ash, but were given no option to listen in over the phone or watch online. By holding those meetings in an unsafe way, Alabama Power has piled insult upon injury, once again revealing its complete disregard for the health and safety of the members of its community.
“I am a concerned advocate for environmental issues in Alabama and in the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, and it was beyond frustrating to not be able to attend the Mobile Plant Barry coal ash meeting,” said Sierra Club member and Alabama resident Carol Adams-Davis. “I am taking the pandemic restrictions seriously, and it is unconscionable that Alabama Power would completely disregard the health of us, the citizens of Alabama, who will be impacted by these decisions for decades.”