Some of the regular Americans who are paying the price for Scott Pruitt’s leadership were in Washington, D.C., this week, and I had the honor of spending the day with them and hearing their stories. As we all know, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt headed to Capitol Hill Thursday, where he was grilled by members of Congress on his many ethical scandals, which have been making headlines for weeks. Just two days earlier, people from across the U.S. came to Washington to testify at the EPA’s lone public hearing on Pruitt’s proposed rollbacks of protections from toxic coal ash.
Their stories of coal ash contamination were heartbreaking -- a North Carolina town where neighbors keep getting sick, a community on the Navajo Nation where people drive 15 miles to haul water for livestock. The EPA had finally put very modest coal ash safeguards in place for these communities in 2015, and now Scott Pruitt was trying to take them away. As I told the EPA in my testimony, “Families are looking to EPA to solve the coal ash problem — not abandon them. If you don’t defend these standards, the Sierra Club and our allies will.”
One small-town Alabama mayor summed up the thoughts of everyone in the room when he faced EPA representatives and simply said, “What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?”
Pruitt’s maneuver to weaken coal ash standards has sparked grassroots outrage from both red states and blue states. He is handing out yet another favor to the corporate polluters who’ve been giving him sweetheart deals and marching orders since he took over the EPA. Pruitt is weakening the protections so that millionaire utility executives don’t have to pay for affordable, commonsense fixes to America’s mounting coal ash problem.
As I heard from scientists and the many families affected who spoke at the hearing earlier this week, coal ash is the primary solid waste product of coal-fired power plants, and it contains some of the most dangerous toxic chemicals on earth, like arsenic, lead, mercury, and chromium. The toxins raise the risk for cancer, heart disease, and stroke, and can inflict permanent brain damage on children. It’s estimated that 1.5 million children live near the coal ash storage sites, which only getting larger with each ton of coal burned.
In places like Kingston, Tennessee and on the Dan River in North Carolina, we’ve seen the tragedies that coal ash spills and leaks can cause by devastating communities, contaminating water, and sending people to the hospital.
In 2015, after years of scientific research and public comments, the EPA finalized a set of basic clean water protections from coal ash that were cheap and easy for utilities to implement. These standards required coal-plant owners to do things like line new coal ash dump sites with strong, waterproof materials to make sure the dangerous contents don't leach into soil and contaminate groundwater. They also provided local communities with online tools to monitor their groundwater to make sure that toxic heavy metals from nearby coal ash waste sites haven't contaminated the water they used for farming, drinking, and cooking.
In a cruel irony, Pruitt announced these rollbacks on the day after EPA reporting under the new standard revealed dangerous coal ash pollution in more than 70 sites around the country.
Everyone deserves clean water free from toxic coal ash, and the profits of utility executives should never be held in higher regard than the health of local communities. After nearly a year in his position, Pruitt seems more concerned with pushing the agenda of wealthy coal executives than with doing his job to protect the environment and the health of the people who are suffering from the pollution created by coal plants.
Nothing better illustrates this than the sweetheart deal Pruitt received from the wife of a dirty energy lobbyist who had business before the EPA. For a mere $50 a night, he stayed in a plush, multimillion dollar condo near the United States Capitol. By day, Pruitt was touting his rollback efforts to make it easier for energy companies and utilities to save money by polluting, and by night, he slept peacefully in a bed owned by someone whom energy companies and utilities hire to do their bidding on Capitol Hill.
As each day goes by, we find out more about Pruitt’s conflicts of interests and revelations about his failed judgement. However, it’s important to remember that his failures have real-world impacts on the health of the people he is supposed to be protecting. Real families -- people who can’t offer him sweetheart deals on luxury housing -- will be hurt because of his decision to roll back the clean water protections against coal ash.