The Metro East region of Illinois sits along the Mississippi River and is home to diverse residents—community members of river towns like East Alton and Alton, abundant wildlife including the bald eagle, thousands of species of fish, and—in times without a pandemic—boaters, skiers, and fledgling ecotourism businesses.  

This area is also home to the shuttered Wood River Power Station, located just feet from the Mississippi, alongside the Wood River Creek. Abandoned by Dynegy/Vistra in 2016, it is now owned by Commercial Liability Partners, a company that has taken a wrecking ball to the property without public engagement and nearly zero protective oversight. Four deep, unlined ash ponds sit on this property and are designated, per the current closure plan, to be capped in place forever.  

Over the past two and a half years, environmental groups, local communities, and social justice organizations have been working to hold polluters accountable. Our biggest win to date for the climate and the people is the passage of SB9: The Coal Ash Cleanup Protection Act, which will put in place the requirements for removal and/or storage of coal ash across our state at the expense of the companies who put it there, not Illinois taxpayers. 

We have a good start, but the language and the restrictions for polluters need to be stronger. For example, the IEPA would like to exclude flood plains from its proposed list of high-risk locations on which coal ash in unlined ponds must be removed. The Wood River Power Station sits on such a floodplain with four unlined ponds, acres wide and filled with decades of toxic ash. As currently proposed, those ponds will remain...forever. But capping in place won’t protect us. Rainwater from above is only part of the problem. What threatens to unleash the pollution housed at the Wood River Power Station is the inevitable rising water table below that will allow ash in the unlined ponds to become saturated. This ash, proven to contain unacceptable levels of major toxins, will flow back out as the water recedes, polluting the habitat, poisoning drinking water of already devastated communities, all for corporate savings.

Capping in place saves polluters billions and costs residents our health, our river, our economy and, for many, our very lives. There will never be a vaccine for poisoning from coal ash. If you feel capping in place is not the best solution for our area, you can demand better by making a written public comment:  don.brown@illinois.gov by October 30, 2020. Make your voice heard, demand protection for our communities and our ecosystem, and force polluters to clean up their mess responsibly.