Just two weeks after the House of Representatives caved to the coal industry and voted to strip the EPA of the authority to protect Americans from coal ash, a retaining bluff collapsed on Monday, October 31, at the We Energies Oak Creek Power Plant in Wisconsin, sending toxic coal ash spewing into Lake Michigan, a drinking water supply for over 10 million residents in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana.
The standard line from opponents of strong EPA regulation of toxic coal ash is: “States can handle this.” But state environmental regulators gave We Energies a pass in 2008 – exempting it from certain rules so that construction work could be done atop coal ash landfills on a bluff on the Lake Michigan shoreline at the utility’s Oak Creek Power Plant, officials said Tuesday. A recent review conducted by Earthjustice reveals that when measured against basic safeguards that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified as essential to protect health and the environment, state regulatory programs fail miserably to guarantee safety from contamination and catastrophe. Our recent report, “Illinois at Risk,” highlights numerous examples of how our state environment regulators are failing to protect residents from coal ash pollution in Illinois.
