Posted on 04/22/2015 3:51:08 PM PDT by ilovesarah2012
Edited on 04/22/2015 4:08:00 PM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- State officials are advising an undisclosed number of residents near Duke Energy coal ash dumps not to drink or cook with water from their wells after tests showed contamination with toxic heavy metals.
A law passed after last year's spill into the Dan River required the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources to sample wells within 1,000 feet of Duke's 32 coal ash dumps.
(Excerpt) Read more at wlos.com ...
Are the ash dumps new? If not what could possibly be in the water now that hasn’t been there for 20 years?
Toxic heavy metals. It’s highly unlikely they are naturally occurring.
This is the Catch-22, ignore it all and deal with the consequences or take action, even if by a state agency. I'm sure the local residents are happier to know the water is unsafe than be told "don't worry" or to be simply ignored.
That Duke or some other company gets strapped with paying cleanup... better them than the taxpayer.
I think there are heavy metals in the ground water now and there was 20 years ago. It’s just another case of kicking the can down the road just like with nuclear waste
All vanadium compounds should be considered toxic. Tetravalent VOSO4 has been reported to be over 5 times more toxic than trivalent V2O3.[74] The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set an exposure limit of 0.05 mg/m3 for vanadium pentoxide dust and 0.1 mg/m3 for vanadium pentoxide fumes in workplace air for an 8-hour workday, 40-hour work week.[75] The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has recommended that 35 mg/m3 of vanadium be considered immediately dangerous to life and health. This is the exposure level of a chemical that is likely to cause permanent health problems or death.[75]
Vanadium compounds are poorly absorbed through the gastrointestinal system. Inhalation exposures to vanadium and vanadium compounds result primarily in adverse effects on the respiratory system.[76][77][78] Quantitative data are, however, insufficient to derive a subchronic or chronic inhalation reference dose. Other effects have been reported after oral or inhalation exposures on blood parameters,[79][80] on liver,[81] on neurological development in rats,[82] and other organs.[83]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanadium
The source of the vanadium is almost certainly Duke’s ash piles. Duke should bear full responsibility for correcting the problem. It may have been there 20 years or more depending on when they started piling it on.
The only way I can think of to correct the problem is to install purge wells to pump the water into the sanitary sewer system. But you can’t fix it for good unless you install some sort of system to keep the ash from leeching into the groundwater. Maybe that’s been done already. I’m inclined to think there are already regulations in place to keep this from happening. Maybe not.
I find it appalling that the state refuses to release information regarding how many wells were contaminated. If I owned one of those wells I’d be sorely pissed.
My point is if there were health implications they would have manifested themselves by now. If there are no health problems then I am wary of the motivations behind forcing a cleanup. I think this will be nothing but a shakedown of Duke Energy.
The EPA ran one of these scams in my hometown. We had a copper smelter that had operated for the last 100 years and the EPA comes in and says the soil is contaminated with “dangerous” levels of lead and arsenic. Now keep in mind there have been no health anomalies, lead/arsenic related or otherwise and people have lived around it for 60 years. So the smelter is forced to pay clean up the site using EPA approved remediation companies (gee I bet there’s no corruption there) AND directly paying the EPA to fund salaries of EPA employees to “supervise.” I know the second part because one of the federal scum would slime around my local watering hole and bragged about his great works. The smelter shut down when copper prices dropped and then thanks in part to EPA scaremongering the City fought tooth and nail to keep it closed. This bankrupted the company that owned the smelter.
Now here is where it gets fun. As soon as the company money dried up this super urgent cleanup ground to a halt. Eventually the city took over the land and still no clean up. They even knocked over the smoke stacks kicking up untold amounts of supposedly lead laden dust and not a peep from the Feds. The whole thing was nothing more than extortion of the smelter company.
If you are talking about El Paso, that town is so filthy it would be hard to tell if the contamination came from the smelter or from Mexico just beyond it. God I hate that place!
There may be health problems you’re not aware of. Toxins can accumulate in your body for a long time before you start to feel ill effects and even then they might not be discovered because no one bothers to test for them. Cause of death: liver failure. How did that happen? It doesn’t matter. He’s dead
If El Paso isn’t bad enough, there is always Jaurez. Was there in 1993... The first time I saw someone passed out in broad daylight on the sidewalk in a puddle of their own vomit... it was Jaurez.
The first time I saw that was in Osaka, Japan . Three coat and tie salarymen in different spots.
Nheard your account about the ASARCO plant from El Paso natives.
The air pollution in the Permian Basin has worsened since NAFTA was passed and the Juarez side gained more factories and powerplants. Prevailing winds from the southwest.
Since the environmentalists (Agenda 21) are against private wells, I would have my own water tested for said heavy metals.
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