Consumers Energy ash piles make EPA list of dangerous sites

Coal ash piles at Consumers Energy’s Karn-Weadock power plant near Bay City are among the 584 coal ash landfills recently identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as threats to public health.

Consumers Energy told the Bay City Times that it plans to build a slurry wall around one of the leaking piles by the end of the year.

The ash landfills at Consumers became a public issue in October 2008, when a Bay City-area environmental group, the Lone Tree Council, released government documents showing that toxics had been leaking from the landfills for decades, in part because the landfills weren’t built properly in the first place. Consumers had known about the leaking since 1982.

Loren Curtis, a senior geologist with the DEQ in Bay City, said there are concerns about the leakage of boron, arsenic, phosphorus and mercury from the Karn landfill.

Earlier this year the Environmental Integrity project analyzed EPA’s coal ash risk assessment data and found that as many as 1 in 50 people who live around coal ash dumps get cancer because of toxins in drinking water.