coal ash

April 26, 2018 - This week the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing in Virginia on a proposal to roll back federal coal ash regulation. Among those who weighed in was a newspaperman from a rural Georgia community that's been targeted for coal ash dumping.

April 13, 2018 - A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of scores of dead and ill people who cleaned up the massive 2008 coal ash spill in eastern Tennessee is expected to get underway later this year. While claims have been made that no one warned of the health dangers for workers, records show otherwise.

March 16, 2018 - Data released under the new federal coal ash rule revealed radium contamination of groundwater at many of the utility's coal-fired power plants. But now the Trump administration wants to roll back that rule — including its groundwater monitoring requirements.

February 14, 2018 - The news that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest solicited millions of dollars from a Durham businessman for supposedly "independent" political groups highlights loopholes in state campaign finance law that need to be closed.

October 20, 2016 - The record flooding across the Southeast from Hurricane Matthew has resulted in spills of waste from a Duke Energy coal ash pit, hog waste from factory farm lagoons, and sewage from water treatment plants.

September 23, 2016 - The predominantly poor, African-American community in Alabama that became the dumping ground for coal ash spilled in the 2008 TVA disaster in Tennessee is embroiled in an ongoing fight for environmental justice — and there's now an opening for the public to weigh in.

July 1, 2016 - An environmental group wants the N.C. Ethics Commission to investigate whether the McCrory administration withheld information about a dinner meeting with Duke Energy officials and used state resources to benefit his re-election campaign. It's not the first ethics complaint filed against McCrory — or the first involving his relationship with the utility.

May 26, 2016 - In recent weeks, the company got the N.C. Utilities Commission to require an unprecedented $10 million bond from grassroots groups seeking to block construction of a fracked gas plant and lobbied N.C. lawmakers to get a coal ash bill that watchdogs have blasted as a "bailout" and a "sweetheart deal."

May 5, 2016 - After local residents began raising concerns about cancer clusters near Duke Energy coal ash waste pits, the state cancer registry conducted a study that it claims shows there's no cause for worry — but a epidemiologist who reviewed the state's analysis says it does nothing of the sort.

April 15, 2016 - As pressure grows on power companies to move toxic coal ash out of leaky, wet impoundments and into dry, lined landfills, the experience of an African-American community near one such landfill in rural Alabama highlights the potential problems with that approach.