Fly Ash Town Hall On The Calendar

The Hoosier Environmental Council will hold a town hall meeting at the Lawrenceburg Public Library on January 29.

Ash storage areas at the former Tanners Creek Power Plant site in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. IDEM image.

(Lawrenceburg, Ind.) – The cleanup of hazardous coal ash at the former Tanners Creek Power Plant property in Lawrenceburg will be the subject of a town hall meeting Tuesday, January 29.

The Hoosier Environmental Council’s senior policy director, Tim Maloney, will meet with local citizens to discuss the environmental remediation happening at the decommissioned power plant site.

The meeting will run from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. at the Lawrenceburg Public Library’s Ewbank Meeting Room. It will be open to the public and free of charge.

“Among the legacies of the power plant are several coal ash lagoons which pose a direct threat to the region’s drinking water supplies,” according to an announcement.

The Hoosier Environmental Council is among four organizations which wrote to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management last year urging the agency to deny a closure plan for one of the site’s ash storage areas.

The report detailed the environmental and human health threat posed by millions of tons of fly ash stored in both lined and unlined ash ponds at the Tanners Creek site. Millions of tons of coal combustion residuals were generated and stored there as the power plant operated for more than six decades.

Contaminants from the fly ash – well-known to contain arsenic, boron, lead, cadmium, chromium and others – threaten water quality of the underlying aquifers from which Aurora Utilities and Lawrenceburg-Manchester-Sparta Conservancy supply drinking water.

The property’s current owner, Tanners Creek Development, LLC, is conducting brownfield redevelopment there. Ports of Indiana has identified the land along the Ohio River as the potential home of the state’s fourth inland shipping port. A purchase agreement between the two parties has been extended through June 30 as the environmental concerns are addressed.

Tanners Creek Development’s ash pond closure plan of capping the ash landfill in place is in the hands of IDEM, which is awaiting new rules to be developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Maloney told Eagle Country 99.3 last August that the safest, and perhaps most cost-effective solution, would be to dig up and relocate the ash to a safer location.

“Ideally, they should be asking Tanners Creek to move the ash out of that site. That’s the only way they will have a guarantee that those drinking water wells will be protected,” Maloney said.

Last fall, IDEM cited Tanners Creek Development for violations of coal ash storage, as large amounts of the material was found in unpermitted areas. The coal had been deposited outside the designated landfills operations on the property prior to the company purchasing it from former plant operator Indiana Michigan Power, a subsidiary of American Electric Power, in 2016.

According to a report this week from The Indianapolis Star, utilities including Duke Energy and Northern Indiana Public Service Company admitted to polluting in excess of standards at five power plant sites in the state. Other utilities, including Indiana Michigan Power, are expected to make similar disclosures this year.

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