The coal industry wants you to believe that coal isn’t poisoning our drinking water. The truth is that coal-mining and power-plant wastes pollute our water and our bodies with arsenic, lead, mercury and other deadly toxins.
Both underground and surface mining have devastating impacts on water resources. Mining, including acid mine drainage, and disposal of ash generated at coal-fired power plants generates huge quantities of toxic waste that leach into aquifers, contaminating drinking water. Stored in immense unlined and unmonitored impoundments and sometimes even injected underground, coal waste contains heavy metals, diesel fuel and other cancer-causing compounds.
Dr. Ben Stout, an expert on water contamination caused by coal mining and sludge disposal in Appalachia, tested 15 drinking water wells in one community in West Virginia near a coal slurry impoundment and found that the water was contaminated with arsenic, beryllium, lead and selenium - sometimes at levels which exceed federal drinking water standards by as much as 500%. There are 140 billion gallons of this toxic slurry in West Virginia alone.
And nowhere is the coal industry’s lie more evident than with the December 2008 coal-fired power plant ash spill in Harriman, Tennessee. This largest of all environmental disasters in the U.S. is 100 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill. It has destroyed homes, killed wildlife and is poisoning communities, while industry and government work hand-in-hand to keep a lid on the truth about the levels of contamination. Even without catastrophic ash spills, 1 out of every 100 children that drink water contaminated with arsenic from power plant waste has an increased risk of developing cancer - a rate 10,000 times higher than EPA’s goal.
The truth is that the coal industry is poisoning our water sources and us, one ton of coal at a time.
Source: TheDirtieLie.com