This week, I covered a story about two of North Carolina’s 12 high-hazard coal ash ponds for The Mountain Island Weekly. These two, at Duke Energy’s Riverbend Steam Station, are about 12 miles from Uptown Charlotte and only a short distance from the Catawba River Pumping Station, where Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities draws drinking water from the lake.
Also this week, the state House of Representatives, and later the Senate, passed legislation that changes how the ponds are going to be regulated. Gov. Perdue is expected to sign the bill into law.
The coal ash ponds along the bank of Mountain Island Lake look like many other man-made ponds. They are surrounded by vegetation and attract wild animals.The difference? Where the coal ash enters the first pond, the water is not fluid. It’s dense and dark gray. A thick matter that looks a lot like dried lava encircles half of one pond. Though it’s not considered dry, Duke Energy officials say it is hard enough to walk on.
The first pond covers 41 acres, about the size of 200 tennis courts. It is 80 feet deep. For comparison, a standard telephone poll is 55 feet tall.
The second pond covers 28 acres and is 70 feet deep. Its job is to sift the slurry for a second time.
Eventually the water drains from the second pond into Mountain Island Lake, many gallons a minute, Duke Energy officials said.
The water enters the lake just upstream from the Catawba River Pumping Station. The water is then piped to water treatment plants, where it is treated and released for use by residents and businesses throughout Mecklenburg County.
See the photos I took and read the rest of the article here.
This article appears in Jul 21-28, 2009.
Why so insulting, Frank?
Frank, what are you talking about? Your comment directly insults the writer’s intelligence while simultaneously failing as a coherent sentence. If anyone has intelligence issues in this equation, it’s you. How you can say your frequently meanspirited, highly opinionated, and often pointed personal comments are “the truth” is beyond imagination. The real issue is your childlike need for attention.
Your frequent comments on this site paint a picture of your personality that’s dark, cruel, uninformed, and uninterested in discovering truth. In fact, more often than not, you argue that your opinion and “the truth” are one and the same. That isn’t possible, not just for you, but for anyone.
The real thing to do is to put you on ignore and help new commenters realize the constant error of your ways. Instead of arguing with you, which is what you wish for, readers/ commentors should be warned about your fragile mental health.