Correction: Coal Ash-Duke Energy story

By EMERY P. DALESIO

AP Business Writer

Duke Energy said Wednesday that neighbours of unlined coal ash pits, who fear pollution of their water wells, will be offered compensation for depressed property values and new costs for municipal water.

The announcement by the country’s largest electricity company comes in the face of pending lawsuits by neighbours at some of the company’s 14 North Carolina coal-burning power plants. Law firms based in Raleigh, Salisbury and Dallas, Texas, said they represent hundreds of clients who are concerned about what the company may offer.

Duke Energy has “forced us to get an attorney because they couldn’t acknowledge our concerns from the beginning,” said Amy Brown, who lives less than 1,000 feet from the company’s Belmont plant and has consumed only bottled water for 20 months.

Duke Energy also said it will expand its delivery of bottled water for drinking and cooking to neighbours within a half-mile of its coal-plants, nearly doubling the scope of that preventative measure.

“It’s worth noting that our financial supplement is being offered to all property owners in the half-mile radius whether they have a lawyer or not,” Duke Energy spokeswoman Paige Sheehan wrote in an email. Once the company decides how much to offer neighbours, they have the choice to accept it or opt out, Sheehan wrote.

The Charlotte-based utility said it planned to finalize its financial offers to neighbours in the coming weeks. Costs will be borne by shareholders and not passed along to power consumers, the company said.

“They hadn’t set on how much or how it was going to be divvied out,” said Johnnie Gurley, who lives near the company’s Goldsboro power plant.

Part of Duke Energy’s offer will include an attempt to compensate people forced to give up their water wells and will hereafter pay monthly water bills.

Coal ash is the byproduct left after burning decades of coal to generate electricity. Neighbours fear unlined storage basins have allowed mercury, arsenic and other heavy metals to seep into their drinking water supplies.

Hundreds of coal-plant neighbours last year were warned against drinking their well water. State health officials this spring withdrew those warnings after deciding the earlier warning threshold was set too low.

Duke Energy said last month it plans to cap unlined and potentially leaking coal ash pits at 10 generating plants in North Carolina and Indiana while excavating its sites in Kentucky and South Carolina.

The company plans to store in place almost 70 per cent of its ash by dehydrating the storage pools and covering the area with a waterproof liner and dirt to encase the waste. The basin bottoms will remain unlined, and environmentalists contend that will allow toxic materials to filter into underground water supplies for years.

Duke Energy denies that its pits contaminate groundwater.

The utility delivers electricity to about 7.4 million customers in the Carolinas, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Florida.

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The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

Correction: Coal Ash-Duke Energy story

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