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Lawmakers Douse Bill Expanding Water Board Review of Environmental Impact on Certain Communities

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Lawmakers knocked down a proposal to update state law that considered how future development could affect water quality for communities that historically have been economically or socially disadvantaged.

Del. Rodney T. Willett, D-Henrico, introduced House Bill 393, which died in committee in January along a party line vote. The State Water Control Board would have been required to analyze the social and economic implications of a development’s impact on water quality in low-income communities, including rural locales that rely on water sources for drinking, farming and livestock.

The additional provision in Willett’s bill would have expanded the water board’s review of a project from just its environmental impact to the project’s environmental impact on humans who might need additional protections, advocates said.

The Department of Environmental Quality oversees the water board, which sets water quality standards, and develops policies for the conservation of water resources. It also sets requirements for the reuse and treatment of sewage and wastewater.

Regulation and testing would help ensure clean water access for those communities, with the process paralleling that of the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board, which is also overseen by DEQ, Willett said.

“Some of the things we were doing for clean air, we were not doing for clean water, in terms of the regulatory process,” Willett said.

State lawmakers passed the Environmental Justice Act in 2020. The bill outlined the state’s commitment to environmental justice, and defined the terms and communities involved in the effort.

This legislation rippled through regulatory agencies who examine policies and applications. The State Air Pollution Control Board under DEQ must now consider “site suitability,” or how a project will impact the area and community where it is located. A regulatory panel is currently exploring new rules on how environmental justice efforts can be implemented.

The process of site suitability is an element of analysis that Peggy Sanners, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said could also potentially be applied to the work of the water board. Sanners testified on behalf of the bill. It is relevant that DEQ is conducting a regulatory development process to determine site suitability, she said. 

The water board authorizes projects and developments in communities where water quality could be impacted. For example, pipeline proposals that would discharge potential pollutants into waters currently go through the water board to make sure water quality would not affect nearby communities, according to Jessica Sims from Appalachian Voices. The group advocates for clean air, water and energy.

“If a project can cause economic impact, the social and economic demographics should receive review,” Sims said.

Pollutants discharged into the water at certain levels can change the quality of the water, said Peter Anderson, Appalachian Voices Virginia policy director. Sediment pollution from pipeline construction can make its way into wells used for drinking water in rural communities, according to Anderson.

“There’s an old saying in environmental policy that ‘the dose makes the poison,’” said Anderson.

Residents in rural communities who rely on drinking wells instead of municipal water services face difficult and costly repairs when wells are polluted, according to Anderson. Communities that rely on their water source for farming and livestock would have been protected from water quality degradation, advocates testified.

Del. Tony Wilt, R-Rockingham, raised a question about how the water board would gather data on economic and social impact in communities.

Mike Rolband, DEQ director, responded that the DEQ had no position on the legislation and that the governor’s office was still reviewing the legislation. The office responded to a follow-up question that they are no longer doing that because the bill is dead.

The arguments made against the bill revolved around the cost of who would pay for lab analysis tests to collect data on water quality around a development, according to Anderson.

Willett also introduced HB 1228 which would have placed the cost of additional tests on permit applicants building near water, Anderson said.

Jacqueline Goodrum, a conservation policy associate for Wild Virginia, a nonprofit organization in support of conserving wild lands and waters, spoke in support of the bill. Communities should have a say on what happens to their waters, which can enhance property values and draw tourism, Goodrum said.

“This does not create a new obligation for DEQ,” Goodrum said. “This is an analysis that must already be considered under the anti-degradation policy as well as the Clean Water Act.”

Advocates wanted the language included in Virginia code to highlight and emphasize the analysis in order to ensure fair decision making and compliance with the standard when issuing permits.

Delegates in the Republican-majority House objected because the bill is a regulatory matter, according to Willett.

Legislators in both chambers recently passed a bill that would transfer the authority of the air and water citizen boards to issue permits and orders to the DEQ. Lawmakers this session have established that the boards will have less responsibility.

“Without this language included in the code, communities that have been historically disadvantaged, including minority and rural communities, are less protected from potential future water pollutants,” Willett stated.

Written by Monica Alarcon-Najarro, Capital News Service. Photo via CNS.

Op-Ed: River Shitty

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Year after year, coal train derailments, sewage pipeline leaks, pesticide runoff, and other toxic substances continue to poison the James River. In a summer that’s seen multiple toxic train derailments and a two-week ban on swimming due to multiple sewage pipe breaks, climate activist Aaron Linas asks, when will we start treating our river better?

It’s time we take seriously the health of the James River. In the last two months there have been three train derailments in downtown Richmond (June 8, Rocketts Landing; June 30, Hollywood Cemetery; and July 23, Oregon Hill), resulting in multiple cars landing in the river and 500 tons of coal dumped into the Kanawha canal. In two weeks alone, there were two separate sewage pipeline leaks (July 24, Pipeline Trail; and July 29, Goochland), causing the city government to place restrictions on recreational use of the river. Richmond residents were banned for almost two weeks from swimming, rafting, and fishing in the James, or any activity that resulted in getting their skin wet. Virginia health officials have now lifted restrictions, but swimming is still discouraged.

This isn’t the first time the city has restricted swimming, and up until Ralph White’s tenure, it was flat-out banned to go in at all. In 1980, White became the James River Parks manager with a yearly budget of $3000 and a city prepared to sell off wetland parcels for development. Under his guidance and with dedicated volunteers, the park expanded its trail network, built accessible pathways, and conserved Richmond’s urban wilderness. What was once a shunned place has now become a centerpiece of the city.

There is an unspoken history of the river being used as a dumping ground for toxic and sewage waste. The forgotten Kepone plant in Hopewell was manufacturing a DDT relative from 1966 until 1975; in this time they poisoned dozens of workers and dumped over 200,000 pounds of Kepone into the river. Dredging efforts were abandoned for fear of disturbing the settled waste. After being covered with additional dirt, it still sits underneath the river floor. As Avail sang in 1998, “There’s kepone in the river, but the river’s still moving east…”

There are a few other pollutants that live on the bottom of the James, including over 70,000 gallons of crude oil from the 2014 Lynchburg train derailment. Seventeen rail cars carrying volatile crude oil derailed in the downtown area, with three going directly into the James. The images of the river on fire raised concerns over the danger of “bomb trains,” the possibility that cars carrying highly explosive bakkan shale oil from North Dakota might erupt and cause large-scale fires. Our energy reliance on natural gas escalates the potential for a devastating citywide catastrophe. Richmond is lucky that none of the last three train derailments involved fracked gas or oil.

West of Richmond, 60 miles upstream in the town of Bremo, is a coal-fired power plant owned by Dominion. In 2016, Dominion was granted a permit by the Department of Environmental Quality to drain 255 million gallons of coal ash wastewater, containing toxic chemicals like arsenic, selenium, and hexavalent chromium, from the 85-year-old Bremo facility’s ponds into the river. The dumping levels exceeded state-accepted standards of industrial discharge, but DEQ and Dominion claimed the river could sufficiently dilute the heavy metals and not effect drinking water. Dominion has another coal-fired power plant 17 miles downstream in Chester, where for years heavy metals from the coal ash ponds have been leaking into the surrounding waterways. After legislation passed in 2019 that requires Dominion to clean up all of its coal ash ponds within the Chesapeake Bay watershed, any new coal ash from the Chester power plant is now disposed in a landfill.

The most widely known river polluter is the combined sewer overflow system (CSO) that routinely dumps untreated wastewater after a storm. It is common knowledge that after a heavy rain you should avoid swimming in the river, for fear of contracting MRSA or a staph infection. Formal complaints about CSO began in the 1970’s with Newton Hooper Ancarrow, who owned a boat landing on the south side of the river. The landing is now known as Ancarrow’s Landing and sits across the James from Rocketts Landing. In 1974, he directed a film, The Raging James, that focused on the channelizations of waterways and its disruption of environmental health – a debate that is currently underway about Reedy Creek. He would go on to formally petition city council to address the damages CSO had on the river and his business. The city council, in response to his nuisance, placed an eminent domain acquisition on his property — forcing the sale of Ancarrow’s Landing and surrounding area to build where is now the wastewater treatment facility.

Governor Ralph Northam’s allocation of $50 million from the coronavirus relief money for Richmond combined-sewer cleanup is a fraction of the help needed to end overflows into the James River. The City of Richmond had previously asked for $883 million to build infrastructure that can capture, store, and treat heavy storm water flows by separating street runoff from sewage, and bring the city in compliance with new state mandates to end CSO discharge by 2035.

If the Governor and Mayor are sincere about ensuring reliable access to clean drinking water and rebuilding our aging infrastructure, then they must declare a state of climate emergency. Addressing CSO has been evaded, if not ignored, due in part to political unwillingness, as well as the exorbitant cost and planning of a project that is likely to disrupt many areas of the city. This procrastination has increased the cost of repairs, and leaves city operators with no choice but to dump untreated raw sewage into the river. It took two days to inform the public that a 40-inch pipe in Goochland leaked 300,000 gallons of undiluted raw sewage into the James. That’s straight up from the toilet to the river.

Beyond the pollutants of coal, natural gas, and CSO, there are other dumping actors. The juvenile, women’s, and men’s prisons in Powhatan have been permitted to discharge septic treated wastewater into the James for decades. They maintain this is within compliance, but rumors of malfunctions and excess flow dumping untreated wastewater go unnoticed. Runoff from commercial farms add pesticides, sediment, and animal waste.

A discussion about the health of the James River must include all existing actors and aspects of water infrastructure. If we continue to allow permitted or accidental dumping of pollution into our waterways, we reverse the work of people like Ralph White and the volunteers who spent decades to get us a swimmable river. The history of James River pollution must be retold for each generation to ensure we don’t forget or replicate such poor methods of waste management and energy consumption. A city without drinkable water is not fit for humans.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect editorial policy.

Top Photo by Erin Ferrell, via Twitter

Op-Ed: End Environmental Racism In Virginia

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Sunrise Richmond co-coordinator Fionnuala Fisk warns that a Wegmans facility in Hanover County threatens the historic Black community of Brown Grove.

Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the “state-sanctioned and extralegal exposure of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” and environmental racism plays a big role in this premature death. Black Americans are thrice as likely to die of asthma, are exposed to 1.5 times more carcinogenic particulates, and have a higher lead exposure rate than white Americans. The race of surrounding communities is the strongest predictor of where toxic waste sites are placed. Minority communities are consistently underserved with basic infrastructure like drainage and sidewalks (a fact that contributes to pedestrian hospitalization and death disparities), and are less supported after natural disasters, as brutally evinced by Hurricanes Katrina and Maria. These facts didn’t happen by chance, but because of inequitable policy-making and deadly apathy.

Environmental racism isn’t just in Flint, or at Standing Rock. We have our very own fight in Brown Grove, Hanover County. Wegmans plans on building an enormous industrial site in the backyard of this tight-knit and historic Black community. Wegmans’ project comes after 50 years of industrial encroachment on the community, including a cement mixing plant, I-95, a landfill, and an airport expansion. The site chosen is known in the community to contain the unmarked graves of Brown Grove elders, and no topographically appropriate search for graves is planned. The main road already regularly floods, and flooding will be far worse after Wegmans destroys 15 acres of wetlands. Residents, who are mostly on well water, had to lobby intensely to have the option of county water, and the road that runs through their community has no sidewalks. The community has asked local officials for assistance throughout the years and faced apathy. But now residents feel even more unheard and unprotected, especially since Governor Northam lobbied intensely, even visiting Rochester, NY personally, for Wegmans to come to this site.

Most recently, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s State Water Control Board heard six hours of resident and allied testimony in opposition to the project. The board roundly acknowledged the issues raised, but then voted 4-3 regardless to approve their permit and let the US Army Corps of Engineers “handle the issues” in the next round of permitting. One of the board members gallingly said that they hoped the project would provide Brown Grove the attention it needs to receive the infrastructure it has long asked for. This is the epitome of this country’s poisonous deal with its Black citizens — attempting to justify significant harm by hoping vaguely that the community will receive, as some pleasant side effect of the harm, the basic services that everyone else already receives.

We all know that vague hope is nonsense; just ask the historically Black Rodgers-Eubanks community in North Carolina, who are on their fourth decade of fighting for the basic infrastructure they were explicitly promised in exchange for the landfill built in their community. Those promises aren’t kept when they’re made — but to be clear, Wegmans and Hanover County haven’t even made those promises.

So what’s to be done? In the face of environmental racism, we must turn to environmental justice. We must fundamentally reconsider our extractive relationship with the natural world; ally with and amplify the needs, desires, and dreams of frontline communities; and build political power in Black neighborhoods. Environmental justice is the shift from being simultaneously neglected and acted upon to acting. It is Black communities having control over their own destinies and not having to take poisonous deals to get there.

The good news is that Black activists and communities are already doing the hard work of reimagination and power building. Everyone else must simply do no harm. Wegmans should choose a site that won’t destroy wetlands and unmarked ancestral graves — to be the good neighbor that they said they wanted to be. The community should be rezoned by Hanover County from industrial to residential so that this doesn’t happen again. And the local and state elected and appointed officials who have been complicit should instead work tirelessly to meet the infrastructure needs in Brown Grove and communities of color across the state. Because to be clear: this is not a problem unique to Brown Grove.

DEQ thought it wasn’t their problem, and white America has thought the same countless times. But what harms one harms all (as Heather McGhee lays out brilliantly in her book The Sum of Us if you don’t believe me). To deny our interconnectedness to our Black brothers and sisters and to our Earth is to harm all of us both morally and materially. And at the end of the day, Brown Grove deserves better. Brown Grove deserves justice.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect RVA Mag editorial policy.

Top Photo: Protest in Brown Grove, December 2020. Photo by RVA Drone Solutions, via Facebook.

Virginians Are Recycling More Of Their Trash Than Ever

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Despite fewer destinations for recyclables, Virginia managed to recycle almost half of its trash in 2018. But there are still improvements that can be made.

Virginia recycled almost half of its trash last year, setting a record despite China’s ban on importing plastic and other solid waste.

The statewide recycling rate in 2018 was 46 percent — up 3 percentage points from the previous year, according to data released last week by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. The data showed that:

  • The Central Virginia Waste Management Authority, which includes Richmond and surrounding localities, had the highest recycling rate in the commonwealth — 59 percent.
  • The Virginia Peninsulas Public Service Authority, which includes Hampton, Poquoson, and Williamsburg and nearby counties, had the lowest rate — 29 percent.
  • The city of Newport News had the biggest improvement in recycling in recent years. Its rate jumped from 38 percent in 2016 to 57 percent last year.

The numbers represent the percentage of municipal solid waste that is sent for recycling. Local governments also get credit for activities such as programs to reduce the amount of trash generated.

Several factors affect an area’s recycling rate. They include population, population density, location of recycling facilities and funding.

By April 30 each year, the local governments and regional planning units that oversee recycling collect their data and submit a report to the Department of Environmental Quality. DEQ reviews the information and then calculates an overall recycling rate for the state.

“DEQ works with businesses and localities and environmental groups to promote environmental awareness through recycling,” said Leslie Beckwith, the agency’s director of financial responsibility and waste management programs.

The statewide recycling rate was 44 percent in 2015. It dropped to 43 percent in 2016 and 2017 before jumping to 46 percent last year.

The increase came despite an unstable market for various types of trash to be recycled — especially China’s decision to stop accepting solid waste.

“China’s revisions in recycling material acceptance is having a big impact on the recycling market,” Beckwith said.

As a result, DEQ has asked localities and planning units to identify any changes or challenges regarding their recycling efforts when they submit their 2019 reports.

One change is that many localities have dropped recycling glass because it is hard to find a market for that product. That is why DEQ is asking Virginians to minimize their use of glass.

“Citizens should try to generate less waste, like purchasing products with the least amount of packaging and those that are readily recyclable, such as aluminum cans vs. glass bottles,” said Anissa Rafeh, the department’s communications coordinator.

Glass can be problematic to recycle for several reasons, said Joe Romuno, director of national accounts for an environmental consulting firm called Great Forest Sustainability Solutions.

“Broken glass can contaminate other recyclables like paper and cardboard, lowering their value,” Romuno said. Moreover, broken glass can be a safety hazard to workers and can damage machines at recycling facilities.

Also, glass must be sorted by color in order to reprocess for recycling. “Glass is difficult to sort when broken, and if broken down too finely, it may become too difficult to reprocess,” Romuno said.

Four localities in Northern Virginia have teamed up to tackle the challenge of glass recycling.

The city of Alexandria and the counties of Fairfax, Arlington Prince William have joined forces to collect source-separated glass in purple bins for better recovery. The glass is then crushed at Fairfax County’s Glass Processing Center to produce sand and gravel that can be used in construction and landscaping projects.

DEQ is also keeping an eye on new technologies to improve Virginia’s recycling efforts. For example, the agency was on hand when the Central Virginia Waste Management Authority announced it was deploying 2,000 recycling bins from an Israeli company called UBQ.

The bins are made with a thermoplastic created from household waste that would normally end up in a landfill, including banana peels, chicken bones, plastics and old pizza boxes.

Written By Eric Everington, Capital News Service. Top Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash

Chesterfield Coal Ash Ponds Under Scrutiny After Brutal Hurricane Season

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Chesterfield Power Station stores 15 million tons of coal ash on its premises, and environmental groups are worried about it. The coal ash’s close proximity to the James River has caused concern among environmental organizations that a severe flooding event could send the ash spilling into the river. The ash ponds are located less than a half-mile from the riverbank, and only several hundred yards from Dutch Gap Conservation Area, a popular walking and kayaking destination.

According to environmental activist and Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks, the power station’s ash ponds aren’t prepared for the type of flooding seen during Hurricane Florence, which caused an estimated 17 billion dollars in damage and wreaked havoc on North Carolina’s rivers last September.

“Older coal ash ponds, like the lower ash pond at Chesterfield Power Station, are at serious risk of breaching and flooding from hurricane events,” Naujoks said. “Anytime [the James River] floods, water is going to go right to that area.”

North Carolina experienced just such an event during Hurricane Florence when a coal ash landfill at Sutton Power Station in North Carolina was breached by floodwaters, and released 2,000 cubic yards of toxic ash into nearby Sutton Lake and the Cape Fear River. The spill has brought renewed attention to the stability of Virginia’s coal ash ponds.

Chesterfield Power Station has two coal ash ponds on site, as well as newly constructed dry ash landfill. Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Nate Benforado said that the ash pond’s aren’t equipped for severe weather, and expressed concern at the power station’s ability to prevent an ash spill.

“Chesterfield is one of the sites we are very concerned with when it comes to flood risk,” Benforado said. “It’s surrounded by water and marshy areas and could very easily flood, and the fact that it’s basically constructed in an active river system is also very concerning.”

The lower coal ash pond at Chesterfield Power Station was built in 1964 and contains two million tons of coal ash. It was classified in 2016 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a “significant hazard.”

A “significant” hazard rating indicates that, in the event of a dam failure or misoperation, there would be economic loss, environmental damage, and disruption of lifeline facilities, including power and water services, in the areas surrounding the coal ash ponds.

The remaining 13 million tons of coal ash are stored at the power station’s upper ash pond. The EPA determined that the upper ash pond’s hazard potential was not significant.

A representative of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) downplayed the possibility of a coal ash spill at the site. According to the DEQ, both ponds at the power plant “should have had plenty of capacity for a rain event, such as a hurricane.”

Dominion Energy, who owns and operates Chesterfield Power Station, is in the process of closing 11 coal ash ponds across four sites in Virginia. Many of the coal ash ponds will be capped in place, including Chesterfield’s lower ash pond.

According to Dominion’s website, the capping procedure involves “removing, treating, and testing the water stored in the ponds, stabilizing the ash material, and installing a protective, multilayer impermeable cover system, topped with two feet of soil and grass.”

Environmental organizations have scrutinized Dominion’s decision to leave the coal ash in place, saying that the unlined ash ponds will continue to leach toxic chemicals into the groundwater after they’ve been closed.

“We can’t allow Dominion to cap 30 million tons of toxic coal ash along the banks of Virginia’s rivers and just leave it there indefinitely,” Naujoks said. “At some point it will continue to cause more problems, and has already caused documented 30 years of groundwater contamination.”

In March 2018, Dominion began releasing groundwater reports for the coal ash ponds at Chesterfield Power Station, as required by EPA regulations. According to SELC, the reports showed that ten of the wells at the site exceeded the allowable limit for arsenic, in some cases as high as 17 times the limit. Dominion’s data also showed high levels of chemicals like boron and chlorides in the groundwater at Chesterfield Power Station. These reports were online as recently as last month, but Dominion’s website now has a dead link where they once were.

“We found arsenic at incredibly high levels, 282 parts per million right here, which is higher than many Superfund sites that have really bad pollution problems,” Benforado told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2017. According to the EPA, the presence of these chemicals at these levels are among the indicators that coal ash pollutants are seeping into the groundwater in the surrounding area.

“The evidence is very clear that the coal ash ponds at Chesterfield Power Station are leaking into the adjacent waterways,” Benforado said.

A 2017 report issued by researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that recycling Virginia’s coal ash for use in concrete manufacturing is a cost-effective alternative to capping the existing ponds, and would substantially reduce the environmental impact of the ponds on the surrounding ecosystems. Dominion Energy hasn’t offered any alternatives to its current plan, however.

“Dominion wants to leave its coal ash on the banks of rivers where it will continue to threaten our rivers and drinking water supplies,” Naujoks said. “Even if it’s capped we’ll still be at risk of flooding, and it will continue to leak because it will stay in these unlined pits.”

Photos via Southwings