More than 20 state and federal representatives met with Solley residents Friday to hear their complaints about a fly ash disposal site in what community leaders hailed as a significant first effort to include them in decision-making about environmental issues.
For almost 3 1/2 hours, experts brought in by the residents discussed their studies, which show that Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. disposal site on Solley Road has contaminated the ++ air with particles of fly ash and could taint well water, too.
State and federal officials refuted some assertions and conceded others, concluding that they need to study whether more permits regulating air quality and fly ash placement at the ++ site are needed.
"Something like this would have been helpful in the beginning," said John B. Britton, the residents' lawyer. "It would have put in the public forum all the things that are wrong with the site."
BGE sent no representative to the meeting.
But the session at the Army Corps of Engineers' Baltimore office included two community leaders, Britton and two experts, representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, the corps and the Maryland Department of the Environment, and Republican Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest, who organized the meeting.
Coal-burning produces waste
BGE began using 3 million tons of fly ash -- a byproduct of burning coal for electricity -- as fill under a three-section business park on the site in 1982. The utility, which burns about 5 million tons of coal a year, producing 500,000 tons of fly ash, began receiving criticism from the residents when the third section of the business park started going up about five years ago.
Residents are fighting to get building permits for the third section rescinded or to have the state or EPA require new, more stringent permits to ensure regulation.
Protection questioned
The corps' engineers kicked off the meeting with a discussion of whether a continuous clay layer exists under the disposal site. The residents' hydrogeologic expert, Donald Cohen, said that such a layer would protect underground aquifers from fly ash contamination.
Corps engineer Joe Mueller said that parts of the layer are clay mixed with silt, which also has a "low impermeability." But residents have portrayed those sections as breaks in the layer.
MDE's Jeffrey L. Rein, a deputy program administrator, pointed out that because the EPA does not regulate fly ash as a hazardous material, "BGE doesn't need a confining layer of clay, [placement] is done properly."
