Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts will receive $3 million from an Ohio-based power company as part of one of the largest settlements ever recorded in a pollution lawsuit, according to state officials.
American Electric Power Services Corp. agreed yesterday to install $4.6 billion in pollution-control equipment on 16 coal-burning power plants and pay $15 million in penalties. The settlement ends a lawsuit brought in 1999 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and later joined by Maryland and seven other states, as well as 13 environmental groups.
"This settlement will remove 813,000 tons of air pollution a year that drifts into Maryland and into the Chesapeake Bay," said Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler. "So this will have a direct effect on our air quality and an indirect effect on the Chesapeake Bay as well."
Under the terms of the consent decree, $3 million will go to Chesapeake Bay pollution-control programs, such as the planting of forested buffer strips between farmlands and streams.
American Electric Power, one of the largest electricity-generating companies in the U.S., also will have to install scrubbers and other pollution-control devices to reduce air pollution from older coal-burning plants that it owns in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Nitrogen oxide emissions from these plants must be reduced by 69 percent from 2006 levels, according to the agreement.
The violations involved the federal Clean Air Act's so-called "New Source Review" rules, which require power companies to install modern filtration systems whenever they expand the capacity of their plants. The Bush administration has proposed weakening these rules, but this lawsuit was filed in 1999, before the revisions.
Michael G. Morris, American Electric Power's chairman, said in a news release: "Since November 1999, when the initial complaint was filed by the government, we have remained firm in our belief that we operated our plants in compliance with the New Source Review provisions. That remains our position today. But we have also said that we would be willing to consider ways to reasonably resolve these issues."
Eric Schaeffer, a former EPA enforcement official who helped file the lawsuit in 1999 and is now an environmental activist, said that about two-thirds of Maryland's air pollution drifts in from out of state, with much of it from the Ohio area.
