Les Marshall strode onto his dock in Southern Maryland, looking down at the brownish murk of the Wicomico River. Then he gestured upstream, toward a forested area where a power company has been dumping 150,000 tons of coal ash a year.
"When we first moved here in the 1970s, there were lots of grasses under the water, as well as clams, oyster beds, crabs and abundant fish," said Marshall, a retired satellite engineer. "And since then, the river is pretty much dead. The grasses are gone. The perch are gone."
Other factors might be involved in the river's decline, but state regulators say one source of pollution has been a landfill that receives coal ash from a nearby power plant and has over the years leaked acidic waste and metals into a Wicomico tributary.
Power company Mirant Corp. filters the runoff from its landfill in Faulkner, but the Maryland Department of the Environment believes that some tainted water might still be escaping. It is considering whether to require the Atlanta-based company to install more pollution controls.
The agency is also drafting tighter regulations for all ash dumps, after revelations that one in Anne Arundel County polluted local wells, drawing a $1 million fine. State officials haven't said exactly what they will require, but say the new mandates might include putting liners under every ash landfill to prevent rain from seeping through to contaminate underground water supplies.
Across the country, buried ash is a growing but widely ignored source of pollution from coal-fired power plants, according to a researcher who has studied them.
"We tend to put all our focus on airborne pollutants," said Christopher L. Rowe, an environmental toxicologist at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. "This problem has been completely overlooked."
He said filters on the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants catch not only ash, but also mercury, arsenic, chromium and other potential carcinogens. Then the power companies dump the waste into loosely regulated landfills - from which dangerous metals can seep into streams and wells. So while the filters keep pollutants out of the air, the process "simply increases what we put into the aquatic environment," Rowe said.
Brad Heavner, director of the advocacy group Environment Maryland, said pollution from the Faulkner landfill and the one in Anne Arundel County raises questions about whether there are more leaky ash dumps across the state. "For decades this state has been mismanaging fly ash, and that should change immediately," Heavner said. "Right now, the law on fly ash is basically nonexistent."
