Trump’s Coal-Friendly EPA Rolls Back Rules Meant to Prevent Water Contamination
All it took was a leak in a stormwater pipe. Over the course of one week in February 2014, nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated wastewater poured from a retired Duke Energy power plant into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina. Toxic gray sludge coated the riverbanks for miles, and carcinogenic heavy metals contaminated the drinking water for the thousands of North Carolinians and Virginians downstream. It was the third-largest coal ash spill in U.S. history.
Following the Duke Energy disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Barack Obama finalized long-sought federal rules for disposing of coal ash, a byproduct of incineration at coal-fired power plants. Coal ash is often stored in landfills and engineered ponds; when the dump sites are unlined, toxins have been known to seep into nearby groundwater and pollute the drinking water supply. The 2015 rule aimed to prevent the contamination of groundwater and surface water by establishing technical guidelines for power plants’ coal ash disposal. Advocates said at the time that the guidelines were inadequate, only covering about half of known dump sites due to a loophole that exempted inactive facilities. Still, President Donald Trump’s first administration did little to enforce those bare minimum rules. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the EPA took a more hands-on approach, and the administration finalized a rule last year expanding the 2015 regulations to cover all coal ash landfills. Utility companies were required to report coal ash contamination in groundwater to the EPA by February 2026, install groundwater monitoring systems by May 2028, and begin drafting remediation plans if contamination was found.
These actions would have been the first steps toward providing much-needed and long-overdue relief to communities impacted by the coal industry. But on July 19, Trump’s EPA announced it would extend the deadline for utility companies to address the Biden-era rules by at least one more year. Again, that’s a one-year delay in base-level reporting and monitoring — which means that the actual cleanup will be punted even further into the future. As Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, told The New York Times, the EPA’s announcement means “one more year of hazardous contaminants getting into the groundwater, and the more chemicals that get into the groundwater, the more difficult and expensive it is to remediate.”
Coal ash is not currently regulated as hazardous waste, even though it contains at least 17 toxic pollutants, including neurotoxins and carcinogens such as mercury, lead, and arsenic. Long-term exposure can lead to liver and kidney damage, reproductive harm, and various cancers. And the burden of toxic pollution from coal-burning power plants disproportionately impacts communities of color. A 2019 report by the NAACP found that, although Black people comprise just 15 percent of the national population, 78 percent live within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant. Meanwhile, the Trump administration also recently rolled back a Biden-era proposal to limit toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” in drinking water.
The Trump administration’s extension of the coal ash cleanup deadline comes after years of pressure from coal and utility company lobbyists, and it’s very possible that we’ll see a bigger rollback of Obama- and Biden-era rules. On March 12, the EPA announced it would “work with state partners to place implementation of the coal ash regulations more fully into state hands.” This state-first approach is, of course, mere cover to deregulate in favor of coal industry interests. While some states passed more vigorous coal cleanup laws during the first Trump administration, other states did little to nothing to protect their communities from harm. In Kentucky, for instance — one of the country’s top coal ash-generating states — utility companies failed to initiate coal ash cleanups during Trump’s first presidency, despite the EPA rule requiring them to do so. The state did not step in to enforce the requirements. A whopping 86 percent of Kentucky coal ash plants are located in disproportionately low-income communities, communities of color, or both.
In January of this year, just days before Trump’s inauguration, a coalition of utility companies sent a letter to then-incoming EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, imploring the administration to relieve them of their coal ash cleanup and greenhouse gas emissions requirements. “The new Administration should decline to defend these unlawful rules and should seek their immediate rescission,” the executives wrote. “Swift action by the incoming Trump Administration is needed to reverse EPA’s regulatory overreach and to support critical energy production and development at U.S. power plants.” The letter was signed by executives from several power plant companies, including a senior vice president at Duke Energy.
The Trump administration was quick to listen to the executives’ demands. In addition to punting on coal ash cleanup, the EPA extended a deadline for utility companies to reduce the toxic emissions of nearly 70 coal-fired plants. Trump has heavily pushed to revive the declining coal industry in his second term, fast-tracking new coal mines and permitting mining on federal land under the guise of an “energy emergency.” On July 22, news broke that Trump’s EPA has allegedly drafted a plan to repeal a 2009 landmark finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health.
Still, environmental advocates are staunch in their belief that the Trump administration’s last-ditch attempt to bring back coal will fail.
“Trump tried and failed to bail out the coal industry during his first term in office,” wrote Christy Walsh, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a blog post. “Given the realities of the market, whatever he tries to do this time should fail as well.… Instead of trying to prop up the fuels of the last century, this administration should be working to build the grid needed for the 21st century.”