Even before Hurricane Maria struck the island nearly six months ago, the majority of Puerto Rico’s residents lived with water that violated health standards set by the U.S. law. Since the storm, residents say the situation has only gotten worse. Among the sources of potential water contamination are mountains of coal ash generated by a coal-fired power plant owned by a private company called AES. For years, residents have demanded the company stop dumping toxic coal ash into their community, saying the waste is poisonous to their health and the environment.
Mekela Panditharatne talking:
for example, the southern coastal town of Guayama is home to a five-story-high pile of coal ash that was produced by this energy company AES. Now, AES has been producing coal ash, and that has been deposited in landfills scattered across Puerto Rico, including in a community called Peñuelas, which has been really a locus in these environmental justice fights.
Coal ash does pose significant human health risks, in part because it produces what’s known as fugitive dust. That’s when parts of the coal ash stack will blow away during a windy day and contaminate the surrounding environment. When coal ash gets wet, it can also seep into the soil and into the groundwater and potentially cause drinking water contamination.
The plant is still running. And residents of Guayama have expressed concern that after the hurricane there may be contaminants leaching into the soil and into the groundwater in that area.
what we’re seeing in Puerto Rico at the moment is really the culmination of a long-standing drinking water crisis that has in part been contributed to by these coal ash sites and by these plentiful Superfund sites. Even before Maria, Puerto Ricans had the worst drinking water quality of any state or territory in the nation: 99.5 percent of Puerto Ricans were served by drinking water in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Around 70 percent of Puerto Ricans were served by water sources that violated health base standards, so that had unlawfully high levels of contaminants or weren’t being treated in accordance with federal standards. Those contaminants included coliform bacteria and disinfection byproducts, but also the kind of volatile organic compounds that you would expect to see from leaching from these kind of Superfund sites and coal ash deposits.
the hurricane has really made a bad water situation and a bad contamination situation even worse. The local government has said the majority of its water infrastructure was damaged by the hurricane. And as we’ve heard, residents are concerned about coal ash contamination leaching into the groundwater. So, what we’d really want to see is significant investment into drinking water infrastructure and also into securing these coal ash contamination sites and preventing further leaching of these contaminants into people’s water sources.
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Mekela Panditharatne
lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council who just returned from Puerto Rico.
— source democracynow.org