WV Coals Ash Dump Leaks Spread Through, Divide Small Town Of Chester
CHESTER, W.Va. -- The ground here is leaking. Several neighbors have moved away to escape seeps coming out of the hillside. They say the leaks have dampened their backyards and infested their homes with mold.
Curt and Debbie Havens, who put a trailer on their Pyramus Road lot in the mid-1970s and built their current home in 1979, are ready to pack up, too. "It's equivalent to seven fire hoses," Curt Havens said, describing one outflow. "If you lay seven fire hoses side by side, that's how much water is coming through there."
Neighbors blame the 1,700-acre Little Blue Run coal ash dump -- an unlined impoundment that straddles the border with Pennsylvania and has for decades been a repository for combustion waste from FirstEnergy Corp.'s Bruce Mansfield coal power plant near Shippingport, Pa. The waste travels several miles through an underground pipe.
Environmental advocates argue the dump -- which neighbors say is several hundred feet deep in places and can look light sapphire blue from the sky -- is emblematic of the pollution that dozens of such facilities are causing. They want U.S. EPA to force them to close.
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http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2013/01/14/3