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1 Environmental Protection Agency 

2

3

4

5

6 Pretreatment Public Hearing on the 

7 Proposed Effluent Guidelines for the 

8 Steam Electric Power Generating Category 

9

10

11

12 1:02 to 5:15 p.m. 

13 Tuesday, July 9, 2013 

14

15 EPA East Building 

16 Room 1153 

17 1201 Constitution Avenue, N.W. 

18 Washington, D.C. 20210 

19

20

21

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1 EPA Panel: 

2 ROBERT WOOD, Director, 

3 Engineering and Analysis Division, 

4 Office of Water, EPA 

5 ERIC STRASSLER, Environmental Protection 

6 Specialist, Engineering and Analysis Division, 

7 Office of Water, EPA 

8 JAN MATUSZKO, Branch Chief, Engineering and 

9 Analysis Division, Office of Water, EPA 

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12

13

14

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16

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1 C O N T E N T S 

2 PAGE 

3 Session A 

4 ELAINE CHIOSSO, Waterkeeper Alliance 12 

5 JARED SAYLOR, Earthjustice 15 

6 JENNIFER PETERS, Clean Water Action 19 

7 WHITNEY BYRD, 

8 Wise Energy for Virginia Coalition 23 

9 ANGELIQUE GIRAUD, Clean Water Action 26 

10 MARK YAGGI, Waterkeeper Alliance 31 

11 ALEXIS SEGAL, Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper 36 

12 CHERYL NENN, Milwaukee Riverkeeper 40 

13 FRED TUTMAN, Patuxent Riverkeeper 45 

14 DONNA LISENBY, Watauga Riverkeeper 50 

15 SAM PERKINS, Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation 55 

16 PATRICIA SCHUBA, 

17 Labadie Environmental Organization 60 

18

19 Session B 

20 ROBIN BRODER, Potomac Riverkeeper 64 

21 DIANA DASCALU-JOFFE, 

22 Chesapeake Climate Action Network 67 
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1 C O N T E N T S (continued) 

2 PAGE 

3 SESSION B (continued) 

4 RAE SCHNAPP, Wabash Riverkeeper 72 

5 JULIA WYNN, Earthjustice 76 

6 MARY ANNE HITT, Sierra Club 79 

7 CLAUDIA FRIEDETZKY, Maryland Sierra Club 83 

8 CRAIG SEGALL, Sierra Club 87 

9 MELINDA PIERCE, Sierra Club 92 

10 VANESSA PIERCE, Sierra Club 94 

11 ELENA RIOS, 

12 National Hispanic Medical Association 98 

13 ALLISON CHIN, Sierra Club 100 

14 KRISTIN COOK, Resident of Maryland 104 

15

16 SESSION C 

17 KATE ORTENZI, Resident of Maryland 107 

18 KEVIN BROMBERG, 

19 U.S. Small Business Administration 111 

20 AOIFE SEMAR, Sierra Club 115 

21 DISHA BANIK, Sierra Club 117 

22 ERNEST LEHMAN, Sierra Club 120 
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1 C O N T E N T S (continued) 

2 PAGE 

3 SESSION C (continued) 

4 MATT WASSON, Appalachian Voices 125 

5 PHILLIP COLLINS, Sierra Club 130 

6 LESLIE FIELDS, Sierra Club 132 

7 MARK MAGAÑA, National Latino Coalition on 

8 Climate Change 138 

9 ROGER RIVERA, National Hispanic 

10 Environmental Council 141 

11 DR. YOLANDA WHYTE 146 

12

13 SESSION D 

14 RODRIGO SAMAYOA, Beyond Oil Campaign 149 

15 JAMES VANDEVENTER, Beyond Oil Campaign 153 

16 BRENNA MULLER, read statement for 

17 Elizabeth Perera, Sierra Club 156 

18 ALYCE ORTUZAR, Sierra Club 159 

19 MARC IMLAY, Sierra Club 161 

20 DOUG AUS, Sierra Club 163 

21 JOSHUA ALLEN, Sierra Club 165 

22 MICHAEL HORKA, Resident of D.C. 168 
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1 C O N T E N T S (continued) 

2 PAGE 

3 SESSION D (continued) 

4 THOMAS RICHARDS, American University Student 172 

5 TERRY McGUIRE, Sierra Club 174 

6

7 SESSION E 

8 ANDRE SAUVAGEOT, Sierra Club 180 

9 BRENDAN CLINE, Sierra Club 183 

10 THERSA PUGH, 

11 American Public Power Association 186 

12 KRISTY BULLEIT, Hunton & Williams, on behalf 

13 Of Utility Water Act Group 189 

14 ARIEL SOLOSKI, read statement for Jennifer 

15 Duggan, Environmental Integrity Project 196 

16 DR. LIH YOUNG, Sierra Club 199 

17 SHILPA SHENVI, Chesapeake Climate Action 

18 Network 203 

19 STAN BOYD, MCCC 206 

20 CINDY OLSON, I See Pollution 208 

21 BRENNA MULLER, Sierra Club 211 

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1 P R O C E E D I N G S 

2 MR. WOOD: Good afternoon, everybody. 

3 We're going to get this show on the road here in 

4 just a minute. We have a few people taking their 

5 seats still, but we do need to start on time. 

6 My name is Robert Wood. I am the 

7 director of the Engineering Analysis Division in 

8 EPA's Office of Water here at EPA Headquarters, 

9 and my division is, among other things, 

10 responsible for what we're here to talk about, 

11 which is the proposal that was published in the 

12 Federal Register on June 7th of 2013, “Effluent 

13 Guidelines and Standards for the Steam Electric 

14 Power Generating Point Source Category," and, of 

15 course, this is under the Clean Water Act. 

16 So I'd like to welcome you here today and 

17 thank you very much for your interest in this 

18 rulemaking. It's important to EPA to hear from 

19 you, and as we look forward to finalizing this 

20 rule, the stakeholder views that we hear from you 

21 today that are also submitted as part of the 

22 record are very important to us. 
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1 Today's hearing is about the pretreatment 

2 standards that are contained in this larger Steam 

3 Electric Effluent Limitations Guidelines and 

4 Standards, Proposed Rule. 

5 EPA is not going to be presenting any 

6 information today or answer questions. Format of 

7 this session is designed to hear from you, so, 

8 again, we will not be presenting. 

9 By last count, we had 58 registered 

10 speakers, and so in order to accommodate 

11 everyone, we've actually -- we originally planned 

12 to end this hearing at about four o'clock. We've 

13 got the room here until 6 p.m. in order to make 

14 room for everybody who is registered, and we are 

15 going to strictly adhere to, if we can, a 

16 4-minute limitation on each individual's 

17 statements. 

18 We are also going to include a transcript 

19 of today's public hearing in the rulemaking 

20 record, so that will be available to the public 

21 to review, and if you do not wish to speak or if 

22 you wish to provide your information to EPA in 
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1 writing, please do so. Please submit your 

2 comments to the rulemaking record, and there are 

3 instructions on exactly how to do that in the 

4 June 7th Federal Register notice. 

5 We recently extended the period for 

6 public comment to September 20th, 2013, so that 

7 was a 45-day extension. Originally, that public 

8 comment period was going to close on August 6th, 

9 so it's now September 20th, 2013, and there's a 

10 Federal Register notice forthcoming on that. It 

11 may be about a week or two away, but if you look 

12 at EPA's website, where hopefully you've been to 

13 that website and seen the information that's 

14 posted there, the extension to the public comment 

15 period is posted there as well. 

16 I will add that we are planning an 

17 information session during the public comment 

18 period on this proposal. We have not yet 

19 concluded how exactly we are going to conduct 

20 that information session. My guess is it will be 

21 a webinar, but, again, we are putting the 

22 finishing touches on that, so look for an 
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1 announcement on that on our website. For those 

2 of you who are registered for this hearing today 

3 and have provided us your contact information, 

4 we'll let you know directly about that by e-mail. 

5 Next, I'd like to introduce a few people 

6 who are here. To my right is Jan Matuszko. Jan 

7 is the branch chief here at EPA who is the 

8 managing branch chief on this rulemaking, and Jan 

9 has had a very big part in the formulation of the 

10 proposal. 

11 And also, Ron Jordon, who is in the back 

12 of the room -- Ron, please stand -- Ron is the 

13 team leader and arguably the most knowledgeable 

14 person on the planet on the content of this rule. 

15 We also have some of the team members 

16 here. I am looking to see if I see them right 

17 now. Well, you may see them around. I don't see 

18 them in the room at the moment, but, Cuc 

19 Schroeder and James Covington, if you are here, 

20 please stand. I think they are still working on 

21 getting people in the room. 

22 And then Eric Strassler, Eric is also on 
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1 the team that formulated this proposal, and 

2 today, Eric has the job of managing this hearing. 

3 We are going to stick to the 4-minute time frame. 

4 Eric is responsible for letting you know when you 

5 are approaching your 1-minute mark, and, Eric, I 

6 think you will have some other logistical points 

7 that maybe you want to make before we get 

8 started. 

9 MR. STRASSLER: Yeah. Thank you, Rob. 

10 Good afternoon. 

11 Just so you know, the rest rooms are out 

12 by the lobby near the security desk. You may 

13 need to ask somebody to point you in the right 

14 direction for that. 

15 If you have any cell phones or other 

16 gadgets that make noise, please put them on 

17 vibrate or turn them off. Thank you. 

18 Okay. I think we are ready to get 

19 started. 

20 MR. WOOD: Yes. And I will just again 

21 say welcome. We are really glad to host you here 

22 today and looking forward to hearing what you 
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1 have to say. 

2 Session A 

3 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. We are just going 

4 in the order by which we were notified that you 

5 wanted to testify. There were a couple of 

6 substitutions. 

7 The first one is Elaine Chiosso, and 

8 there's 4 minutes. 

9 MS. CHIOSSO: So I am Elaine Chiosso, the 

10 Haw Riverkeeper from Chatham County, North 

11 Carolina, member of Waterkeeper Alliance. 

12 Haw River is home to a million people in 

13 central North Carolina, and its waters flow down 

14 to counties and cities along the Cape Fear River 

15 where the Sutton Coal Power Plant pollutes the 

16 waters there. 

17 Thank you for this public hearing on the 

18 proposal to clean up water pollution from 

19 coal-burning power plants. More stringent 

20 national standards to protect people in our 

21 waters is long overdue, and I know I speak for 

22 many people in North Carolina who cannot be here 
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1 today but whose waters are impacted by coal plant 

2 wastewater effluent. 

3 This effluent, whether pretreated or 

4 discharged, needs to be treated to remove all 

5 toxins before discharge. These include metals 

6 like arsenic, selenium, mercury, and lead, and 

7 exposure can lead to birth defects, cancer, and 

8 even death. We urge you to adopt zero discharge 

9 standards, and the majority of power plants don't 

10 use public water treatment facilities. That's 

11 included in North Carolina, so it makes it 

12 critically important for EPA to adopt rules that 

13 will require all coal-burning plants to install 

14 zero liquid discharge technology and convert to 

15 safer coal ash handling. 

16 Our nation must adopt the strongest 

17 standards in order to protect people whose waters 

18 are receiving streams for the effluent. The 

19 rules that are adopted will not control pollution 

20 in isolation. Right now, all surface waters in 

21 North Carolina are considered impaired for too 

22 much mercury under the 303(d) rules of the Clean 
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1 Water Act. Airborne mercury from coal-fired 

2 power plants is a main source, but there are 

3 other sources that we need to look at 

4 cumulatively. 

5 In my watershed, there is a medical waste 

6 incinerator that has permitted emissions of 

7 mercury and lead. The coal ash ponds that are 

8 the legacy of the Cape Fear Coal Power Plant, 

9 built in 1923, are another environmental pathway 

10 for mercury and other toxins to enter the river. 

11 People all over the United States are waiting for 

12 the rules to address the danger and contamination 

13 from coal ash ponds. 

14 So every region of the country has these 

15 multiple sources of toxins that people are 

16 exposed to, and these pathways must all be 

17 factored into the overall load of heavy metals 

18 when we are looking at stricter guidelines for 

19 coal plant effluent. 

20 Industry has succeeded in setting out 

21 some weaker options, getting those on the table, 

22 and I urge you to select the most protective 
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1 options and not let those who pollute make their 

2 profit at the expense of our health and our clean 

3 waters. Industry should not be allowed to 

4 continue to have an environmental mess that 

5 future generations will need to clean up. 

6 These are long overdue standards, and we 

7 urge you to adopt new stringent rules as soon as 

8 possible, adopt rules that will save lives, 

9 protect children from getting sick, and bring us 

10 closer to the promise of the Clean Water Act of 

11 fishable, swimmable, and drinkable waters. 

12 Thank you very much. 

13 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

14 Next is Jared Saylor. 

15 MR. SAYLOR: Good afternoon. My name is 

16 Jared Saylor. I am the campaign director at 

17 Earthjustice, the nation's largest non-profit 

18 environmental law organization. On behalf of 

19 Earthjustice, I submit these comments at this 

20 public hearing and thank you for this 

21 opportunity. 

22 An updating of these rules is long 
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1 overdue. The current rules have not been updated 

2 since 1982 and do almost nothing to address 

3 discharges of toxic metals from power plants, 

4 such as arsenic, mercury, selenium, and lead that 

5 are doing massive harm. 

6 As EPA itself has recognized, power plant 

7 pollution is a threat to human life, aquatic 

8 life, and wildlife, and ongoing pollution from 

9 power plants is a major impediment to cleaning up 

10 waterways that are already polluted. 

11 This is a growing problem. As power 

12 plants all over the country are installing new 

13 air pollution controls to meet EPA's much-needed 

14 health-based air quality standards, a substantial 

15 portion of the harmful pollution that formerly 

16 was admitted into the air is now being discharged 

17 into our waters. Power plants that install air 

18 pollution controls have exponentially greater 

19 levels of toxic pollutants in their wastewater. 

20 If the EPA doesn't finalize a strong rule that 

21 requires power plants to address all of their 

22 toxic pollutants, then it will be trading one set 
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1 of public health and environmental problems for 

2 another. 

3 The benefits of cleaning up this 

4 pollution far outweigh the costs. EPA's own 

5 cost-benefit analysis, which we believe 

6 undercount or do not monetize many of the 

7 benefits of cleaning up this harmful pollution, 

8 demonstrates the benefits of a strong rule. 

9 These benefits include the health benefits of 

10 restoring hundreds of miles of our rivers so that 

11 their fish are safe to eat and pregnant women and 

12 children are exposed to less harmful mercury and 

13 lead, not to mention benefits to wildlife, 

14 drinking water quality, recreation and tourism, 

15 and property values. 

16 By contrast, EPA found that the vast 

17 majority of power plants will be able to meet 

18 even the strongest of the rule's requirements by 

19 spending less than 1 percent of their annual 

20 revenue and with minimal impact on electricity 

21 rates or grid reliability. No matter how you 

22 slice the numbers, there is no doubt that the 
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1 rule will greatly benefit the country with costs 

2 that can be reasonably born by the industry. 

3 EPA should choose either Option 4 or 

4 Option 5. The Clean Water Act requires that EPA 

5 base these critical protections on the best 

6 available technology economically achievable to 

7 reduce or eliminate pollution. EPA's Options 4 

8 and 5 identify a number of technologies that live 

9 up to the standard, including treatment systems 

10 such as dry ash handling and vapor compression 

11 evaporation that have the potential to completely 

12 eliminate toxic pollution from certain wastewater 

13 streams. 

14 EPA has found that these stringent 

15 treatment options are available and cost 

16 effective, and there is no legal basis for EPA to 

17 require anything less than a strong rule that 

18 fully lives up to the Clean Water Act's 

19 requirements that pollution be eliminated 

20 wherever it is feasible to do so. EPA should 

21 choose Option 5. 

22 Lastly, the EPA has called this hearing 
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1 on only a portion of the Proposed Rule: the 

2 pretreatment standards. We encourage the EPA to 

3 hold an additional hearing on the full scope of 

4 the rule. Many communities across the country 

5 are affected by this pollution, and their stories 

6 deserve to be heard. We hope the EPA will 

7 conduct public hearings in affected communities 

8 on the full spectrum of this proposal. 

9 Thank you. 

10 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

11 Jennifer Peters? 

12 MS. PETERS: Hi. Good afternoon. My 

13 name is Jennifer Peters, and I am National Water 

14 Campaign's coordinator for Clean Water Action, 

15 and we appreciate the opportunity to provide 

16 comments on EPA's proposed effluent guidelines. 

17 Clean Water Action is a national 

18 organization working in 15 states on a wide range 

19 of health and environmental challenges, with a 

20 particular focus on drinking water issues, and I 

21 want to acknowledge that I have about a dozen or 

22 so of our field canvas staff here from Baltimore 
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1 and from D.C. And these are the folks, for the 

2 past month, they have been knocking on thousands 

3 of doors across the country to educate the public 

4 on the importance of cleaning up these toxic 

5 discharges from power plants, so I just wanted to 

6 acknowledge them. 

7 So while the EPA has called this hearing 

8 specifically on the pretreatment part of the 

9 Proposed Rule, the vast majority of power plants 

10 do not send their waste to publicly owned 

11 treatment works, and we believe it is important 

12 for EPA to hear from the public on the rule as a 

13 whole. And in fact, last month, we submitted a 

14 letter to EPA that had over 35 organizations 

15 signed onto this from across the country and 

16 requesting that the agency broaden the scope of 

17 today's hearing to consider public testimony on 

18 all aspects of the Proposed Rule. 

19 So we were disappointed not to receive a 

20 response from EPA in time for today's hearing and 

21 hope that the agency will respond to our concerns 

22 in a timely fashion. 
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1 EPA has proposed several options that 

2 vary significantly in the amount of power plant 

3 wastewater pollution that would be controlled. 

4 For example, the weakest preferred option would 

5 only control 468 million pounds of pollution, 

6 while the most stringent option, though not 

7 preferred by EPA, would control 5.3 billion 

8 pounds of pollution. 

9 It is our understanding that the 

10 pretreatment standards that EPA has proposed are 

11 essentially identical to the standards proposed 

12 for plants discharging directly into streams, 

13 lakes, rivers, and other water. Both sets of 

14 standards need to be as stringent as possible, 

15 meaning that they should require power plants to 

16 treat all of their toxic wastewater, not just 

17 some of it. 

18 Clean Water Action is particularly 

19 concerned that none of the four preferred options 

20 for pretreatment standards or direct discharge 

21 standards would require power plants to control 

22 for bromide. Bromide in wastewater discharge is 
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1 upstream of drinking water intakes, has been 

2 linked to the formation of trihalomethanes, or 

3 THMs, when it is exposed to disinfectants or 

4 processes in water treatment plants. By EPA's 

5 own estimate, approximately 37 percent of all 

6 power plants are located near a drinking water 

7 intake for surface water. These disinfection 

8 byproducts are known to cause cancer and 

9 reproductive and developmental health effects, 

10 which is why public water systems must comply 

11 with regulations to reduce these by products. 

12 If power plant wastewater contributes to 

13 the formation of disinfection byproducts in 

14 drinking water treatment plants, that can mean 

15 increased exposure and health risk to those 

16 drinking that water. This is by no means an 

17 abstract problem if you are a person drinking 

18 that water. It is also not an abstract matter to 

19 the public water system that has to figure out 

20 how to adjust treatment that has been thrown out 

21 of balance. 

22 Of EPA's eight proposed options, only 
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1 Option 5 would require power plants to control 

2 for bromide or other total dissolved solids. 

3 Clean Water Action believes that EPA should 

4 require power plants that discharge to POTWs or 

5 are directly discharging to surface water to 

6 control for these pollutants in order to protect 

7 the quality of the public's drinking water 

8 sources. 

9 Technology exists to effectively 

10 eliminate nearly all water pollution from power 

11 plants, and it is time to end the power plant 

12 industry's unlimited permit to pollute, which 

13 stands in the way of cleaning up our rivers, 

14 streams, and lakes. 

15 Thank you for the opportunity to provide 

16 these comments. 

17 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

18 Next is Whitney Byrd. 

19 MS. BYRD: Hi. My name is Whitney Byrd, 

20 and I am the coordinator of the Wise Energy for 

21 Virginia Coalition. Supporters of the coalition 

22 group’s number over 50,000 Virginians. 
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1 I am here today to speak in support of 

2 EPA's most stringent options for limitations on 

3 effluents for the steam electric sector, 

4 specifically Option 4 and, most preferred, Option 

5 5. 

6 Since the ELG has not been updated since 

7 1982, the most stringent options for effluent 

8 limitation are preferred to bring the regulations 

9 up to date with the best available technology. 

10 Virginia has many reasons to support 

11 stringent limitations on effluence from power 

12 plants. Virginia ranks 18th in the U.S. for 

13 production of coal ash and has 25 coal ash ponds 

14 and 11 power plants. Eight of the ponds are 

15 classified as significant hazards, meaning 

16 failure would cause economic and environmental 

17 damage. 

18 In 2011, EPA gave a poor rating to two of 

19 the significant hazard ash ponds that I just 

20 mentioned: the Dominion Chesapeake Energy Center 

21 and Appalachian Power's Clinch River Coal Plant. 

22 So I'm going to talk to those two as case 
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1 studies. 

2 Virginia is located within the Chesapeake 

3 Bay watershed, which is very sensitive to 

4 nutrient pollution that causes large dissolved 

5 oxygen-depleting algal blooms. Steam electric 

6 plant effluents contribute large cumulative 

7 nutrient pollution loads, which undermine the 

8 efforts to reduce other sources of nutrient 

9 pollution from entering the Chesapeake Bay. 

10 Dominion's Chesapeake Energy Center is a 

11 concern for many reasons, but among those is that 

12 failure would release coal ash into the Elizabeth 

13 River and into the Chesapeake Bay. The Energy 

14 Center's 22-acre leaking coal ash landfill has 

15 contaminated groundwater with high levels of 

16 arsenic, with one test well measuring 30 times 

17 the safe limit. 

18 The other at-risk poor rating pond I want 

19 to speak to is at the Clinch River Plant, which 

20 is located in Virginia's far southwest. This ash 

21 pond has a toxic history and continues to pose a 

22 serious threat to the surrounding watershed. 
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1 In 1967, one of the two Clinch Plant's 

2 poorly rated ash ponds failed, spilling into the 

3 Clinch River killing hundreds of thousands of 

4 fish, causing degradation to the ecosystem that 

5 remains evident to this day. 

6 These are just two stories of two 

7 facilities in Virginia. Stringent limitations on 

8 power plant effluent could pass many benefits 

9 onto Virginians, including cleaner water, 

10 improved public health, reduced environmental 

11 degradation, and job creation with minimal cost 

12 to ratepayers. 

13 The Wise Energy Coalition applauds the 

14 EPA for taking these common-sense steps to limit 

15 toxic wastewater discharges from power plant 

16 effluent. 

17 Thank you very much for the opportunity 

18 to comment. 

19 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

20 Angelique Giraud. 

21 MS. GIRAUD: Hello. I am Angelique 

22 Giraud. I am the energy community organizer for 
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1 Clean Water Action in Florida. Thank you for the 

2 chance to comment to the EPA concerning the 

3 proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines and 

4 Standards for the Steam Electric Power Generating 

5 Point Source Category. 

6 Clean Water Action is a national 

7 environmental organization. Our work in Florida 

8 is focused on protecting the state's drinking 

9 water resources and public health. I understand 

10 that the pretreatment standards which EPA has 

11 proposed are basically identical to the proposal 

12 for plants discharging right to our waterways. 

13 Both sets of standards need to be as stringent as 

14 possible. EPA should be setting zero discharge 

15 standards and requiring rigorous treatment of 

16 toxic heavy metals in any remaining waste. 

17 I was born and raised in Florida. I grew 

18 up enjoying the natural beauty of Florida's 

19 waters and later became involved in my personal 

20 life in education with protecting our state's 

21 lifeblood. Florida represents a perfect example 

22 of why the most stringent regulations for power 
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1 plant water pollution are needed. Our water 

2 supply is vulnerable. We use a lot of energy. 

3 State regulations are weak. Enforcement is rare, 

4 and pollution is rampant. 

5 Florida's water supply is uniquely 

6 vulnerable to toxic contamination. Our high 

7 water table, sandy soils, and porous limestone 

8 bedrock allow surface waters to freely flow down 

9 to our aquifer, which provides drinking water for 

10 millions of people. 

11 Florida generates the third-most energy 

12 in the U.S. Our economy is largely tourism-based 

13 with a record-breaking 89.3 million visits last 

14 year and relies on an abundance of fresh clean 

15 water that is currently threatened by toxic power 

16 plant pollution. 

17 The Florida Department of Environmental 

18 Protection regulates solid waste and wastewater 

19 management of each coal power plant on a 

20 case-by-case basis, creating dangerous 

21 inconsistencies in safety standards. 

22 I will provide six facts that highlight 
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1 the real power plant water pollution problems we 

2 are facing in the Sunshine State. First off, in 

3 2011, our 15 coal-fired power plants reported 5.3 

4 million pounds of toxic releases to landfills, 

5 surface impoundments, and directly to surface 

6 waters. Of that, there were 2,200 pounds of 

7 mercury. 

8 Second, there is 78 fish consumption 

9 advisories for mercury in water bodies 

10 surrounding the state's coal-fired power plants. 

11 Third, five coal-fired power plants have 

12 no limits on discharges of any heavy metals, and 

13 no plant in Florida has permit limits on all of 

14 the toxic metals of concern. 

15 The St. Johns River Power Park in Duval 

16 County is operating with an expired NPDES permit, 

17 and the Seminole Plant in Putnam discharges 

18 wastewater into Rice Creek, which is impaired 

19 with cadmium, iron, lead, nickel, and silver. 

20 And the Big Bend Power Plant, Hillsborough 

21 County, is one of the worst offenders. In 2011 

22 alone, the plant reported discharging over 1,200 
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1 pounds of selenium into the Big Bend Bayou. 

2 Florida's precious water supplies are 

3 facing serious threat of toxic contamination from 

4 our coal-fired power plants. The health of our 

5 local communities is directly affected by this 

6 out-of-control hazardous waste stream. By 

7 alleviating industries of the responsibility of 

8 properly treating toxic waste, the government is 

9 passing those costs on the public and taxpayers 

10 in the form of increased health care cost, 

11 pollution cleanup cost, and Florida's future 

12 economic livelihood. I would like my future 

13 children and grandchildren to have the chance to 

14 enjoy the pleasures of Florida's natural habitat, 

15 but I don't believe that will be possible without 

16 cutting back on coal-fired power plant water 

17 pollution with the most stringent regulations 

18 possible. 

19 If the technology exists to eliminate 

20 irreparable damage to our only home, the only 

21 question should be, “When can we start?” 

22 While these coal plant water pollution 
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1 standards will address pollution on the coal 

2 plant wastewater, there are many other types of 

3 water pollution we still need to address, 

4 including coal ash. We encourage you to move 

5 forward on those rules as well as soon as 

6 possible. 

7 Thank you very much. 

8 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

9 Is Julia Wynn here? 

10 [No audible response.] 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. We will move on to 

12 Marc Yaggi. 

13 MR. YAGGI: Good afternoon. Thank you 

14 for the opportunity to submit testimony today. 

15 My name is Marc Yaggi, and I am the 

16 executive director of Waterkeeper Alliance. 

17 Waterkeeper Alliance comprises more than 200 

18 waterkeeper organizations that patrol and protect 

19 more than 1.5 million square miles of watersheds 

20 on six continents. 

21 Coal mining, coal transportation, coal 

22 combustion, and then finally the disposal of coal 
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1 ash all create water pollution, poisoning our 

2 most precious resource along with the people and 

3 wildlife that depend on it. 

4 Of particular concern to Waterkeeper 

5 Alliance is the toxic water discharges associated 

6 with coal combustion, waste storage, and 

7 disposal. 

8 Of all the coal-fired power plants in the 

9 country, 182 of them discharge their pollution 

10 into watersheds of 49 of our member waterkeeper 

11 organizations. Every second of every day, the 

12 wastewater outfalls at these power plants 

13 constantly pours staggering amounts of toxic 

14 heavy metals into our rivers, lakes, and streams, 

15 often without any limits or even monitoring 

16 requirements. 

17 Without adequate federal limits on toxic 

18 discharges from coal-fired power plants, it is 

19 these Waterkeeper organizations, rather than 

20 government regulators, who often bear the burden 

21 of safeguarding their waterways in their 

22 communities by monitoring the effects of this 
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1 dangerous pollution. 

2 These public advocates document 

3 pollution, warn the public of hazardous water 

4 quality conditions, and when necessary bring 

5 enforcement actions. All too often, however, 

6 this work is hampered by industry-friendly state 

7 regulators and, importantly, the lack of 

8 enforceable federal limits on toxic discharges. 

9 For example, on the Black Warrior River 

10 in Alabama, the Miller generating station 

11 constantly discharges coal ash refuge and 

12 scrubber sludge into a huge waste lagoon. Waste 

13 from the Miller ash pond flows right into 

14 Bankhead Lake, a public drinking water source for 

15 the City of Birmingham and surrounding areas and 

16 a popular boating and fishing destination. 

17 In 2010, the Miller plant generated more 

18 than 5 million pounds of toxic waste, making it 

19 the biggest ash polluter in the country that 

20 year. 

21 Despite this pollution, the State of 

22 Alabama does not require monitoring for or limit 
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1 the discharges of poisons like arsenic, mercury, 

2 and lead from the Miller plant. Even though 

3 Alabama doesn't know exactly what is being 

4 discharged from the plant, the pollution from 

5 this power plant is clearly having an impact. 

6 Some of those impacts are easy to see. 

7 The rocks in the river below the discharge are 

8 blanketed with a hard white gunk that cements the 

9 rocks together. Other impacts like toxic metals 

10 that are likely building up in the river system 

11 are harder to see but no less real. 

12 This is not unique. In North Carolina, 

13 not far up the Cape Fear River from the coastal 

14 estuaries that provide habitat for precious 

15 species like the Atlantic Green Sea turtle, the 

16 Duke Energy L.V. Sutton Power Plant dumps toxic 

17 waste into the river. With no treatment other 

18 than settling, the ash water flows directly from 

19 unlined ash ponds into Sutton Lake where scores 

20 of people make use of a public boat launch near 

21 the plant to fish and recreate. North Carolina, 

22 however, imposes no limits on the concentration 
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1 of metals that Sutton may discharge, and 

2 according to the plant's own records, it 

3 discharged 603 pounds of arsenic in 2012 along 

4 with 526 pounds of selenium. 

5 Finally, stringent new air pollution 

6 controls have the unfortunate side effect of 

7 increasing the volume of toxic water pollution 

8 from power plants. At the Asheville Steam Plant 

9 in western North Carolina, the plant's water 

10 pollution has significantly worsened since wet 

11 scrubbers were added. Duke University 

12 researchers compared the pollutant loads before 

13 and after the scrubbers were installed and found 

14 dramatic increases in the amounts of pollutants 

15 discharged. Recent samples showed arsenic at 

16 levels four times higher than the EPA's drinking 

17 water standard and selenium at 17 times higher 

18 than the standard for aquatic life. 

19 This goes on and on, but I would conclude 

20 by saying that Options 4 or 5 of the proposed 

21 effluent guidelines are necessary to prevent the 

22 continuing poisoning of our waters. Anything 
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1 less is unacceptable. 

2 Thank you for the opportunity to comment. 

3 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

4 Alexis Segal? 

5 MS. SEGAL: Good afternoon. My name is 

6 Alexis Segal, and I am here on behalf of my home 

7 state of Florida and our precious and essential 

8 waterways. I appreciate the opportunity to speak 

9 here today. 

10 In my capacity as the Biscayne Bay 

11 Waterkeeper in Miami, Florida, it is my honor to 

12 advocate for swimmable, fishable, and drinkable 

13 water, like the over-200 Waterkeeper Alliance 

14 affiliate organizations worldwide, not just 

15 because it is our right to enjoy and protect the 

16 common resources bestowed to us by our planet, 

17 but as Floridians, clean water is the life blood 

18 of our economy, our lifestyle, and health and 

19 prosperity of our communities, now and for 

20 generations to come. 

21 In Florida, we have 15 active coal-fired 

22 power plants. We drink from, fish, and swim in 
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1 the same waters where toxic pollutants are 

2 discharged, becoming annoyingly susceptible to 

3 ingesting toxins like arsenic, mercury, and lead. 

4 If you come on vacation to Florida to fish or 

5 kayak or swim, you may be too. 

6 But it does not have to be this way. 

7 Just like it does with many other industries, the 

8 EPA should require these power plants to adopt 

9 the best available technology, which already 

10 exists and is in use at some plants, to reduce 

11 the most amount of pollution. Because what is at 

12 stake, our water, it is critical to our survival, 

13 our health, and our well-being. 

14 There is no reason for power plants to 

15 continue dumping arsenic, lead, selenium, 

16 mercury, and many other toxic pollutants into our 

17 water. These are the very same toxins that EPA 

18 already regulates in other forms. 

19 Aside from tourism and commercial 

20 recreation on subsistence fishing economies 

21 depending on our water, what is perhaps most 

22 scary is the threat these coal plant discharges 
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1 place on our drinking water. In Florida, most of 

2 the fresh water we use comes from relatively 

3 shallow aquifers stored in porous rocks such as 

4 limestone and sandstone that serves as Florida's 

5 foundation layer and holds approximately 90 

6 percent of our drinking water for our people, our 

7 agriculture, and our commerce that depend on this 

8 water being healthy, replenished, and potable. 

9 Once water supplies are compromised by 

10 unregulated discharges from coal-fired power 

11 plants, there is no turning back, and in some 

12 instances, they already are. But EPA can help us 

13 change that. 

14 Our drinking water in Florida already 

15 faces massive threats. Contamination from 

16 coal-fired power plants, pretreated or otherwise, 

17 does not have to be one of them, yet it remains. 

18 In addition, I'd like to mention in 2011 alone, 

19 17 billion pounds of coal ash was generated, and 

20 74 coal ash landfills and ponds were 

21 self-reported. Many of these landfills and ponds 

22 remain unlined and in some cases have shown to 
39

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1 have been leaching extremely harmful pollutions 

2 into our too-precious water and quite-limited 

3 drinking water for years, even decades. 

4 In addition, the State of Florida just 

5 passed Senate Bill 682 allowing coal ash for 

6 reuse in things like cement and asphalt, roofing 

7 materials, and on-the-ground agricultural use. 

8 Instances of groundwater contamination in 

9 dangerous proximity to protected wetlands have 

10 already been documented. Arsenic levels on and 

11 off site of the power plants have been documented 

12 at very high levels as well. 

13 Now more than ever, we as Floridians, we 

14 as Americans, we as human beings need to act to 

15 safeguard our limited resources not just for our 

16 survival, but for the generations after us who 

17 will inherit our decisions. EPA can, and 

18 therefore should, take this step and implement 

19 the most stringent standards possible to bring us 

20 closer to safeguarding our waterways. 

21 Thank you for your time. 

22 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 
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1 Cheryl Nenn. 

2 MS. NENN: Hi. My name is Cheryl Nenn, 

3 and I am the Milwaukee Riverkeeper and a member 

4 of Waterkeeper Alliance. We appreciate the 

5 opportunity to comment today on the pretreatment 

6 standards and the proposed steam electric rule. 

7 The proposed power plant water pollution 

8 standards will set national limits to limit 

9 toxics and wastewater from coal-burning plants. 

10 These toxins include millions of pounds of toxic 

11 metals like arsenic, selenium, mercury, and lead 

12 that are dumped into our waterways, these same 

13 waterways that are really the life blood of our 

14 communities. 

15 In Wisconsin, water-based tourism is an 

16 8- to $12-billion annual industry, so clean water 

17 is very important to us. 

18 Exposure to these dangerous chemicals can 

19 lead to birth defects, cancer, and even death. 

20 While the EPA has called this hearing 

21 specifically on the pretreatment part of the 

22 proposed water pollution standards, we feel it's 
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1 important that you hear from the public on the 

2 rule as a whole because so many of us are 

3 affected by coal waste in our local rivers, 

4 lakes, and streams. 

5 In Milwaukee, we have a power plant 

6 called We Energies Valley Power Plant. This is a 

7 lovely picture of it. It's one of the oldest 

8 coal-fired electric power plants in the country 

9 and creates steam and electric for most of 

10 downtown Milwaukee. The plant finally received a 

11 new wastewater permit just late last year in 

12 2012. Their previous permit had been expired for 

13 20 years, was last issued in 1987, and the 

14 Valley's permit, like these Proposed Rules that 

15 I'm understanding, are also -- have been expired 

16 for 3 years, still allows for antiquated 

17 technology that's not really in compliance with 

18 new laws, best management practices, or science. 

19 These proposed water pollution standards 

20 for steam power plants are long overdue, and we 

21 feel the standard should be finalized in the 

22 strongest form possible to ensure that coal 
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1 plants eliminate their most toxic discharges and 

2 finally use available controlled technology to 

3 treat heavy metals. We support EPA in 

4 promulgating these standards, and I give you 

5 kudos for finally tackling this major source of 

6 water pollution. 

7 As others have mentioned, we're very 

8 concerned that toxic wastewater discharge from 

9 power plants is anticipated to actually increase. 

10 I think EPA's own numbers are that the wastewater 

11 stream could increase by 28 percent in the next 

12 15 years as more pollutants are scrubbed out of 

13 the air and essentially ending up in the water 

14 waste stream and discharged into our waterways, 

15 either directly or after being filtered through a 

16 public treatment facility first. 

17 Our rivers in Milwaukee are already 

18 really suffering from a history of degradation 

19 due to industry and urbanization combined with 

20 habitat alteration. The Valley Power Plant is 

21 also located within our Milwaukee estuary federal 

22 area of concern, which has been identified by EPA 
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1 as part of the Great Lakes Legacy Act. 

2 DNR in Wisconsin, EPA, and many NGOs have 

3 been investing major resources into improving the 

4 quality of the estuary and getting it taken off 

5 of the Area of Concern list, as well as adjusting 

6 many beneficial use impairments, which include 

7 water quality and impairment sufficient in 

8 aquatic life. 

9 Our estuary is currently listed on the 

10 impaired list for PCBs, E. coli, phosphorous, and 

11 unspecified metals. Given these challenges, it's 

12 especially important that EPA set zero discharge 

13 for heavy metals and other pollutants and require 

14 rigorous treatment of heavy metals and any 

15 remaining waste. 

16 Valley Power Plant's 2012 permit, which 

17 was just issued, includes very lax monitoring 

18 requirements in general for mercury, selenium, 

19 and cyanide. They included no requirement for 

20 copper, even though there was strong indication 

21 that it was coming in the waste stream, and there 

22 is also very limited effluent limitations put 
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1 into that permit, which we just got in November. 

2 So we are very supportive and hopeful that these 

3 proposed effluent limits could address this issue 

4 in the future. 

5 The Valley Power Plant is a very 

6 significant factor in degradation of our water 

7 quality and wildlife habitat in general, and 

8 these federal rules would help reduce pollution 

9 in our rivers and also downstream waterways, such 

10 as Lake Michigan, which provide drinking water 

11 for over 40 million people, both Canadians and 

12 Americans. And additionally, these limits would 

13 also help us protect aquatic life, which is also 

14 given very short shrift in many of our permits. 

15 The good news is that there's many 

16 stakeholder groups, including Milwaukee 

17 Riverkeeper and others, that are working hard to 

18 improve the conditions in our urban rivers and to 

19 get us back on a path to achieving water quality 

20 standards in meeting fishable, swimmable rivers. 

21 So, in conclusion, we hope that EPA will 

22 select the strongest effluent limitations 
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1 possible to limit the toxics in our waterways and 

2 ensure our water is safe to drink and our fish 

3 are safe to eat. Thank you. 

4 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

5 Fred Tutman. 

6 MR. TUTMAN: My name is Fred Tutman. My 

7 title is Patuxent Riverkeeper, a post I've held 

8 for about 10 years, with some 20 years before 

9 that as a community activist. 

10 I have one of the largest coal-burning 

11 power plants in my state, located in my 

12 watershed, not too far from here on the Patuxent. 

13 It's called the Chalk Point Generating Station. 

14 Its discharges to my waterways are well 

15 documented as being generally way beyond its 

16 permitted limits, fairly egregious levels of 

17 toxic hazards, both to the surface and 

18 groundwaters of the communities that I serve, and 

19 I have a deep and closely personal relationship 

20 with the people and the communities that I serve. 

21 I am concerned about the future of their water, 

22 and I am concerned about their futures, because 
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1 these are very intertwined values. 

2 My organization is currently involved in 

3 enforcement action to hold this plant operator 

4 accountable for its exceedances of effluent 

5 limits into the river by as much as 40 times its 

6 permitted limits. 

7 Earlier this year, we also helped forge a 

8 consent decree by requiring the plant operators 

9 to remediate and overhaul their coal waste 

10 disposal site, located in nearby Brandywine. 

11 There, the company's own records reveal they have 

12 discharged heavy metals into the ground at nearly 

13 50 times the federal drinking water standards. 

14 Here, we're talking about cadmium, selenium, 

15 arsenic, and other very toxic contaminants that 

16 can have very serious and permanent health 

17 implications for the surrounding neighbors who 

18 rely on their water supply. 

19 Many of these folks have never been told 

20 about the risks from the neighboring industrial 

21 facility that cheerfully donates money to buy 

22 band uniforms at local high schools and always 
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1 sets up environment exhibits at local Earth Day 

2 festivals. So I assure you that toxic burdens 

3 suffered by the predominant rural and 

4 African-American neighbors to this facility is a 

5 legacy that was completely foreseeable by the 

6 plant operators and an entire industry that has 

7 exploited a culture of weak enforcement and 

8 insufficient federal rulemaking that allows them 

9 to make profits at the expense of the health and 

10 safety of an ill-informed public. 

11 And I wish I could tell you that Chalk 

12 Point and Brandywine are anomalies, but they're 

13 not. These occurrences are not flukes. I've got 

14 way too much coal waste in my water supply 

15 throughout my river from other sources. 

16 Chalk Point was also, I should add, the 

17 scene of what many consider in Maryland to be the 

18 worst manmade ecological catastrophe in the 

19 state's history in 2000, year 2000. 12,000 

20 gallons of bunker oil came pouring out of one of 

21 their ruptured pipelines into the heart of my 

22 river's prime shellfish areas. This happened the 
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1 day before a hurricane when the poisons were then 

2 blown downriver and destroyed the livelihoods of 

3 many people who will never get those things back. 

4 My point being that an industrial facility of 

5 this sort has many on-record permanent 

6 consequences for the inhabitants, not like a 

7 strip mall or a housing development. These are 

8 real communities, real livelihoods, and real 

9 consequences that cannot be ignored. 

10 So the consequences of weak or inadequate 

11 regulations have real consequences for real 

12 Americans, and the solution has to be really 

13 good, stringent, enforceable standards and 

14 regulations to protect the public from the known 

15 hazards from this coal-burning industry. 

16 So the latest pretreatment standards that 

17 EPA has proposed for wastewater must be stringent 

18 because we already know from bitter experience 

19 the terrible and unfair consequences for 

20 communities of having less stringent rules, of 

21 having rules that do not achieve the ends for 

22 which they are created, of having rules that 
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1 ultimately fall short of protecting the health 

2 and safety of the general public and most 

3 particularly of the communities closest to these 

4 toxic generators. How many communities must 

5 suffer due to the deferral of strict and 

6 stringent and prudent rules necessary to protect 

7 the public from these ravages, to curtail the 

8 brutal injustices created by these waste streams? 

9 And, you know, these are never found near 

10 wealthy communities. They tend to be those 

11 communities that are least able to fight back, 

12 who don't have the political power. So by 

13 promulgating zero waste effluent requirements for 

14 coal plants, you and we can create justice for 

15 many communities across this land that have been 

16 denied it for far too long, communities that have 

17 every right to expect relief from the awful 

18 legacy of dirty coal and dirty water. The time 

19 is now, and if not now, when? 

20 Thank you for your time and your 

21 consideration. 

22 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 
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1 Donna Lisenby. 

2 MS. LISENBY: Thank you very much for 

3 allowing me to testify today. I am the Watauga 

4 Riverkeeper from Boone, North Carolina, and I am 

5 also the coal campaign coordinator for 

6 Waterkeeper Alliance. 

7 I came here today all the way from North 

8 Carolina. It took me 5 hours of flying time to 

9 get here. It was a pain in the tuchus to get 

10 here for me. 

11 The reason I took all that time to come 

12 here is because this is important, really 

13 important for you all to get this right, and even 

14 though the scope of this hearing has been 

15 unfortunately limited to just the small number of 

16 coal-fired power plants that discharge into 

17 publicly owned treatment works, I want to speak 

18 more broadly because the options you all have 

19 proposed apply to the majority of coal-fired 

20 power plants in our country that discharge 

21 directly to our waterways. 

22 I came here to tell you three things. 
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1 The most important thing I want you to know, 

2 unequivocally and without any doubt, is 

3 coal-fired power plants are polluting our 

4 waterways in America with millions of gallons of 

5 toxic heavy metals. 

6 This is a picture of heavy metals, 

7 arsenic, and other pollutants that are flowing 

8 into the Cane Creek, a tributary of the Tennessee 

9 River, from the Colbert coal-fired power plant in 

10 Alabama. Looks like Gatorade, doesn't it? Okay. 

11 The Tennessee River provides drinking 

12 water to millions of people. Now, the 

13 Waterkeepers you see here today and many other 

14 ones who could not be here today, as well as 

15 Waterkeeper Alliance, have tested leaking 

16 discharges from coal-fired power plant waste 

17 ponds and from their discharges directly from the 

18 Asheville, North Carolina, plant, the Colbert 

19 plant in Alabama, the Scholz plant in Florida, 

20 the Harllee Branch plant in Georgia, the Grainger 

21 plant in South Carolina, the Kingston plant in 

22 Tennessee, the Chalk Point plant in Maryland, the 
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1 Valley Power plant in Wisconsin, the Sutton power 

2 plant in North Carolina, the Gaston power plant 

3 in Alabama, the Allen power plant in North 

4 Carolina, the Gadsden power plant also in 

5 Alabama. All of these power plants are polluting 

6 our waterways. Some of them are also polluting 

7 groundwater. 

8 So I am standing here today with you as a 

9 person who has gone out with these Waterkeepers, 

10 done this testing. I am not giving you testimony 

11 that is in the abstract. I am giving you 

12 testimony today that is based on my real-life 

13 work on the ground at these coal-fired power 

14 plants sampling their toxic heavy metals that are 

15 going into our drinking water and the places 

16 where our families swim every day. 

17 And I want to make this point to you. It 

18 is criminal to me that we have power plants in 

19 this country whose sole means of treatment is to 

20 dump their scrubber sludge, their coal ash waste, 

21 and their other processed water in a hole in the 

22 ground. That is not best available technology. 
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1 That is 1950s old-school, no treatment, 

2 ridiculous kind of way to treat toxic heavy 

3 metals, and it is time for it to stop. It is 

4 time for us to stop poisoning our waterways with 

5 heavy metals. 

6 The second thing I wanted to tell you is 

7 that our waterways need the strongest protections 

8 that you all have proposed. We need the zero 

9 discharge option. It is completely unacceptable 

10 to us that industry was allowed to insert options 

11 that will not eliminate heavy metal pollution 

12 from our waterways. Those options are completely 

13 inappropriate, and the bottom line here is 

14 corporations should not be allowed to pollute our 

15 waterways for profit. Poisoning people and 

16 waterways for profit is not okay. Our country is 

17 better than that. We can do better than holes in 

18 the ground, and we need to implement the most 

19 stringent water pollution technology options you 

20 all have listed. 

21 Thirdly, our communities need strong 

22 limits, the most stringent limits now. Reagan 
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1 was President the last time you all proposed 

2 rules for coal-fired power plants. It's been 30 

3 years that they've been dumping millions of 

4 gallons of toxic heavy metals into our waterways. 

5 We need you all to get going and get the most 

6 stringent option implemented right away, and we 

7 need that -- it is critical because we're adding 

8 more scrubbers. They are pulling more arsenic, 

9 mercury, lead, NOx, and SOx out of the air, and 

10 those are going into our waterways. 

11 The bottom line here, and I'm going to 

12 conclude by saying, we don't need 5.3 billion 

13 gallons or 5.3 billion pounds of toxic heavy 

14 metal pollution dumped in our waterways. America 

15 is better than that. A hole in the ground is not 

16 the best available technology. We need you all 

17 to get with the program and do what's right. 

18 Now, we just marched a parade of 

19 Waterkeepers from all over the country up here to 

20 the podium to speak. The reason that parade of 

21 Waterkeepers from all these states came here 

22 today, and more are coming up to talk, is because 
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1 this is critical. It is critical for you all to 

2 get this right because our people, the people we 

3 love, that we interact every day with in our 

4 communities and our families, drink the water 

5 from these waterways, they recreate there, they 

6 swim, and they fish. They deserve clean water. 

7 Thank you. 

8 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

9 May I remind everybody that if we keep 

10 running over on the allotted time, some people at 

11 the end of the list will not get to speak today, 

12 so please think about that for your neighbors. 

13 Next on the list is Sam Perkins. 

14 MR. PERKINS: Good afternoon. My name is 

15 Sam Perkins. I'm the director of Technical 

16 Programs for the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation 

17 in Charlotte, North Carolina. We cover the 

18 entire Catawba River Basin from the North 

19 Carolina mountains to the South Carolina coastal 

20 plain, stretched with millions of people, as well 

21 as four of your EPA-listed high-hazard coal ash 

22 impoundments, 4 of the 44. 
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1 I have a master's degree in geochemistry 

2 from the University of North Carolina-Chapel 

3 Hill. I'm also a born-and-raised Carolinian, 

4 mostly north and partly south. So I come 

5 representing relatively conservative states where 

6 people firmly believe in their property rights 

7 and respecting those of their neighbors. We 

8 believe that whatever Duke Energy might need to 

9 do on its property to produce energy, fine, but 

10 it needs to stay on their own property, which it 

11 has not. 

12 This year, American Rivers named the 

13 Catawba River the fifth most endangered river and 

14 the most endangered for threats to water quality, 

15 not just quantity, in America because of the 

16 impacts and threats of coal ash discharges, both 

17 permitted and unpermitted. 

18 In a 28-mile span around Charlotte, we 

19 have 3 coal-fired power plants and 445 acres of 

20 coal ash impoundments propped up 80-feet high, 

21 unlined, like mashed potatoes on a plate holding 

22 back a mound of toxic gravy. 
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1 The waterways on which these ponds lie 

2 each serve as the drinking water reservoirs in 

3 locations that have provided drinking water for 

4 centuries. The NPDES permits that limit iron but 

5 not arsenic and selenium with these lakes, 

6 regulation has done nothing to inhibit the impact 

7 of these toxic, steeping, shorefront mounds, but 

8 with these effluent limit guidelines and 

9 specifically Steam Electric Regulatory Options 4 

10 and 5 of the pretreatment standards, as long 

11 overdue as they are, the EPA can start to catch 

12 back up to its original mid-1980s NPDES goal of 

13 eliminating pollutant discharges. We need Option 

14 4 or 5 at this point, given the decades of 

15 accumulation from unrestricted discharges. 

16 The saying has often been that dilution 

17 is the solution to pollution; however, dilution 

18 is not a one-way street, and matter is neither 

19 created nor destroyed. The sorption of toxics to 

20 particulates, something I studied in grad school, 

21 and the transport and settling of these 

22 particulates have created potent reservoirs for 
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1 toxic metals in reservoirs that were only meant 

2 to hold water and in particular drinking water, 

3 and in my case on Mountain Island Lake, for more 

4 than 860,000 people. 

5 In my own investigations around coal ash 

6 discharges on the Catawba, I have seen this toxic 

7 accumulation in two areas. On Mountain Island 

8 Lake near the Riverbend Steam Station, bottom 

9 sediment samples have revealed arsenic as high as 

10 170 milligrams per kilogram, relative to an 

11 upstream sample of 0.76. 

12 This accumulation has also been evident 

13 in the water treatment residuals, also known as 

14 sludge, from the Charlotte drinking water 

15 treatment plant, Franklin, located a few miles 

16 downstream of Riverbend Steam Station. I 

17 compared a decade of sludge data from dozens of 

18 other drinking water and wastewater treatment 

19 plants around North Carolina without coal ash 

20 discharges immediately upstream. Charlotte 

21 consistently has 5 to 10 times the arsenic in its 

22 sludge compared to anywhere else statewide, often 
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1 approaching the EPA Part 503 limit, sludge 

2 regulatory limit for arsenic, being 75 milligrams 

3 per kilogram, especially during the summer when 

4 warmer weather with more hypoxic bottom water 

5 releases arsenic into the water column. 

6 We have, and have had for years, more 

7 than affordable technology for a zero discharge 

8 standard. The, quote/unquote, treatment 

9 technology that's been utilized until now, 

10 gravity is a 13.8-billion-year-plus-old 

11 technology. 

12 Pretreatment standards for existing 

13 sources, Regulatory Options 4 and 5, and those 

14 alone are the adequate options for beginning to 

15 utilize modern technology to put a true halt on a 

16 problem that has perpetuated for 30 years longer 

17 than it was supposed to. Fall short here and you 

18 will increasingly have a problem in waterways and 

19 with water and wastewater treatment plant sludge 

20 under Part 503. Please stop playing toxic metal 

21 Whac-A-Mole with public waterways and 

22 infrastructures. 
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1 Thank you. 

2 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

3 Patricia Schuba. 

4 MS. SCHUBA: Good afternoon, and thank 

5 you for allowing me to speak today. My name is 

6 Patricia Schuba, and I am from a small town in 

7 the middle of Missouri, and I am the president of 

8 that town's organization. It's a grassroots 

9 group that came together to oppose the dumping of 

10 coal waste in our nation's floodplains and namely 

11 in my town. I also happen to be a consultant for 

12 Citizens Coal Council as a result of that work. 

13 I would like to target my comments today 

14 to address risk assumptions posed in the text of 

15 the Proposed Rule in the reading of Section III, 

16 Background, G, and I'm sure you're familiar with 

17 that section. It talks about the information 

18 collection request conducted by EPA's Office of 

19 Water for the ELG rule that has the potential to 

20 affect the risk assessment for the CCR rule: 

21 "...reliance on the data and analyses 

22 discussed...may have the potential to lower the 
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1 CCR rule risk assessment results by as much as an 

2 order of magnitude...and could support regulation 

3 of CCR disposal under RCRA Subtitle D...." 

4 I would like to take the time allotted 

5 today to share an example from Missouri, actually 

6 from my town, that supports the conclusion that 

7 more independently collected site-specific data 

8 is needed to draw conclusions about numbers of 

9 human receptors impacted and assumptions made 

10 about water flow in our nation's floodplains and 

11 near ash-way sites because much like the 

12 communities that are impacted, all these sites 

13 are in our floodplains. 

14 I would also like to make the point that 

15 we need both a strong ELG rule and a strong coal 

16 ash rule, for they work hand-in-hand to protect 

17 people and the environment. 

18 The Labadie power plant was constructed 

19 in 1970 when I was 9 years old with one large 

20 150-acre unlined ash pit dug into the floodplain 

21 sitting in our groundwater. The pond and the 

22 79-acre pond constructed in 1993 together have 
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1 been discharging untreated coal and plant 

2 wastewater into the Missouri River at volumes of 

3 30 million gallons per day under NPDES permits. 

4 The four identified leaks, two of which date at 

5 least back to the permit issued in '92, have 

6 contributed at least 383 million gallons of 

7 untreated wastewater into the floodplain with no 

8 groundwater monitoring. 

9 I would like to submit into the record, 

10 which unfortunately I left at the hotel, but I 

11 will do that digitally, a map that is of the 

12 floodplain and the domestic wells located within 

13 a 3-mile radius of the existing ponds in the 

14 proposed landfill that would accept increasingly 

15 toxic coal ash waste for the next 40 years. The 

16 well data was plotted by Washington University's 

17 Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic for LEO, 

18 which is our organization, as part of legal 

19 action to attempt to stop the siting of the 

20 landfill in the floodway, not just floodplain, 

21 but the floodway of our floodplain. 

22 I am also providing a landfill drawing 
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1 included in the permit document submitted by the 

2 utility to the Missouri Department of Natural 

3 Resources, which chose the same private wells and 

4 three springs in the floodplain. LEO contracted 

5 the services of hydrogeologist Charles Norris to 

6 review the piezometer data from the Ameren's 

7 detailed site investigation, and he and others 

8 indicated that water flow was relatively 

9 unpredictable, with water moving seasonally 

10 either toward the river or toward drinking wells 

11 south of the site. 

12 What was amazing was the short time frame 

13 in which water could change directions and likely 

14 move toxins long distances. The subsequent 

15 review of the proposed groundwater monitoring 

16 program at the proposed landfill did not reflect 

17 the hydrological complexities. 

18 Unfortunately, I suspect the facts and 

19 decisions made in the Labadie case are not an 

20 exception but the norm. The facts suggest that 

21 we should look closer before permitting said 

22 sites, and regulations absolutely need to be more 
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1 protective. 

2 In conclusion, LEO and CCC recommend that 

3 EPA not rely on limited industry-supplied data on 

4 hydrogeology at these sites to weaken a strong 

5 subtitle C coal ash rule, coupled with a very 

6 strong ELG rule, to finally protect communities 

7 impacted by coal ash waste and wastewater risk. 

8 Thank you for your time and 

9 consideration, and this is my little niece. She 

10 said to me yesterday morning, "Aunt Pat, I want 

11 to go with you." So someday, she'll be up here 

12 too. Thanks. 

13 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

14 Session B 

15 MR. STRASSLER: Robin Broder. 

16 MS. BRODER: Good afternoon. I'm Robin 

17 Broder, Vice President of Potomac Riverkeeper, 

18 and my comments will be brief. 

19 Today, I urge the EPA to adopt and 

20 finalize the strongest possible options in the 

21 Proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines and 

22 Standards for the Steam Electric Power Plants. 
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1 The EPA should finalize a strong rule to protect 

2 our rivers, lakes, streams, and communities from 

3 toxic power plant wastewater. 

4 Power plants should be required to adopt 

5 the best available technology, to reduce the most 

6 amount of pollution. The technology exists, and 

7 it's already in use at some plants. There is no 

8 reason for power plants to continue dumping 

9 arsenic, leads, selenium, mercury, and other 

10 toxic pollutants into our waters. 

11 Here on the Potomac River, just a few 

12 miles from Washington, D.C., are two major coal 

13 power plants. Over the past few years, Potomac 

14 Riverkeeper has been involved in getting these 

15 plants to clean up toxic pollution leaching from 

16 their unlined coal ash disposal sites. 

17 Now these plants have installed flue gas 

18 desulfurization scrubbers, and the State of 

19 Maryland mandated that they install waste 

20 treatment systems to control the discharge of 

21 nitrogen. 

22 As you may know, under the Chesapeake Bay 
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1 TMDL, no new discharges of nutrients are allowed; 

2 however, these plants have had a very difficult 

3 time keeping their nitrogen discharges within 

4 their limits. 

5 Throughout this time while we've been 

6 trying to enforce the nitrogen limits, we have 

7 asked the question: What about the toxic metals? 

8 Recently, a firefighter contacted us 

9 because he and other firefighters had become sick 

10 and gotten rashes after training in the waters 

11 outside of one of these plants. He sent me a 

12 report by the Environmental Integrity Project 

13 that stated the data from the Dickerson Plant 

14 indicated levels of selenium and boron in 

15 post-treatment wastewater was much higher than 

16 federal and state water quality standards. 

17 Naturally, these findings alarmed him. Since 

18 this plant doesn't monitor and report toxic 

19 metals, I wasn't able to give him an answer to 

20 his question of what's in the water. 

21 Now the State of Maryland is drafting new 

22 permits for these plants, and again, I ask what 
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1 about the toxic metals. The EPA should adopt the 

2 strongest possible rule so that people like this 

3 firefighter, the people who live and work near 

4 the power plants, the people who recreate in the 

5 river, and the millions of people who get their 

6 drinking water from the river like you do not 

7 have to worry and ask what's in the water. 

8 Technologies are available that will 

9 nearly eliminate water pollution from these power 

10 plants. These technologies are cost effective 

11 and should be adopted. 

12 Thank you. 

13 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

14 Diana Dascalu-Joffe. 

15 MS. DASCALU-JOFFE: Good afternoon. My 

16 name is Diana Dascalu-Joffe, and I am senior 

17 general counsel for a regional clean energy 

18 organization called the Chesapeake Climate Action 

19 Network. On behalf of our over-80,000 members, 

20 activists, and volunteers in Maryland and 

21 Virginia, we are here today to urge the EPA to 

22 finalize the strongest regulatory option for 
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1 power plant wastewater effluent discharges in 

2 order to protect the health of our local 

3 waterways and communities. 

4 CCAN is submitting comments on behalf of 

5 our members that live within 5 miles of many 

6 large coal-fired power plants in Maryland and 

7 Virginia and are negatively impacted by these 

8 facilities on a daily basis. 

9 EPA has repeatedly acknowledged that the 

10 existing effluent guidelines that are over 30 

11 years have not kept pace with developments in the 

12 industry and have utterly failed to protect local 

13 waterways from the worst pollutants, such as 

14 toxic metals that are discharging from these 

15 facilities. 

16 Maryland has seven active coal-fired 

17 power plants, and none of them have permits which 

18 limit dumping of any toxic metal, including 

19 arsenic, boron, cadmium, mercury, and lead. At 

20 least four of these plants have discharges 

21 contaminated by metalating coal ash or dangerous 

22 smokestack scrubber sludge. All that pollution 
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1 has serious consequences. At least two plants in 

2 Maryland are dumping their waste directly into 

3 water bodies, which have been formerly designated 

4 as having impaired water quality, including the 

5 Middle River, the Potomac River, and Browns 

6 Creek. The Potomac River alone is impaired 

7 because of cadmium and nickel contamination. 

8 In Virginia, Virginia has 16 active 

9 coal-fired power plants, and none of them have 

10 permits which limit dumping of any toxic metal 

11 either. At least seven of these power plants 

12 have discharges contaminated by metalating coal 

13 ash or the dangerous smokestack scrubber sludge. 

14 Eight plants are dumping their waste into water 

15 bodies which have been formerly designated as 

16 having impaired water quality in Virginia, 

17 including the James and York Rivers. 

18 To use an example of how these outdated 

19 guidelines have failed in the real world, I will 

20 provide a quick summary of a National Pollution 

21 Discharge Elimination System permit, a NPDES 

22 renewal permit challenge that our organization 
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1 brought against a NPDES permit issued from one of 

2 Maryland's oldest and dirtiest power plants, the 

3 R. Paul Smith Power Plant in Williamsport, 

4 Maryland, which has been retired since the case 

5 was brought. 

6 This power plant dated back to the 

7 Eisenhower administration and was discharging 

8 effluent from on-site bottom ash and fly ash 

9 ponds directly into the Upper Potomac River, 

10 which contained the following pollutants in this 

11 wastewater stream: arsenic, radium, selenium, 

12 sulfate, boron, zinc, barium, mercury, and 

13 nickel, just to name a few. 

14 The state issued a NPDES renewal permit 

15 in the winter of 2009 for this power plant and 

16 set no technology-based effluent limitations for 

17 any of these toxic metals and sometimes 

18 radioactive pollutants that I just listed. In 

19 fact, the only limits in the permit were for 

20 total suspended solids, oil and grease, nitrogen, 

21 phosphorous, and pH. That's it. 

22 We challenged this permit in state court 
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1 under the judicial review provision of the Clean 

2 Water Act and lost because of the very reason we 

3 are here today. The state court judge in that 

4 case deferred to the judgment of the Maryland 

5 Department of the Environment based on EPA's 

6 Effluent Limitation Guidelines, which dated back 

7 to the 1980s. 

8 Our intention in that case was to protect 

9 the local water quality and citizens' health from 

10 dangerous water pollution coming from that very 

11 old power plant. Many of our members swim, fish, 

12 boat, and recreate just a few hundred feet from 

13 that power plant's outfall pipes and had no idea 

14 that they were encountering dangerous toxins 

15 every time they use that waterway. 

16 These rules have real-world consequences 

17 for people living near these plants. They are 

18 not just regulatory hurdles that industry must 

19 jump through. 

20 State regulatory agencies have been 

21 hiding behind these outdated guidelines when 

22 issuing water pollution permits for these massive 
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1 industrial facilities for far too long. That is 

2 why we are here today. We urge EPA to revise the 

3 Effluent Limitation Guidelines for power plants 

4 and make them as strong as possible. 

5 Thank you for the opportunity to testify. 

6 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

7 Chris Espinosa? 

8 [No audible response.] 

9 MR. STRASSLER: Mr. Espinosa? No? 

10 ATTENDEE: He's outside. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Would he like to come in 

12 and testify? Because now is the time. 

13 We will call the next person. That will 

14 be Rae Schnapp. 

15 MS. SCHNAPP: Good afternoon. My name is 

16 Rae Schnapp. I am the Wabash Riverkeeper and 

17 proud to be a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance. 

18 I'm also speaking today on behalf of the Citizens 

19 Coal Council. 

20 Among the Waterkeeper Alliance 

21 organizations, I have the dubious distinction of 

22 having more power plants in my watershed than any 
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1 other Riverkeeper. The Wabash River forms the 

2 border between Indiana and Illinois and is listed 

3 as impaired for numerous heavy metals, and its 

4 impairments are localized in many cases. 

5 Most of our power plants are old and 

6 should have been retired years ago. They have 

7 gone beyond their design life, and most of our 

8 power plants have coal ash ponds on site that 

9 discharge toxic metals such as arsenic, cadmium, 

10 boron, selenium, and they are much more soluble 

11 and much more concentrated than they are in the 

12 coal itself. 

13 Today's hearing addresses only a very 

14 small subset of power plants because most do not 

15 discharge to publicly owned treatment works, so 

16 we really want to encourage EPA to adopt rules 

17 that would require all power plants to install 

18 zero discharge technology and convert to safer 

19 coal ash handling systems. 

20 In the proposed ELG rules in the Federal 

21 Register, EPA stated that we have new data from a 

22 2010 information collection request, and that 
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1 that data could be used to determine the extent 

2 to which plumes of groundwater contamination 

3 leaching from these coal ash disposal sites might 

4 be intercepted by surface water bodies. 

5 And the narrative goes on to suggest that 

6 a risk assessment incorporating that information 

7 might reduce the risk assessment by as much as an 

8 order of magnitude, and we are really concerned 

9 about EPA's reliance on this one-sided data set 

10 that was provided by the utility industry. We 

11 think that too much reliance on that data could 

12 lead to adoption of rules that fail to protect 

13 human health and the environment. 

14 So I am going to talk about a couple of 

15 specific examples. First of all, we know that 

16 many of our power plants have coal ash ponds that 

17 discharge large quantities of toxic waste waters 

18 to our rivers, but if rivers are actually 

19 intercepting toxic groundwater plumes as well, 

20 then that would appear to be an illegal 

21 unpermitted discharge to our surface waters, and 

22 we just want to point that out. 
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1 And then we feel that industry is really 

2 downplaying the risk to human receptors. Most 

3 coal-fired power plants are built next to rivers, 

4 and the shallow alluvial aquifers are really 

5 important as water supplies aquifers. 

6 I've been compiling information about the 

7 location of public water supply wells and private 

8 wells in proximity to power plants, and the 

9 Harding Street Plant in Indianapolis is one 

10 example where there is a public water supply well 

11 field, a well field protection area within a 

12 3-mile radius of the power plant, as well as more 

13 than 100 private wells within 3 miles. 

14 Further, the industry documents generally 

15 assume that groundwater in these alluvial 

16 aquifers is moving in the same direction as the 

17 adjacent river, when in fact if you look at a 

18 more detailed level, there is often documentation 

19 that groundwater can flow in the opposite 

20 direction, especially if there are significant 

21 water withdrawals in the vicinity that could 

22 change the groundwater flow. And an example of 
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1 that is the Gibson Power Plant where there is 

2 documentation of groundwater contamination in 

3 wells that are upriver from the plant. 

4 So we encourage EPA to conduct regional 

5 hearings to take comments on all aspects of power 

6 plant waste, so we can learn more about the real 

7 impacts of these facilities in this country, and 

8 we hope that EPA will adopt the strongest 

9 protections possible to prevent this pollution. 

10 Thank you. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

12 Julia Wynn is here now? 

13 MS. WYNN: Thank you for the opportunity 

14 to present my testimony today. My name is Julia 

15 Wynn. I am with the Policy Legislation Team at 

16 Earthjustice, an environmental law organization 

17 dedicated to protecting our natural resources and 

18 defending the right of all people to a healthy 

19 environment. 

20 At the core of our work is a commitment 

21 to safeguarding essential tenets of human health, 

22 including the water we rely on in so many ways to 
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1 sustain us as human beings, yet toxic pollutants 

2 from coal-fired power plants threaten to rescind 

3 our fundamental right to clean water, clogging 

4 U.S. waterways with hundreds of thousands of 

5 pounds of chemicals that by nature linger in the 

6 environment for years. These contaminants pose 

7 serious health risks to communities and 

8 ecosystems located near power plants. 

9 Studies have shown that exposure to toxic 

10 pollutants can cause cancer as well as serious 

11 damage to the circulatory system, nervous system, 

12 and critical organs, such as kidneys. Aquatic 

13 organisms also suffer debilitating contagion when 

14 these chemicals infiltrate their water, trigging 

15 sweeping fatalities across water ecosystems. 

16 This not only jeopardizes biodiversity, but also 

17 impacts the fishing industry and the health of 

18 consumers. 

19 Earthjustice is concerned that EPA 

20 guidelines limiting toxic effluent inadequately 

21 addressed the adverse effects on public health 

22 and water from coal-fired power plant discharges. 
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1 EPA must carry out its mandate by ensuring that 

2 all communities are adequately protected from 

3 harmful effluents. The strictest standards for 

4 chemical discharge and the disposal of toxic coal 

5 ash are the only regulations that will ensure 

6 that obligation is met. 

7 Earthjustice urges EPA to implement a 

8 zero discharge policy for coal ash impoundments 

9 and other wastewaters, so that our waterways 

10 remain clean enough to sustain healthy 

11 lifestyles. Communities should not be exposed to 

12 mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic 

13 pollutants to any degree in their drinking water. 

14 Wastewater should also be subject to evaporation 

15 treatment to guarantee that dry waste is disposed 

16 of safely in protective landfills. 

17 When public health is at risk, partial 

18 advocacy is not enough. We need EPA to enact the 

19 strongest and most effective measures possible 

20 concerning effluent limitations for steam 

21 electric power plants to ensure that our 

22 environment is livable. Furthermore, finalizing 
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1 the coal ash we proposed over 3 years ago is 

2 another essential EPA action that would progress 

3 our fight against toxic waste and its threat to 

4 health. 

5 Earthjustice urges EPA to implement these 

6 two policies, ensuring effective regulation of 

7 wastewater and solid waste. They are central to 

8 preserving the clean environment that all people 

9 deserve. 

10 Thank you. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

12 Mary Anne Hitt? 

13 MS. HITT: My name is Mary. Thank you 

14 for the opportunity to speak today. I am the 

15 director of the Beyond Coal Campaign at the 

16 Sierra Club, and on behalf of the Sierra Club and 

17 our 2 million members and supporters, I am here 

18 today to both offer our support for EPA's 

19 proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines for power 

20 plants and to call on the agency to adopt a 

21 strong final standard that offers the best 

22 possible protection for our health, for the 
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1 health of our kids, and the health of the 

2 streams, rivers, and lakes that we all love and 

3 upon which so many of us depend. 

4 As a mom who loves to take my little 

5 3-year-old daughter swimming, fishing, and 

6 boating in the streams and rivers of West 

7 Virginia where I live, I know how much is at 

8 stake. I have worked personally for over a 

9 decade to tackle coal pollution and move America 

10 to clean energy, and that work has taken me from 

11 the coal fields of Appalachia to the halls of 

12 Congress. I thought I had seen it all, but until 

13 we ramped up our work on this standard last year, 

14 I actually had no idea that coal-fired power 

15 plants were the number-one source of toxic water 

16 pollution in the United States, to the tune of 

17 billions of pounds a year of dangerous 

18 pollutants, like mercury, lead, and arsenic, and 

19 I also had no idea that in most states, this 

20 increasingly toxic pollution is being dumped 

21 straight into our streams and rivers and lakes, 

22 essentially without being treated at all, due to 
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1 sorely outdated national standards that are 31 

2 years old and fail to set any limits on many 

3 dangerous pollutants. 

4 When I tell my friends, my family, even 

5 my coworkers who work closely on these issues 

6 about this, they can't believe it either. I have 

7 explained to them that, yes, the Clean Water Act 

8 is one of our nation's greatest achievements, and 

9 thanks to this historic legislation, our rivers 

10 are no longer catching on fire, and our waterways 

11 are safer and healthier than they were decades 

12 ago. 

13 But 40 years after the act was passed, 

14 the coal industry is still polluting with 

15 impunity thanks to a loophole no other industry 

16 has enjoyed. That is about to change, and how 

17 much it will change, now depends on you. 

18 The Sierra Club is calling on the EPA to 

19 adopt a standard that adequately protects public 

20 health and our waterways. That means a standard 

21 that requires a dry handling of coal ash, moving 

22 away from settling ponds that do essentially 
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1 nothing to treat the waste, and using best water 

2 treatment technologies for scrubber sludge and 

3 leachate. These are labeled Options 4 and 5 in 

4 the Proposed Rule. 

5 As you know, we have technologies 

6 available today in use at some coal plants, as a 

7 matter of fact, that can treat this pollution at 

8 a modest cost. EPA has every reason to adopt a 

9 strong standard, but I understand you are under 

10 great pressure to adopt a weaker and inadequate 

11 standard. This is no surprise. 

12 As President Obama noted in his climate 

13 speech last month, this is the boilerplate 

14 reaction of polluters anytime improved health and 

15 safety protections are proposed. As the 

16 President also noted, these gloom-and-doom 

17 scenarios never come to pass. Industry adapts 

18 and evolves, and we all enjoy cleaner air and 

19 water. I implore you to stand firm and adopt a 

20 robust standard that will really protect our 

21 water and our kids. After all, it might be quite 

22 a long time before we get another chance. 
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1 I want to close by noting that the many 

2 people who spoke before me have traveled from 

3 across the nation making very long trips to this 

4 hearing today because their health and the health 

5 of their families is threatened by what is a 

6 completely solvable problem. You now have the 

7 solution within your grasp, the opportunity to 

8 clean up the majority of our nation's toxic water 

9 pollution, save lives, prevent our kids from 

10 getting sick, and make sure our water is safe to 

11 drink and our fish are safe to eat, but the 

12 weaker options EPA has proposed won't do the job. 

13 We need the EPA to finalize strong Effluent 

14 Limitation Guidelines for power plants, Options 4 

15 and 5, in the Proposed Rule. Our kids are 

16 counting on you. 

17 Thank you. 

18 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

19 Claudia Friedetzky? 

20 MS. FRIEDETZKY: Good afternoon. My name 

21 is Claudia Friedetzky, and I am the conservation 

22 representation of the Maryland Sierra Club, and I 
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1 manage our chapter's water protection campaigns, 

2 with a focus on Chesapeake Bay restoration. And 

3 I appreciate the opportunity to testify today. 

4 I am here today as an advocate who has 

5 fought global warming pollution since 2007. In 

6 fact, that's why I entered the field of 

7 environmental advocacy, because I was concerned 

8 about climate change, and since 2011, I've been 

9 working on water pollution in the Chesapeake Bay 

10 for the Maryland Chapter. 

11 Most importantly, though, I am here today 

12 as the mother of two young boys, and on their 

13 behalf, I'm concerned with the impact of fossil 

14 fuel pollution on our atmosphere and our 

15 waterways, two resources that are key for the 

16 future of humanity and the planet. 

17 Thanks in large part of EPA's leadership, 

18 there is now, after decades of neglect and half 

19 measures, a robust process in place to restore 

20 the Chesapeake Bay through a commitment to 

21 reducing nutrient and sediment pollution. 

22 Despite the substantial progress that has been 
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1 made on nutrient pollution, toxics in our 

2 waterways caused by power plants continues to 

3 degrade and impact our waterways, affecting the 

4 health and safety of American families in the 

5 Chesapeake Bay watershed and across the country. 

6 For example, in the Chesapeake Bay, 70 

7 percent of the bay's tidal water segments are 

8 fully or partially impaired as a result of the 

9 presence of toxic contaminants, according to a 

10 2010 report issued by the Chesapeake Bay program, 

11 which is the EPA. In some areas of the bay 

12 watershed, fish consumption advisories have been 

13 established as a result of concentrations of 

14 toxic contaminants, including in particular 

15 mercury and lead. Mercury and lead stemming 

16 primarily from power plant pollution and other 

17 sources are potent neurotoxins that accumulate in 

18 the food chain and cause persistent, 

19 developmental, and behavioral problems in 

20 children and lead to a drastically lowering of 

21 IQ. 

22 With the health of children and entire 
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1 families at stake, EPA must act and put the most 

2 stringent national guidelines in place to reduce 

3 water pollution from power plants. EPA should be 

4 setting a zero discharge standard in requiring 

5 rigorous treatment of the heavy metals in any 

6 remaining waste. 

7 It is critical that EPA stands with 

8 American citizens and holds the line against big 

9 polluters who apparently have managed to weaken 

10 EPA's original proposal already. We cannot allow 

11 big polluters who are content to make a profit on 

12 the backs of families and our natural resources 

13 to continue to use our waterways as dumping 

14 ground for toxic chemicals. 

15 And I just wanted to add one more thing, 

16 which is that the lady from North Carolina has 

17 suggested that we are better than this, this 

18 country is better than this, and I believe that 

19 the hallmark of bad environmental or lacking 

20 environmental regulation, that's a characteristic 

21 of third world countries, not first world 

22 countries that should be a leader in the world to 
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1 establishing high standards on environmental 

2 protection, so I am asking you to lead on this 

3 issue. 

4 Thank you. 

5 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

6 Craig Segall? 

7 MR. SEGALL: Hi. Craig Segall, staff 

8 attorney with the Sierra Club. Thank you all for 

9 being here today. I know it's been a long road 

10 to get to this point, and it will be a further 

11 long road to get to the end of it. 

12 So I think it's appropriate that the map 

13 above us makes the rivers of the United States 

14 very clear, but aligns most of the state and 

15 national boundaries, remain the core of the 

16 country. I think one thing we've heard today is 

17 how deeply affected communities across the 

18 country have been by the 31 years of regulatory 

19 failure that EPA is seeking to correct. 

20 It makes me think linking the dark line 

21 of the Ohio up there. I'm thinking of all the 

22 plants that pour into it, of a time I spent some 
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1 years ago in a former bourbon warehouse, which 

2 now holds the Kentucky Department of the 

3 Environment -- it's a good environment for 

4 bourbon and less so for people -- deposing them 

5 as to why the Trimble Power Plant and LG&E 

6 facility, just upstream of Louisville wastewater 

7 intakes, has been allowed to discharge huge 

8 amounts of coal-contaminated water from its ash 

9 ponds, both from leaks and through permits. 

10 And two lines stayed with me. The first 

11 was asking a treatment engineer there, "Well, 

12 shouldn't you clean this up?" and he said, "Well, 

13 we could, but we won't know where to start. 

14 They're all leaking," and asking the permit 

15 writer, "Well, didn't EPA say in the Hanlon memo, 

16 that you have a best professional judgment 

17 allegation to take care of this, despite the 

18 absence of national standards?" and having not 

19 just the permit writer, but the administrative 

20 law judge tell me, "EPA can say whatever it likes 

21 in guidance. We just aren't going to do that, 

22 and Kentucky hasn't." 
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1 I remember thinking at the time, "Well, 

2 that's Kentucky. Surely, it's not a national 

3 problem," but I'm here to tell you now that 

4 having reviewed the water discharge permits for 

5 every coal power plant in the country, it is a 

6 national problem. No one has done this 

7 consistently and well. Most states haven't done 

8 it at all, and many, many states don't even 

9 provide consistent monitoring. 

10 And it's become clear that neither the 

11 Clean Water Act's best professional judgment 

12 mandate nor EPA's helpful comments nor permit 

13 objectives if they ever come are sufficient. We 

14 need our national standards, and we need them now 

15 in this narrow window where scrubbers are being 

16 installed as a result of their rules. It's, I 

17 think, really generational opportunity to address 

18 this problem, that if it fails, leaves the 

19 protection of our nation's waterways to the legal 

20 tenacity of citizens groups, and that although 

21 the option was never the intent of Congress, it 

22 is tragic that folks who really should be able to 
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1 spend their lives, just having their lives -- are 

2 forced to devote their time and treasure to 

3 securing basic human rights, rights that EPA and 

4 government should be securing for them. It is 

5 personally and professionally offensive that we 

6 have to do this work, and it's time for that to 

7 change. 

8 For that reason, it's so encouraging to 

9 see the strong options in this rule and so 

10 utterly discouraging to see what has been forced 

11 upon EPA by OMB. The red line for this rule 

12 demonstrates OMB bureaucrats, I think, acting at 

13 the behest of industry and other less sensitive 

14 issues, reversing EPA's scientific conclusions. 

15 There's lines in EPA's version of this 

16 rule that talk about how utterly inadequate the 

17 holes in the ground, as nonetheless we talked 

18 about, are for treatment. OMB rewrote that to 

19 suggest those holes in the ground could be just 

20 fine. We find that profoundly troubling. This 

21 administration's job and its commitment to the 

22 public is to protect public health, protect its 
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1 environment. It's time to walk away from those 

2 options. 

3 I will note as a lawyer, I don't believe 

4 those options written not by EPA's experts, but 

5 by OMB bureaucrats -- are entitled to any form of 

6 Chevron or other administrative deference since 

7 they were not constructed by the agency 

8 scientific staff in response to political 

9 pressure. 

10 We can do better than this. I think, 

11 ultimately, our charge is to avoid the 

12 unnecessary misery of communities who must suffer 

13 from this systematic negligence who must devote 

14 their time to fighting to get what government 

15 should be guaranteeing them and what Congress 

16 guaranteed in the Clean Water Act. We deeply 

17 appreciate your efforts to move us forward, and 

18 we trust that this remaining road will lead us to 

19 a good place. 

20 Thank you. 

21 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

22 Melinda Pierce? 
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1 MS. PIERCE: Good afternoon. My name is 

2 Melinda Pierce. I am the deputy director of 

3 Federal Policy for the Sierra Club. Thank you 

4 truly for what you do, and thank you for the 

5 opportunity to provide public comment. 

6 I am delighted to be here and hear the 

7 strong, clear, impassioned advocacy for strong 

8 Effluent Limitation Guidelines to clean up toxic 

9 wastewater pollution from power plants. 

10 Put very simply, water is one of our 

11 nation's most precious resources. Coal-fired 

12 power plants are the number-one source of toxic 

13 water pollution discharged into our lakes and 

14 rivers and streams. With the advent of stronger 

15 air pollution controls, much of the dangerous 

16 toxic metals and other poisons that were 

17 previously released into the air we breathe are 

18 now being controlled and captured, but what has 

19 been a win for our air has created new problems 

20 for our waters. 

21 Because of the adoption of modern control 

22 technologies for air pollution, the quantity and 
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1 the concentration of toxic chemicals being 

2 controlled and captured in our wastewater streams 

3 has greatly increased and is now being directly 

4 discharged into our public waterways across the 

5 nation. 

6 These dangerous chemicals, toxic metals, 

7 and known carcinogens, such as lead, arsenic, 

8 mercury, selenium, and cadmium, present a clear 

9 public threat to our public health. 

10 For too long, we have failed to address 

11 adequately this pervasive problem. It's time to 

12 tackle this pollution. EPA's proposed standards 

13 will ensure that power plants are responsible for 

14 cleaning up their toxic pollution instead of 

15 pumping it into the lakes and streams where we 

16 swim, fish, and boat. 

17 The Sierra Club calls upon EPA to 

18 establish the strongest possible standards to 

19 address toxic wastewater pollution from 

20 coal-fired power plants. America needs strong 

21 pollution standards to protect public health and 

22 the environment. 
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1 EPA must require a final standard that 

2 adopts the proposals put forward in both Options 

3 4 and 5 that mandate the dry handling of coal ash 

4 we well as water treatment technologies for 

5 scrubber sludge and leachate. 

6 Sierra Club supports a zero discharge 

7 policy. 

8 Thank you. 

9 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

10 Vanessa Pierce? 

11 MS. PIERCE: Thank you. My name is 

12 Vanessa Pierce, and I am the Eastern regional 

13 director for the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal 

14 Campaign, and I, like my colleagues, am here to 

15 urge the EPA to swiftly adopt the most protective 

16 possible standards in its new Effluent Limitation 

17 Guidelines. 

18 I oversee 19 states in this great country 

19 from Maine to Florida, and over 70 percent of the 

20 coal plants in those states have no limits on the 

21 amount of toxic heavy metals that they can dump 

22 into our waterways. 
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1 And I want to take a minute just to share 

2 two stories from those states that illustrate the 

3 need for the adoption -- for the timely adoption 

4 of a zero liquid discharge standard. 

5 In North Carolina, Duke Energy's L.V. 

6 Sutton Power Plant, which is located near 

7 Wilmington, dumps its ash into two unlined ponds 

8 on the banks of Sutton Late, which is an 

9 impoundment of the Cape Fear tributary. The Cape 

10 Fear is a river that is already endangered with 

11 high levels of heavy metals, and the ash water 

12 that dumps into this tributary ultimately 

13 receives no treatment other than settling before 

14 it's dumped into the lake. 

15 Duke's water permit imposes no limits in 

16 the concentration of metals that can be 

17 discharged, and we're now seeing the impacts of 

18 this free pass downstream where fish in the 

19 Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Cape Fear 

20 River contain dangerous levels of mercury, and 

21 residents and tourists alike are warned not to 

22 consume them. 
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1 The river below the Sutton plant violates 

2 water quality standards for nickel and copper, 

3 and it is unsafe for harvesting aquatic life. 

4 This is no way for us to live. 

5 It's also critical for EPA to move 

6 swiftly on setting these standards because, as we 

7 have started to control the air pollution from 

8 power plants, we are now starting to see those 

9 same pollutants being caught as scrubber sludge 

10 and transferred to our water, so the communities 

11 that once had to breathe these dangerous 

12 pollutants will now have to drink them unless the 

13 rules change. 

14 A prime example of this problem can be 

15 seen in Pennsylvania in the case of First 

16 Energy's Bruce Mansfield Plant. This massive 

17 power plant is equipped with wet scrubbers, the 

18 fact that we applaud. Unfortunately, though, for 

19 years, First Energy has sent its scrubber waste 

20 and ash handling waste into the Little Blue Run 

21 coal ash impoundment, which is the largest 

22 unlined ash impoundment in the United States. 
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1 In 2011, First Energy dumped over 100,000 

2 pounds of arsenic and selenium into this 

3 impoundment, and these pollutants and other toxic 

4 heavy metals are dumped into the Little Blue Run 

5 Stream and Mill Creek, ultimately making their 

6 way into the Ohio River. 

7 Pennsylvania regulators have identified 

8 these waterways as unsafe for aquatic life due to 

9 heavy metals and other problems, and they have 

10 advised community members to limit their 

11 consumption of fish caught in this river. And 

12 yet, this power plant, Bruce Mansfield, operates 

13 under an expired water permit that imposes no 

14 discharge limits or monitoring requirements for 

15 any of these metals where the impoundment enters 

16 public waters. 

17 The people of Pennsylvania and residents 

18 across the country have been left vulnerable by 

19 states that don't act and by outdated rules that 

20 haven't changed in the last three decades. This 

21 is why it is time for the EPA to finalize these 

22 long overdue standards and to require all coal 
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1 plants to eliminate their most toxic discharges. 

2 Doing so will prevent children from getting sick, 

3 will save lives, and ensure that our water is 

4 safe to drink and our fish are safe to eat. 

5 Thank you. 

6 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

7 Elena Rios? 

8 MS. RIOS: Good afternoon. I'm here on 

9 behalf of the National Hispanic Medical 

10 Association, or NHMA, a non-profit association 

11 representing 45,000 Hispanic physicians in the 

12 United States. 

13 The mission of the NHMA is to improve the 

14 health of Hispanic populations. I'm honored to 

15 provide comments to the Environmental Protection 

16 Agency for this hearing on the power plants that 

17 we've heard a lot about today. These power 

18 plants contribute over half of all toxic 

19 pollutants to surface waters by industrial 

20 categories regulated by the Clean Air Act. We 

21 are most concerned about the coal waste going to 

22 public water treatment, but also to the lead, 
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1 mercury, arsenic, selenium, and other minerals 

2 which become toxic pollutants, causing cancers 

3 and neurological damage among Hispanics and 

4 others who reside in industrial communities near 

5 these plants. 

6 Of growing concern to our organization is 

7 the disparate impact on the health and quality of 

8 life that pollutants from coal-fired power plants 

9 have on Hispanics. We have advocated 

10 persistently to eliminate health disparities 

11 among this population, and four of the five 

12 leading causes of death -- cancer, heart disease, 

13 and diabetes -- have all been linked to these 

14 toxic pollutants. 

15 Without strong and effective Effluent 

16 Limitation Guidelines from EPA, harmful 

17 substances will continue to pollute the waterways 

18 of communities hampered by low socioeconomic 

19 health outcomes, decreased productivity of our 

20 students and workers, and the health of all 

21 Americans. 

22 So the NHMA urges EPA to implement 
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1 guidelines that ensure the health and safety of 

2 our communities and require zero discharge of 

3 deadly chemicals into our waterways and 

4 evaporation treatment of wastewaters, so that dry 

5 waste can be safely disposed in secure landfills. 

6 Lastly, as clinicians supporting public 

7 health policy, we urge EPA to address the threat 

8 to health from the coal-fired power plants by 

9 finalizing the coal ash rule that the agency 

10 proposed over 3 years ago. 

11 Thank you. 

12 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

13 Allison Chin? 

14 MS. CHIN: Thank you for the opportunity 

15 to testify in support of critical safeguards for 

16 toxic water pollution from coal plants. While 

17 the Environmental Protection Agency has called 

18 this hearing specifically on the pretreatment 

19 part of the proposed water pollution standards, 

20 the agency needs to listen more broadly about the 

21 serious water pollution caused by coal-burning 

22 power plants. 
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1 All across the United States, millions of 

2 gallons per day of water pollution laced with 

3 toxic pollutants, including heavy metals like 

4 arsenic, mercury, selenium, and lead flow from 

5 coal-fired power plants into our rivers, lakes, 

6 and streams. 

7 The Clean Water Act was established to 

8 deal with such pollution, but after three decades 

9 of inaction, the largest industrial source of 

10 toxic water pollution continues to foul our 

11 waters. 

12 An update is long overdue, and I applaud 

13 the EPA for proposing a rule to finally clean up 

14 this mess, and while there are many options 

15 proposed in the rule, I strongly encourage the 

16 EPA to finalize the strongest option and move 

17 towards zero discharge of these water pollutants. 

18 I am invested in this at multiple levels. 

19 Professionally, as a cancer biologist, I know 

20 exposure to heavy metals, dangerous chemicals, 

21 can cause cancer, birth defects, and even death. 

22 Personally, I am concerned about health risks for 
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1 myself, for my family, for friends, from water 

2 and food pollution from coal plants. What makes 

3 it so egregious is that poisoning our waters can 

4 be prevented. These long overdue standards, if 

5 finalized in their strongest form, will require 

6 all coal plants to eliminate their most toxic 

7 discharges and use available, existing technology 

8 to treat dangerous heavy metals in their 

9 wastewater. 

10 Limiting the amount of toxics in our 

11 water through common sense standards will save 

12 lives, prevent children from getting sick, and 

13 ensure our water is safe to drink and our fish 

14 safe to eat. 

15 My story is just one of millions out 

16 there on how this pollution is directly affecting 

17 our daily lives. No community should have to 

18 worry about the safety of its water or the health 

19 of its rivers. That is the guarantee that 

20 Congress set out in the Clean Water Act, but that 

21 promise has long been deferred. 

22 For the sake of the hundreds of thousands 
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1 of Americans who suffer because of that 

2 indefensible delay, it's time now for EPA at 

3 least to clean up this toxic industry. Clean 

4 water is a basic human right. We all deserve 

5 safe water to drink, clean lakes and rivers to 

6 boat and play in, flourishing watersheds, and 

7 healthy fish to eat. For too long, the coal 

8 industry has polluted our precious waters with 

9 impunity. There is no reason to tolerate 

10 continued dumping, and the Clean Water Act 

11 mandates cleanup. 

12 The strongest of EPA's proposed options 

13 will get us to that future. EPA has shown that 

14 the strongest options will be affordable and the 

15 most beneficial to our communities. I ask that 

16 you move to finalize the strongest option and 

17 move us toward zero discharge of pollution. 

18 Thank you for taking the time today to 

19 listen to me and to the other people who have 

20 come to D.C. to speak in favor of clean water for 

21 all Americans. 

22 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 
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1 Kristin Cook? 

2 MS. COOK: Hello. This is going to be 

3 short and sweet. Hello and good afternoon. My 

4 name is Kristin Cook, and I'm a resident of 

5 Maryland, mother of three, and environmental 

6 activist. Thank you for letting me speak today. 

7 With regards to toxic water from power 

8 plants or ELG, the reason we're all here today, I 

9 must preface this by saying that I think it's 

10 odd, bizarre that we even have to testify to the 

11 basic desire to have no toxic anything dumped in 

12 our water sources, but for the record, it's my 

13 strong position that we should be setting a 

14 standard of zero discharge and requiring rigorous 

15 treatment of toxic heavy metals in the remaining 

16 waste. 

17 My position that there should be zero 

18 discharge allowed is based on two items. One, 

19 speaking on a local level, the Chesapeake Bay and 

20 its tributaries are already suffering from the 

21 effects of pollution and are just starting to 

22 make a slow comeback. 
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1 More importantly, I don't trust coal 

2 energy companies to abide by set guidelines. For 

3 example, there's a possible lawsuit against the 

4 operator of three coal-fired plants in Maryland 

5 -- Chalk Point, Morgantown, and Dickerson -- for 

6 discharging excessive amounts of nutrient 

7 pollution from Chesapeake Bay rivers and trying 

8 to mask their violations by transferring 

9 pollution credits among facilities. 

10 On a personal note, my husband likes to 

11 take the kids fishing, as you can see from -- 

12 well, this isn't a very good picture, but this is 

13 a good picture. You know, we like to fish, of 

14 course, and it's sad to think that we have to 

15 question the fish that we catch. It's sad to 

16 think that we aren't comfortable swimming in 

17 certain waters. When will we see that by 

18 compromising the environment, we only hurt 

19 ourselves, and how penny-smart and dollar-foolish 

20 are we in thinking that it's okay to allow some 

21 degree of pollution only to have to pay for 

22 cleaning it up later, not to mention the health 
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1 costs associated with sickness due to heavy metal 

2 contamination? 

3 So, in closing, be strong, and remember 

4 that your job is to protect the public and not 

5 the power plants. And I want to commend Mr. Wood 

6 for using a reusable water bottle. 

7 Thank you. Thank you very much. 

8 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

9 We are going to take a break for about 10 

10 minutes. It's now 2:43, so we will reconvene at 

11 about 2:53, and Liz Perera will be the next 

12 speaker. 

13 The next group of speakers, please sit up 

14 here and be ready to speak at your time. 

15 So we will see you in 10 minutes. 

16 Thanks. 

17 [Recess taken from 2:43 to 2:52 p.m.] 

18 Session C 

19 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. We're going to 

20 resume the hearing on pretreatment standards. 

21 Is Elizabeth Perera here? 

22 [No audible response.] 
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1 MR. STRASSLER: Elizabeth Perera? 

2 [No audible response.] 

3 MR. STRASSLER: No. We'll come back. 

4 Let's see. Oh, Kate Ortenzi. 

5 MS. ORTENZI: Hi. My name is Kate 

6 Ortenzi, and I'm here representing myself and as 

7 a member of the University of Maryland community 

8 in support of the EPA's updated Effluent 

9 Limitation Guidelines. 

10 I'm here in front of you today because 

11 coal-burning power plant effluent affects my life 

12 and the life of the ones I love directly. 

13 I'm an outdoorsy person, and this 

14 inclination has found me teaching 100 

15 undergraduate students at the University of 

16 Maryland. One of the perks of this job is 

17 getting to take them on weekly field trips. This 

18 fall, I will be taking them paddling in the 

19 Chesapeake Bay and to visit a local coal plant. 

20 Unfortunately, we will be able to do both on the 

21 same trip. 

22 Currently, there are more than 30 
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1 coal-fired power plants in the Chesapeake Bay 

2 watershed with untold cumulative effects on the 

3 Bay and all that depend on it. 

4 In my class, Environment, Technology, and 

5 Economy, my students become well versed in the 

6 effects of heavy metals emitted by coal plants on 

7 our local industries that depend on the Bay. For 

8 crabbers, oystermen, and the Vitamin E industry 

9 dependent on the Menhaden fish, these industries 

10 are incredibly vulnerable to pollution and have 

11 all been suffering, especially the Vitamin E 

12 industry affected by heavy metals that 

13 bioaccumulate in the fish. 

14 I am personally concerned about business 

15 because after I leave the university, I intend on 

16 starting my own as a farmer and chef. With a 

17 degree in conservation biology, I intend to be 

18 extremely choosy as a find a place that is right 

19 for me and where I can offer products where I can 

20 account for every ingredient in them. 

21 Current effluent water standards will 

22 drive young entrepreneurs such as me away from 
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1 locations where business could be affected. I am 

2 concerned about coal-fired power plant effluent 

3 because of the effects of the metals emitted. 

4 For example, boron is taken up excessively by 

5 plants when soil is contaminated and eating 

6 contaminated plants can cause reproductive and 

7 liver damage. 

8 Surface water containing selenium, 

9 arsenic, or cobalt, all present in effluent, 

10 takes more than 70 years to reach peak 

11 concentrations in groundwater. This means that 

12 even if well water is safe today, it is likely 

13 that it will become increasingly toxic over the 

14 next three generations. 

15 Even though we know the individual 

16 toxicity of all these chemicals, exposure to 

17 several of them at once, even at minute levels, 

18 produces an increased and ignoble risk to health. 

19 I am not only looking for a place to 

20 start my career, but since I am recently engaged, 

21 I am also looking for a place to build a home and 

22 a family. If my future children are remotely as 
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1 inclined as I was to spend every warm day 

2 swimming and paddling, I will be sure to find a 

3 location that I know is safe. Locations of coal 

4 plants are something that I personally look at 

5 when I am making these life decisions, as the 

6 health of those I care about are a dependent. 

7 I urge the EPA to apply the strictest 

8 effluent limitations considered for healthy 

9 businesses and healthy families. I hope that 

10 this time next year as I take my students 

11 paddling, I can tell them about the improvements 

12 made in coal plant regulations that are working 

13 to improve our waterways and help our fledgling 

14 industries grow. And most of all, I hope to be 

15 able to expand my search for a home and a place 

16 to grow my business unhindered by concerns of 

17 heavy metal water pollution. 

18 Thank you. 

19 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

20 Is Leslie Fields here? 

21 [No audible response.] 

22 MR. STRASSLER: No? Okay. 
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1 All right. Kevin Bromberg? 

2 MR. BROMBERG: Hello, EPA colleagues. 

3 It's been a while since I've seen you folks. We 

4 are pleased to have had the opportunity to work 

5 on this rule, and now you folks will be hearing a 

6 somewhat different perspective than what you've 

7 heard before. 

8 Kevin Bromberg with the U.S. Small 

9 Business Administration, Office of Advocacy, and 

10 our role is to protect small entities before the 

11 federal government. 

12 In the context of this rule, it's small 

13 independently owned utilities, small rural 

14 electric co-ops, and small municipalities. 

15 There was a Reg Flex Analysis done by 

16 EPA, and here, we have hundreds of small entities 

17 who own power plants, but EPA surprisingly has 

18 certified the rule as not having a significant 

19 economic effect on these small entities, and the 

20 first problem that we want to address is 

21 transparency. 

22 We are unable to look behind that 
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1 finding. EPA thinks there is no problem here, 

2 but we cannot look behind that finding for the 

3 following reasons. 

4 There were no model plant costs for us to 

5 look at. EPA does not identify the small 

6 entity-owned utilities and their respective 

7 costs, and this is actually now -- the last point 

8 of it is of interest to the general audience. 

9 EPA does not identify plant-specific pollutant 

10 removals or the cost for each plant. I would 

11 think the public would want to know how much 

12 pollution is contributed by each plant as 

13 estimated by EPA, and EPA did fabulous work here. 

14 And I'd like the public to be able to see that, 

15 minus the 14 plants that claimed CBI. But 

16 hundreds of plants, this should be made available 

17 for. 

18 We have three preliminary conclusions 

19 from the analysis we've done. One is that the 

20 ash pollution removals have been vastly 

21 overestimated by EPA, and that's a key 

22 consideration when you're developing how to do 
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1 your Final Rule. 

2 The cost of zero discharge of bottom ash 

3 and fly ash can be very prohibitive for small 

4 units, and those units would be better off 

5 closing, which isn't as good an option for 

6 certain people, than having those costs, but that 

7 is something that needs to be considered under 

8 the Clean Water Act. 

9 And EPA's regulatory concept of excluding 

10 smaller plants and relying on regulating only the 

11 larger plants for several of these options -- fly 

12 ash, bottom ash, and FGD wastewater -- make a lot 

13 of sense. 

14 Just to give one example of an EPA 

15 option, the EPA put on the table an option for 

16 retrofitting only the bottom ash plants under 400 

17 megawatts cutoff, and that would result in 

18 regulating only 115 plants instead of 240 plants 

19 under the Option 4. That illustrates how you can 

20 maximize the cost effectiveness of the 

21 regulation. 

22 Now, the major problem in the rulemaking 
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1 that we saw is EPA overestimating the toxic 

2 weight pollutant removals. This is a fancy way 

3 of estimating how much pollution is in there and 

4 how to weight them. 

5 The ash removals were overestimated by up 

6 to a factor of 10, relying on two factors. One 

7 is non-detect data, and the other is 

8 non-representative data from the '70s. We have a 

9 data set that has a median age of August 2011, 

10 and that data shows that the data has been 

11 overestimated for ash pollution by a factor of 

12 roughly 7. 

13 And to illustrate half the problem, half 

14 the problem with sulfide data, EPA had 18 

15 non-detect data points, 3 detect data points, 85 

16 percent non-detects. Normally, you would throw 

17 that way, and you would not be using that data, 

18 but EPA decided to use that data in any event. 

19 With regard to the three detects, it 

20 turns out that the source water, the incoming 

21 value was the same as the discharge value, and 

22 normally, you would think that the plant would be 
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1 adding something. Well, there was nothing added 

2 there. That would be another reason for 

3 discarding. That's half of the toxic weight 

4 pollutants data there. 

5 So we are going to in conclusion -- what 

6 should EPA do about this data in front of it? It 

7 should consider what the pollutant levels really 

8 are from those plants, consider the NRDC decree 

9 consent levels on how you can exclude plants that 

10 have de minimis levels of pollution, and finalize 

11 regulatory options that allow small plants to 

12 stay in operation and still have de minimis 

13 levels of pollution as a result of the Final 

14 Rule. 

15 Thank you. 

16 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

17 Pardon me if I don't pronounce the name 

18 correctly. Aoife Semar? 

19 MS. SEMAR: Hello. My name is Aoife 

20 Semar, and I am a student at Skidmore College, 

21 and I am an intern at the Sierra Club. 

22 Coal provides an important energy source 
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1 and jobs for many Americans; however, 

2 coal-burning plants also produce dangerous 

3 toxins, which may harm the same people who should 

4 benefit from the energy produced by these plants. 

5 Because coal released in our local 

6 rivers, lakes, and streams affect so many people, 

7 today's hearing and public testimony is of 

8 special importance. 

9 Coal-burning plants release millions of 

10 pounds of toxic metals into our waterways. These 

11 chemicals can lead to serious health problems, 

12 including cancer and birth defects, yet nearly 

13 four out of five coal plants in the U.S. have no 

14 limits on the amount of toxins they are allowed 

15 to dump into the water. 

16 I live in New Jersey, a state where three 

17 active coal power plants operate, but only one of 

18 these plants has a permit that limits dumping of 

19 toxic metal. This is why the proposed national 

20 standards to limit toxins and wastewater from 

21 coal-burning plants are so important. Strong 

22 limits on the amount of toxins in our water will 
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1 ensure that communities may benefit from energy 

2 that sustains them rather than being harmed. 

3 Thank you. 

4 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

5 Disha Banik? 

6 MS. BANIK: Hi. My name is Disha, and I 

7 am a student at UC-Berkeley. I want to start off 

8 briefly illustrating the current state of coal 

9 plant water pollution. 

10 Right now, four out of five coal plants 

11 in the U.S. have no limits on the amount of toxic 

12 waste they are allowed to dump into our water. 

13 Coal plants are permitted to dump heavy metals 

14 like arsenics, selenium, boron, cadmium, mercury, 

15 and lead into our waterways, polluting drinking 

16 water, fishing areas, local rivers, and streams. 

17 And for the first time, the EPA has released 

18 national standards that limit the amount of 

19 toxins that coal plants can dump in our 

20 waterways, and I want to thank you for this 

21 action. This is the first time in over 30 years 

22 that the standards for water pollution from coal 
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1 plants has been updated, so thank you very much. 

2 And I thank you today not because I am 

3 directly affected by a coal power plant. I grew 

4 up in a relatively well-off and clean 

5 neighborhood in San Jose, California, and now I 

6 live in Berkeley, neither of which have coal 

7 plants near me. I don't use public waterways 

8 very often, and my drinking water is fantastic, 

9 but I know that is not the case for all 

10 Americans, and I don't have to travel very far 

11 from home to see this. I can go a little north 

12 to the coal plant in Stockton or down to the ones 

13 in California Central Valley. 

14 Over spring break, I actually did go to 

15 Central Valley, not to see coal plants, though. 

16 I went to learn about agriculture and labor 

17 issues, and there, I discovered a number of 

18 public health issues, the most pressing one being 

19 water quality. 

20 The water in many low-income communities 

21 primarily of color contain arsenic, nitrates, and 

22 other chemicals because the fertilizers, animal 
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1 waste, and pesticides on agribusiness farms would 

2 run off into the groundwater that became tap 

3 water. And in communities where the average 

4 annual income was less than 15,000 a year, 

5 families were paying double for water, for the 

6 tap water they used to wash clothes and shower 

7 and for the bottles that they bought for 

8 drinking, cooking, and brushing their teeth. And 

9 why this is relevant to this is that these 

10 communities in Central Valley face a double 

11 threat to their drinking water. One is from 

12 agribusiness, and another one is from coal. 

13 So I want to remind the EPA, the gravity 

14 of its proposed legislation –- regulations, and 

15 specify that specifically, their impacts on the 

16 health of individuals I met in March, and while I 

17 thank the EPA, I want to remind the EPA that 

18 there is more to be done. I encourage the agency 

19 to be bolder and even more thorough. EPA should 

20 be setting zero discharge standards on all coal 

21 plants and require rigorous treatment on toxic 

22 heavy metals and any remaining waste. 
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1 Also, while the proposed standards 

2 address pollution and coal plant wastewater, 

3 there are other types of water pollution that 

4 still need to be addressed, including coal ash. 

5 I encourage the EPA to move forward on 

6 these additional rules and to do so as quickly as 

7 possible. This is because I know that having 

8 safe, clean drinking water should not be a 

9 privilege. It is a basic human right. 

10 Thank you. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

12 Ernest Lehman? 

13 MR. LEHMAN: Good afternoon. Do you like 

14 that? Thank you for this opportunity to testify. 

15 My name is Ernest Lehman, and I am a resident of 

16 Alexandria, Virginia. I'm also the proud 

17 grandfather -- I know I don't look it -- of four 

18 beautiful, young, healthy granddaughters, and all 

19 of whom live in the Alexandria-Arlington area, 

20 doubly helpful there -- happy there. 

21 I also want them to remain healthy, and 

22 that's the reason I'm here. I come to you as a 
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1 grandparent, a citizen, and an active member of 

2 the Sierra Club to offer my views on the proposed 

3 coal-fired power plants water pollution 

4 standards. 

5 To get to the bottom line immediately, I 

6 urge you to adopt the most complete and stringent 

7 rules. We really need it. 

8 When I arrived in Alexandria in 2002, I 

9 became involved with closing the Potomac River 

10 Generating Station, PRGS, otherwise known as the 

11 Mirant Plant or the GenOn Potomac River 

12 Generating Station. It keeps changing. It has a 

13 new name now. It's called the "NRG plant." 

14 This is one of the oldest coal-fired 

15 power plants in the United States. It was the 

16 last one functioning in the metropolitan D.C. 

17 area. Happily, it closed on October 1st, 2012. 

18 Proudly, I was one of the many activists who 

19 helped convince the current owner of the plant, 

20 the NRG Corporation, to shut it down. 

21 We used many different strategies to 

22 close this plant. One of those strategies was an 
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1 attack on the plant's lack of compliance to the 

2 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, 

3 NPDES -- I'm sure you're familiar with that -- 

4 the permit requirements. The plant was running 

5 on an expired permit and requested a new one. 

6 The Sierra Club's legal staff gave me a 

7 copy of the document they had prepared to 

8 intervene in this matter. Sierra Club attorney 

9 Zachary M. Fabish and Joshua Stebbins and their 

10 staff produced the April 13th, 2011, letter, 

11 which the Sierra Club submitted to the EPA On 

12 behalf of a large number of environmental 

13 organizations and itself. 

14 A copy of this letter was being provided. 

15 I left that outside in the box, but I'll do it 

16 electronically also. 

17 I want to take this opportunity to thank 

18 the Sierra Club's legal team for producing such a 

19 well-crafted, detailed, and comprehensive 

20 submission. The relevance of this letter to 

21 today's hearings is obvious. Many of the 

22 concerns that this letter addressed in 2011 are 
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1 the same ones being addressed in the proposed 

2 regulations currently before the EPA. 

3 Some of the topics I will address do not 

4 relate directly to toxic waste, but they do help 

5 paint a more complete picture of the devastation 

6 and human toll that coal-fired power plants 

7 produce. 

8 We called the Mirant plant that was about 

9 a mile from our house the "butcher of the 

10 Potomac." Now, all plants with open cooling 

11 systems, such as the GenOn or the Mirant or the 

12 NRG plant, kill. They will. Tens to hundreds of 

13 millions of fish per year are killed by 

14 open-cycle power plants. Remember the GenOn 

15 plant was running for 60 years. The math is 

16 astounding: 60 years times 100 million comes out 

17 to a little bit of -- quite a few fish. 

18 A species of sturgeon, the shortnose 

19 sturgeon most probably, has been lost as a direct 

20 result of the plant's operation. 

21 Another thing, now, this -- you know, 

22 looking at this letter and its great detail, I 
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1 was struck by one part of it, and I said there 

2 wasn't much reaction to that. And that showed 

3 that the result of pollution was a reduced penile 

4 size. Now, I thought men might be concerned 

5 about something like that. It's part of the 

6 benefit of putting DEHP -- I'm being sarcastic -- 

7 in the water. It's a chemical, and it's part of 

8 the toxic waste from coal-fired power plants, and 

9 it is a probable -- it doesn't say "may" or 

10 "might" or "could." It's a probable human 

11 carcinogen. 

12 DEHP is known as an endocrine disrupter, 

13 and studies have associated DEHP with a number of 

14 reproductive disorders, including in humans the 

15 failure of the testes to distend and reduce 

16 penile size. I think that makes some -- some 

17 people should be concerned about that. 

18 I belong to part of a group that before 

19 they know how large it is, they cut off half of 

20 that. So, you know, this is something quite 

21 important. 

22 On to drinking water. Over the past 5 
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1 years, I have been made aware of the low quality 

2 of drinking water -- 

3 MR. STRASSLER: Five minutes. 

4 MR. LEHMAN: I'm going too long. Okay. 

5 -- available to us, and as a result, I 

6 decided that we would distill all of our water. 

7 This is the remains of a distillate taken about 2 

8 days ago. We do about a gallon every 2 days. 

9 Take a look at the water on your desk right 

10 there, and this is the remains of a gallon of 

11 distilled water from the water tap. 

12 We've got a job to do, folks, a serious 

13 job to do. Thank you very much. 

14 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

15 Matt Wasson. 

16 MR. WASSON: My name is Matt Wasson. I 

17 am the director of programs with Appalachian 

18 Voices. We are a regional non-profit 

19 organization that aims to address the greatest 

20 environmental threats facing the Southern and 

21 Central Appalachian region, and with that as our 

22 mission, it's no mistake that the Effluent 
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1 Limitation Guidelines is one of the top issues 

2 that we consider that we're working on as an 

3 organization. We do consider that discharge from 

4 power plants as one of the top threats to the 

5 region that we represent. 

6 I am here from North Carolina, and 

7 there's been plenty of others from North Carolina 

8 who have done an excellent job describing the 

9 threats, the pollution threats we face from the 

10 14 coal-fired power plants in the state. So I'm 

11 not going to get into that. I'm going to assume 

12 that you are fully aware of the issues we're 

13 facing. 

14 And what I really want to talk about is 

15 why it's so important that EPA use the full 

16 authority that you have been granted to follow 

17 the excellent science that you have generated to 

18 its logical conclusion and adopt either some sort 

19 of zero liquid discharge technology in your 

20 technology-based standards that you're 

21 developing. 

22 I think that we're all aware of the 
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1 pushback that EPA is facing around the issues of 

2 not just complaints about costs for power 

3 companies, but around more legitimate issues of 

4 cooperative federalism, that delicate balance 

5 that EPA has to find between states' rights and 

6 the need to protect the health and safety of all 

7 Americans. 

8 I believe it's because of this pushback 

9 that we find ourselves discussing a dizzyingly 

10 complex 400-page document with 8 options, and I 

11 think that's probably why the White House was 

12 more willing to stick its nose in where many of 

13 us believe it didn't belong. 

14 But when EPA is considering finalizing 

15 this rule, let's look back at the formation of 

16 the EPA and why you were given the authority and 

17 the latitude that you were given. Congress had 

18 dozens of hearings when it was considering the 

19 National Environmental Policy Act and when the 

20 Nixon administration created the EPA, and the 

21 issues they discussed were all about concerns 

22 about states' rights and agency capture at 
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1 different levels, and the authority that EPA was 

2 given to follow the science was very deliberate 

3 authority. That hasn't changed when power shifts 

4 in Congress changed, and so our hope is that you 

5 will follow what is clearly dictated by -- or 

6 should clearly be dictated by the scientific -- 

7 500 pages of scientific findings that you 

8 generated in support of this rule. 

9 And I wanted to speak, just give an 

10 example in North Carolina of why it's so 

11 important that EPA do that. 

12 In North Carolina, more than half of our 

13 residents are on well water, myself included, and 

14 we also happen to be home to what is now the 

15 largest and most powerful electric utility in the 

16 United States. 

17 In recent years, we have seen an 

18 unprecedented rollback of state rules protecting 

19 surface and groundwater, but as a result of bills 

20 that have been written by this very powerful 

21 utility -- and the most recent example is a bill 

22 passed just last week that redefines the 
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1 compliance boundary around coal ash ponds. And 

2 it used to be 250 to 500 feet. Now they've put 

3 it at the property line. What that means is that 

4 based on the state rules, we don't have any 

5 authority to address groundwater pollution coming 

6 from these coal ash ponds until it's already 

7 crossed over into neighboring properties. That 

8 kind of ridiculousness has occurred not because 

9 it's good public policy. It's because the most 

10 politically powerful lobby in the state is 

11 pushing it, and precisely to prevent the sort of 

12 political manipulation by powerful entities that 

13 EPA was given the authority that it has, and we 

14 strongly encourage you to use it. 

15 Adopt something resembling the Options 4 

16 or 5 in the rule that you have proposed to effect 

17 zero liquid discharge technology, and I'd just 

18 encourage you as you're developing this to just 

19 ask this one question: If not the EPA, then who? 

20 Who is going to protect the health and safety of 

21 people in North Carolina? I can assure you, it's 

22 not the state or the state agencies. 
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1 Thank you. 

2 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

3 Phillip Collins? 

4 MR. COLLINS: Hi. I want to thank you 

5 today for holding this hearing to let us testify. 

6 My name is Phillip Collins also known as -- 

7 nickname "Filo." I am a D.C. resident and a D.C. 

8 attorney. I'm a volunteer and member the Sierra 

9 Club and also organize an environment meet-up 

10 group with meetup.com. 

11 Think of a lottery. Pay a dollar for a 

12 lottery ticket, and you could win a million bucks 

13 or a trip to Disneyland or a smaller prize. With 

14 the profits going for a benefit to support good 

15 causes like education or health or senior 

16 citizens, the current lack of limitation on toxic 

17 coal waste water pollution is like a reverse 

18 lottery. So instead of paying to win, we don't 

19 pay in order that some people lose. By all of us 

20 not paying a bit more for electricity to pretreat 

21 or treat wastewater from coal power plants, we 

22 are setting some of us up, both humans and 
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1 animals, to, quotation marks, win the lottery of 

2 being personally having their health adversely 

3 affected by coal toxic waste. 

4 This is a lottery that most of us would 

5 not like to win, and most of us think we're not 

6 going to win because other people will win that 

7 lottery of having cancers or other health 

8 problems resulting from winning the lottery of 

9 ingesting toxic coal waste, and we think that 

10 other people will be subjected to it. 

11 But personally -- and I think many of us 

12 in this room by their testimony have said they 

13 would prefer to pay a bit more in order that some 

14 people, maybe some other people, maybe 

15 themselves, would not, quotation marks, win the 

16 toxic coal waste lottery. 

17 Now, D.C. might think, well, we're here 

18 in D.C. It's a very clean city, but we do have a 

19 coal plant still here. That's the D.C. Capitol 

20 Hill Power Plant that burns coal, natural gas, 

21 and fuel oil, but they have recently requested an 

22 increase in their pollution to allow them to burn 
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1 more coal because they are seeking to burn more 

2 -- to order more coal. And that is in a 

3 residential neighborhood on the Anacostia River 

4 watershed, and I live about 2 miles from it. 

5 So I think that we should end this 

6 lottery, the reverse lottery, we don't buy a 

7 ticket, and therefore, people are having their 

8 health impacted. I think we should -- and I 

9 agree with the Sierra Club that there should be 

10 zero toxic waste going into the waters, and we 

11 should go further than that and require that the 

12 winners of this lottery be the managers of the 

13 coal plants and the executives that are in charge 

14 of the coal companies that profit from this, that 

15 they should be required to live downriver or 

16 downstream and downwind from these plants 

17 themselves. 

18 So I want to thank you today for the 

19 opportunity to testify. 

20 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

21 Leslie Fields? 

22 MS. FIELDS: Good afternoon. I'm Leslie 
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1 Fields, and I am the director of the 

2 Environmental Justice and Community Partnerships 

3 Program of the Sierra Club here in Washington, 

4 D.C. And our program works directly in 

5 communities here in Washington, D.C., in West 

6 Virginia, Puerto Rico, Arizona, New Mexico, 

7 Detroit, Minneapolis, in Memphis, in Appalachia, 

8 and also in Louisiana. 

9 And I'm pleased to be able to testify in 

10 favor of the EPA ELG rule, the Effluent 

11 Limitation Guidelines, to finalize in the 

12 strongest form, eliminate and greatly reduce 

13 toxic dumping in our nation’s waterways that 

14 limit the amount of toxic materials that are 

15 dumped. 

16 These standards will also require coal 

17 plants to monitor and report amounts of pollution 

18 dumped into the water, giving us detailed 

19 information about the types and amounts of 

20 dangerous chemicals. 

21 Water is at the heart of our 

22 environmental problems and priorities. Its 
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1 management and consumption play a crucial role in 

2 health, agriculture, and ecology. For decades, 

3 the self-evident worth has been ignored, and 

4 water pollution mismanagement afflict enumerable 

5 communities, particularly Environmental Justice 

6 communities. Chronic pathologies related to 

7 dehydration and water pollution are widespread. 

8 Despite the worth of water, it is often treated 

9 with that little care of caution. 

10 Here in the U.S., this callous attitude 

11 results in appalling concentrations of pollution, 

12 and coal plants are by far one of the worst 

13 offenders. 

14 Coal plants are notorious saboteurs of 

15 groundwater supplies in nearby waterways. The 

16 sheer volume of toxic heavy metals the industry 

17 dumps into ponds and rivers is staggering, 

18 accounting for over 60 percent of our nation's 

19 total water pollution. These substances are 

20 arsenic, mercury, selenium, all of which are 

21 toxic even in small doses, because they do not 

22 degrade over time. They bioaccumulate or 
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1 increase in concentrations and move up the food 

2 chain. These toxins are dumped by millions of 

3 gallons and hundreds of plants every day. 

4 Many coal-fired power plants sit in 

5 recreational lakes and reservoirs, if not 

6 upstream from drinking water supplies. Several 

7 coal plants still handle their waste with the 

8 equivalent of 19th century technology, simply 

9 dunking the toxic revenue from coal combustion 

10 into vast surface impoundments or ponds that are 

11 often directly along your riverbanks. These 

12 byproducts constitute a noxious cocktail of 

13 pollutants that discharge directly into river, 

14 streams, and groundwater. 

15 Coal slurry, a byproduct of washing and 

16 processing coal with water, is highly toxic and 

17 leak into groundwater supplies. Up to 60 

18 different chemicals are used to wash coal. These 

19 chemicals combined with the heavy metals also in 

20 coal present an eminent danger to exposed 

21 communities. 

22 In the rural area of Mingo County and 
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1 Boone County, West Virginia, billions of gallons 

2 of coal slurry were injected in abandoned mines 

3 in those small communities that relied on well 

4 water. Residents of these communities reported 

5 changes in the color of their water to yellow, 

6 orange, and black. Sinks, tubs, and clothes 

7 became permanently stained, and metal appliances 

8 corroded rapidly. Illnesses spread to the 

9 community, ranging from skin rashes, severe 

10 diarrhea, to cancer and kidney failure. Heavy 

11 metals were found in drinking water supplies 

12 including iron, manganese, lead, aluminum, 

13 arsenic, and others to hundreds of times the safe 

14 drinking water limits. 

15 West Virginia has more slurry 

16 impoundments than any other state in the nation. 

17 A 2011 report by the Office of Surface Mining 

18 Reclamation found that the walls of coal slurry 

19 impoundments be dangerously weak. Tests of the 

20 densities of impoundment walls show flaws in all 

21 seven sites surveyed in West Virginia. 

22 Also, we also work with the communities 
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1 in states like in Michigan, as I mentioned, and 

2 where toxic coal water is a problem in Michigan, 

3 has 21 active coal plants, only 8 that have 

4 permits, to limit the dumping of any toxic metal. 

5 No permits limit the arsenic, cadmium, or lead. 

6 Detroit Electric River Rouge Plant, which 

7 the NAACP has identified as one of the worst 

8 environmental justice offenders in the nation, 

9 lack such limits, for instance. 

10 At least 16 of these plants have 

11 discharges contaminated by metalating coal ash 

12 and dangerous smokestacks from scrubber sludge. 

13 Worst, of these plants, only three of them report 

14 how much toxic arsenic and selenium they are 

15 discharging to EPA's TRI. 

16 We also want to include that just 

17 recently on June 28th, many community groups, the 

18 Sierra Club, Earthjustice, also submitted 

19 comments for the cumulative -- to create 

20 cumulative impact standards at EPA to include 

21 coal ash, to include all these coal water 

22 problems in addition because these communities 
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1 are so inundated with pollution not just from 

2 coal but other sources and refineries and 

3 agriculture processes. 

4 So we are very happy that EPA is looking 

5 at this and it's a long awaited solution, and for 

6 all of us who rely on water, because all of us 

7 do, and the ecosystem, these measures will not 

8 just reach us but also save us, and all of us 

9 particularly in impacted communities. 

10 Thank you. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

12 Mark Magaña. 

13 MR. MAGAÑA: Hello. I am Mark Magaña, the 

14 executive director of the National Latino 

15 Coalition on Climate Change. We are a large 

16 coalition of national Latino organizations, 

17 grassroots supporters, community leaders, and 

18 advocates from across the nation working to 

19 ensure that Latinos have an integral voice in the 

20 national dialogue on climate change and energy 

21 policy. We are raising awareness about global 

22 warming and the impacts of climate change in 
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1 Latino communities and building the capacity 

2 needed to support grassroots advocacy efforts 

3 through research policy and educational outreach. 

4 NLCCC is concerned about pretreatment 

5 standards for coal waste going to public water 

6 treatment facilities, but we also have a deep 

7 concern about successful implementation of this 

8 rule overall. 

9 Our coalition partners are deeply 

10 concerned about the continued adverse impacts 

11 that harmful pollutants, particularly from 

12 coal-fired power plants, are causing on Hispanic 

13 and other communities of color. 

14 According to the 2000 Census, nearly 40 

15 percent of Latinos live within 30 miles of a 

16 power plant, and that is expected to increase. 

17 As a consequence, Latino communities are 

18 disproportionately impacted by the toxic 

19 pollutants that are discharged from these dirty 

20 power plants both in the air and into our water. 

21 1.3 million Hispanics nationwide actively 

22 participate in fishing as a recreational, social, 
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1 or family activity. However, much of the Latino 

2 community is unaware that invisible toxic 

3 chemicals such as mercury, PCBs, and other toxic 

4 substances could be present in the water and the 

5 fish that they eat. 

6 In a number of studies, it's been shown 

7 that Latino sport and commercial anglers catch a 

8 variety of sport fish and consume fish that they 

9 catch more frequently than non-Latino consumers. 

10 At the same time, Hispanic and other minorities 

11 are less likely than non-Hispanics to be aware of 

12 fish consumption advisories. This is yet another 

13 compelling reason why the EPA should enact the 

14 most stringent Effluent Limitation Guidelines 

15 possible to protect families from exposure to 

16 harmful pollutants through their water and 

17 aquatic activities. 

18 It is because Latino and other 

19 traditionally underrepresented communities are so 

20 disproportionally impacted by these harmful 

21 pollutants that NLCCC must urge the EPA to adopt 

22 the strictest possible wastewater guidelines that 
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1 will adequately protect our communities, both for 

2 pretreatment standards for coal waste going to 

3 public water treatment facilities and for all 

4 discharges generally. 

5 In our coalition's view, these strict 

6 standards are best captured in EPA's most 

7 stringent proposal that requires dry handling of 

8 the toxic waste generated by coal plants, zero 

9 discharge from coal ash impoundments and 

10 landfills, and evaporation treatment for FGD 

11 scrubber sludge water. 

12 We also request that EPA finalize its 

13 Proposed Rule governing the disposal of toxic 

14 coal ash under the Resource Conservation and 

15 Recovery Act. Both rules are essential to 

16 protect the health of our members and necessary 

17 to guarantee the safety of the air, water, and 

18 food of our Hispanic communities nationwide. 

19 Thank you. 

20 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

21 Roger Rivera? 

22 MR. RIVERA: Good afternoon. I know it's 
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1 been a long day for you, so thank you for this 

2 opportunity. 

3 My name is Roger Rivera, and I am the 

4 president of the National Hispanic Environmental 

5 Council founded in 1997. NHEC is the leading 

6 national Latino environmental and natural 

7 resource organization in the country. We are an 

8 advocacy, policy, and programmatic group and work 

9 to represent the Hispanic Americans before 

10 federal, state, and green group decision-makers. 

11 We seek to ensure our community has a 

12 seat at the national environmental 

13 decision-making table and to engage Latinos on a 

14 range of environmental and conservation issues. 

15 For over three decades, Americans have 

16 been waiting with growing impatience for the U.S. 

17 EPA to propose a new rule under the federal Clean 

18 Water Act to effectively, thoroughly, and safely 

19 treat toxic waste pollution from coal-fired power 

20 plants. Thus, NHEC is very pleased to be able to 

21 provide public comments on these long overdue 

22 actions regarding the so-called "pretreatment 
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1 standards" of this coal waste. 

2 Today, as we all know, coal-fired power 

3 plants are the largest water polluters in the 

4 United States. These facilities generate nearly 

5 three-quarters of all toxic water pollution, and 

6 coal waste contains harmful quantities of 

7 arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and selenium. All 

8 these metals have proven to be -- to have 

9 damaging health impacts on people and our public 

10 health as well as aquatic life and ecosystems. 

11 Wastewater rules for power plants under 

12 the Clean Water Act have not been revised or 

13 improved for more than 30 years. Under current 

14 regulations, millions of pounds of these heavy 

15 metals pollute our waters annually. A 

16 significant amount of this pollution, as you have 

17 heard today, come from effluent from coal ash 

18 ponds as well as sludge from air pollution 

19 control scrubbers. 

20 Today, nearly 80 percent of the outflow 

21 from coal-fired power plants is responsible for 

22 virtually unlimited discharges of these toxic 
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1 metals and other chemicals. 

2 Further, as air pollution control 

3 technologies improve, these discharges will only 

4 increase. Without effective rules on power plant 

5 water pollution, the generation of this toxic 

6 waste will continue with ongoing harmful, 

7 disproportionate, and environmental justice 

8 effects on nearby communities, many of whom are 

9 Latino. 

10 NHEC is here today to speak on behalf of 

11 our 7,000 members nationwide and the well-being 

12 of the over 50 million Latinos who are directly 

13 impacted by how responsibly and soon EPA carries 

14 out its duties to protect our environment. 

15 NHEC members fully recognize and support 

16 the effective regulation of power plants since 

17 many of these facilities are sited in low-income 

18 and community of colors. With 60 percent of all 

19 toxic pollutants and surface water originating 

20 from power plant discharges, it is now imperative 

21 that EPA take strong swift action to safeguard 

22 public and environmental health. 
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1 Regarding the pretreatment standard for 

2 coal waste going to public water treatment 

3 facilities as well as the Proposed Rule in 

4 general, NHEC has some specific concerns and 

5 recommendations. First, we strongly urge EPA to 

6 adopt the most stringent possible rule on 

7 effluent limitations. By doing so, our nation 

8 will see a 2.62-billion-pound annual reduction of 

9 toxic pollutants. 

10 Second, we urge the adoption of a zero 

11 discharge requirement from coal ash impoundments 

12 by implementing zero liquid discharge technology 

13 and conversion to safer coal ash handling systems 

14 that will eliminate discharges of the most 

15 contaminated wastewaters entirely. 

16 Third, we urge EPA to fully protect 

17 Latino communities living near coal-fired power 

18 plants by completing as soon as possible final 

19 rulemaking to safely dispose of toxic coal ash. 

20 Fourth, we urge EPA to exercise its 

21 undisputed authority under both the Clean Water 

22 Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery 
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1 Act, RCRA, to ensure that the deadly toxins in 

2 coal ash do not pollute our air and water, and by 

3 doing so meet the legitimate environmental 

4 justice concerns of Latinos and other 

5 communities. 

6 Thank you for the opportunity to provide 

7 these comments today. Thanks. 

8 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

9 Yolanda Whyte. 

10 DR. WHYTE: Good afternoon. My name is 

11 Dr. Yolanda Whyte. I am a primary care 

12 pediatrician and environmental health expert with 

13 nearly a decade of experience caring for the 

14 health and well-being of children, especially 

15 those with special needs and those who are 

16 affected by health disparities and environmental 

17 injustices. 

18 I am the community outreach director for 

19 the National Medical Association, which is the 

20 largest African-American physician group in the 

21 country. I'm also a board member of the Florida 

22 Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, 
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1 the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. 

2 Now, I'm concerned with the Proposed Rule 

3 under review at this afternoon's hearing, 

4 including the pretreatment standard for coal 

5 waste. There is an increasing body of research 

6 that continues to highlight health disparities of 

7 economically disadvantaged communities that 

8 reside near coal-fired power plants. The NAACP 

9 also has an excellent Coal Blooded report, 

10 C-o-a-l, that you may want to refer to. 

11 The chemicals that are discharged from 

12 coal plants drastically impact the health and 

13 quality of life of nearby residents who are 

14 already disproportionately affected by asthma, 

15 heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other 

16 chronic diseases, which are all preventable. 

17 The EPA plays a more effective role than 

18 physicians in preventing these conditions by 

19 implementing stringent Effluent Limitation 

20 Guidelines that can reduce the impacts of harmful 

21 pollutants. Stringent guidelines will ensure 

22 that harmful substances such as cadmium, lead, 
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1 mercury, arsenic, selenium, thallium, do not make 

2 their way into the water bodies of these 

3 community. 

4 As a practicing pediatrician, I'm deeply 

5 concerned that children are exposed to a greater 

6 dose of these toxins due to their smaller body 

7 weight, their earlier exposure when their organs 

8 are still in development, and even trace 

9 exposures can be devastating to the fetus. 

10 There is a disturbing relationship 

11 between these heavy metals and the rising 

12 incidence of autism, which is now seen in 1 in 50 

13 children. We should all be alarmed. The cost of 

14 treating autism is estimated at $7.9 billion 

15 annually, and this is according to a 2011 report 

16 published in Health Affairs. I'm also concerned 

17 about the correlations between these 

18 radionuclides and the rapidly rising rate of 

19 pediatric cancer, which has an estimated cost of 

20 $95 million, according to the same study. 

21 No child or family should have to suffer. 

22 I'm deeply and personally concerned that 11 of my 
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1 local 13 rivers are impaired with heavy metals 

2 and radionuclides, and this is according to the 

3 EPA's own MyEnvironment analysis for my zip code. 

4 So the EPA must require zero discharges 

5 of these deadly chemicals into our waterways, 

6 mandate evaporation treatment of chemical-laden 

7 wastewaters, so that dry waste can be safely 

8 disposed in secure landfills, and address the 

9 threat to health from all toxic waste generated 

10 by coal-fired power plants by finalizing the coal 

11 ash rule that the agency has already proposed. 

12 This is not only an important step for 

13 environmental protection; it's a public health 

14 imperative. 

15 I thank you. 

16 SESSION D 

17 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

18 Rodrigo Samayoa. 

19 MR. SAMAYOA: Thanks for having us today. 

20 So I'm not a scientist or a lawyer, so my 

21 comments will not deal with the technical or 

22 legal aspects of this, the pollution standards in 
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1 question, but instead I will tell you about why 

2 these pollution standards are important to me and 

3 for communities all across this country. 

4 I am originally from Guatemala, a small 

5 country in Central America, and my father grew up 

6 in this small town in the outskirts of Guatemala, 

7 a city called Villa Nueva. At the time that he 

8 was a kid, this town had a population of under 

9 20,000 people. He always told me childhood 

10 stories of how he would work the fields with his 

11 father after school, how he would hike the 

12 mountains with his friends on weekends, or how he 

13 learned to swim in the local river. 

14 Today, Villa Nueva has a population of 

15 over 1 million people. The fields he worked as a 

16 kid are now covered by factories. The mountains 

17 have been clear-cut for development, and the 

18 river he learned to swim in is now just a stream 

19 used by the city to dump sewer water. 

20 When I was a kid, I learned to swim in a 

21 swimming pool because there was no rivers and 

22 lakes around for me to learn to swim in. This is 
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1 just one of the examples of nature's gift that my 

2 dad was able to enjoy, but I could not. Because 

3 of the rapid and unregulated development 

4 throughout the region, my generation was denied 

5 the opportunity to live in a place where kids 

6 could swim in local rivers and enjoy the nature 

7 around them. 

8 This is not something I want to deny my 

9 kids or the kids of anyone in this country. 

10 Unlike Guatemala, the United States does have 

11 functioning state entities that can regulate 

12 urban industrial development to protect the 

13 jewels of our environment. It is time for the 

14 EPA to take up responsibility and enforce these 

15 pollution standards, so that communities across 

16 the country and future generations can enjoy the 

17 gifts nature gave us. 

18 It is time for the EPA to start 

19 regulating toxic discharge from coal plants, so 

20 that my children can one day swim in any river 

21 they want in this country. 

22 We cannot allow these dirty plants to 
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1 deny the pleasures to future generations, the 

2 same way I was denied the clean air and clean 

3 water that my dad was able to enjoy. 

4 These regulations not only allow us to 

5 enjoy our environment, but they will also save 

6 lives, prevent children from getting sick, and 

7 ensure that the water remains safe to drink. 

8 In a recent speech President Obama gave 

9 on climate change, he said, and I quote, "While 

10 we may not live to see the full realization of 

11 our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of 

12 knowing that the world we leave our children will 

13 be better off for what we did." 

14 Now, none of us in this room may ever see 

15 the full benefits of these pollution standards 

16 across the country, but we will know that our 

17 children will be able to enjoy these benefits. 

18 So if you will not regulate this 

19 pollution for environmental reasons or for your 

20 own enjoyment and health, at least do it for the 

21 children. We owe it to them. 

22 Thank you. 
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1 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

2 James Vandeventer? 

3 MR. VANDEVENTER: Good afternoon. Thank 

4 you for giving me the opportunity to testify 

5 today. My name is James Vandeventer, and I'm an 

6 intern at the Sierra Club. 

7 Today, I urge the EPA to implement 

8 stringent water pollution standard for 

9 pretreatment at steam electric power plants to 

10 protect our national health and the environment. 

11 I was born and raised in Los Angeles and 

12 at age 12 was told that I have -- or I have -- 

13 whoa, sorry -- I have asthma. I'm sure some of 

14 you have experienced or seen pictures of L.A.'s 

15 infamous smog, so my diagnosis may not come as a 

16 complete surprise. But you might ask yourself 

17 why am I talking about air pollution at a hearing 

18 on water pollution regulations. Well, the answer 

19 is that they are inextricably linked. 

20 The reasons I say this are that, first, 

21 the steam these power plants use to produce 

22 electricity comes from burning coal to heat water 
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1 and make steam. This process leads to 

2 significant air pollution, and in fact, power 

3 plants make up about a third of our nation's 

4 greenhouse gas emissions. 

5 And second, many of the by products from 

6 burning coal don't end up in the air. Instead, 

7 byproducts such as lead, mercury, arsenic, and 

8 dozens of other metal pollutants end up as toxic 

9 sludge that must be pretreated before going to a 

10 treatment plant and then finally being 

11 re-released into our nation's lakes, rivers, and 

12 oceans. 

13 Now, there have been significant steps 

14 taken to limit air pollution, most notably the 

15 limitations on sulfur emissions that were passed 

16 in the '90s. The results of these regulations 

17 were tangible and immediate. Americans saw a 

18 significant decrease in acidic rain. However, 

19 the standards that limit water pollution from 

20 power plants have not been updated in decades. 

21 Power plants have been able to dump the sludge by 

22 products from burning coal into our waterways and 
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1 meet only bare minimum standards of toxic levels, 

2 all while making a handsome profit. 

3 The big issue with water pollution is 

4 that unlike with sulfur, the results of this 

5 pollution are not immediate. The long-term 

6 health effects of these toxins can be deadly, 

7 cancer, birth defects, neurological damage, not 

8 to mention the effects on rivers’ or lakes’ or 

9 oceans' delicate ecological balance. 

10 I applaud the EPA for proposing the 

11 Effluent Limitation Guidelines we are here to 

12 testify today about. Placing limits on the 

13 sludge leaving power plants makes sense, and 

14 telling polluters to lower the amounts of toxic 

15 metals they release seems not only logical, but 

16 necessary to protect the health of the American 

17 people. 

18 In Los Angeles, our mayor recently 

19 announced that the city would no longer rely on 

20 coal for energy needs, and while this is a step 

21 in the right direction, coal plants continue to 

22 operate around the country, and often their air 
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1 and water pollution disproportionately affect 

2 underserved and poor communities. I hope that 

3 the EPA will protect the health of all Americans 

4 and adopt the most stringent proposed regulations 

5 for steam electric power plants, so that the 

6 byproducts of burning coal do not do irreparable 

7 damage to Americans or the lakes, rivers, and 

8 oceans of this great nation. 

9 Thank you. 

10 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

11 Elizabeth Perera? 

12 MS. MULLER: Hi. I'm a colleague of 

13 Elizabeth Perera, and I am going to read her 

14 statement, if that's okay. 

15 MR. STRASSLER: Could you state your 

16 name, please. 

17 MS. MULLER: My name is Brenna Muller. 

18 So she wrote, Good afternoon. I am 

19 Elizabeth Martin Perera, senior Washington 

20 representative working on climate change, coal, 

21 and public health with the national Sierra Club. 

22 I hold an MPH in environmental health and a 
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1 master's of environmental management with a focus 

2 on air pollution, climate, and energy-related 

3 studies and have nearly a decade of experience 

4 working on these issues at the federal and state 

5 level. 

6 Burning coal releases toxic mercury that 

7 is then dumped into rivers and streams. This 

8 poison then accumulates in the food chain, 

9 eventually making its way into our bodies when we 

10 eat contaminated fish. 

11 Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that can 

12 damage the brain and nervous system. As a recent 

13 mother of two, I am particularly worried about my 

14 fellow mothers and mothers-to-be when it comes to 

15 mercury pollution since exposure to mercury can 

16 cause developmental problems, learning 

17 disabilities, and delayed onset of walking and 

18 walking in babies and infants. 

19 Our state has seven active coal power 

20 plants, and none of them have permits which limit 

21 dumping of any toxic metal, including arsenic, 

22 boron, cadmium, mercury, and lead. At least five 
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1 of these plants have discharges contaminated by 

2 metalating coal ash or dangerous smokestack 

3 scrubber sludge. Worse, several of these plants 

4 do not even report how much toxic arsenic and 

5 selenium they are discharging in the EPA's 

6 Enforcement and Compliance History Online 

7 database. 

8 Those few that do report both arsenic and 

9 selenium discharged over 400 pounds of arsenic 

10 and selenium in one year according to EPA's ECHO 

11 database. All that pollution has serious 

12 consequences. At least one of these plants is 

13 dumping its waste into water bodies which have 

14 been formally designated as having impaired water 

15 quality, the Middle River and Browns Creek. 

16 I strongly support the Environmental 

17 Protection Agency proposed new coal plant water 

18 pollution standards to limit the amount of toxic 

19 metals that can be dumped in the water. These 

20 water pollution limits finalized in their 

21 strongest form could eliminate or greatly reduce 

22 toxic dumping in our nation's waterways that 
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1 limit the amount of toxic metals that is dumped 

2 in our waterways. 

3 These standards will also require all 

4 coal plants to monitor and report the amount of 

5 pollution dumped into the water, giving us 

6 detailed information about the types and amounts 

7 of dangerous chemicals in our water. 

8 Limiting the amount of toxics in our 

9 water will save lives, prevent children from 

10 getting sick, and ensure water is safe to drink 

11 and our fish safe to eat. 

12 Thank you. 

13 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

14 Alyce Ortuzar? 

15 MS. ORTUZAR: My name is Alyce Ortuzar, 

16 and I am a member of the Sierra Club. 

17 The book titled "The Polluters," 

18 published in 2010, is a comprehensive exposé of 

19 assorted failures of the government to put public 

20 health and people before corporate profits. 

21 The book documents a historical pattern 

22 of corporate influence, obstructions, dishonesty, 
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1 and greed, combined with the complicity of 

2 government agencies that accepted and promoted 

3 flawed and weak risk assessment paradigms. 

4 Water transcends artificial political 

5 boundaries, so it is incumbent upon the EPA to 

6 enact the most stringent regulations, guidelines, 

7 and enforcement mechanisms that will protect us 

8 all. It is time to stop treating people and 

9 natural resources as if they were expendable. 

10 The chilling horror stories I have heard 

11 today are truly a national disgrace, and it also 

12 seems fraudulent for taxpayers to pay more and 

13 more to clean up or waterways, such as the 

14 Chesapeake Bay, while senseless and destructive 

15 industrial practices continue because regulations 

16 are lax or nonexistent. 

17 Northern Virginia toxicologist Dr. Janet 

18 Sherman maintains that harmful substances have no 

19 safe levels of exposure, and with that in mind, I 

20 applaud the EPA for holding this public hearing, 

21 so we can lend our support for unequivocally 

22 strong and protective actions that truly reflect 
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1 the mission of this agency and that recognize and 

2 restore the integrity of our water sources and 

3 marine life as the commons that they are. 

4 Thank you. 

5 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

6 Marc Imlay? 

7 MR. IMLAY: After I got my Ph.D., my 

8 first job in 1968 was the Water Quality 

9 Laboratory for the Federal Water Pollution 

10 Control Administration, which 2 years later 

11 President Richard Nixon combined with Air 

12 Pollution, Pesticides, and two other agencies to 

13 form the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. 

14 We tested aquatic species with pollutants 

15 for survival, growth, and reproduction. Most 

16 species would test for a full year. We all 

17 agreed that the biggest threat to filter feeders, 

18 such as mussels, gill-breathing river snails, 

19 oysters, clams, and Menhaden fish, was not the 

20 usual culprits, metals and so forth, low oxygen, 

21 but it was sediment from fly ash, erosion, and 

22 stormwater runoff that the animals ate instead of 
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1 food, so they starved to death. They could no 

2 longer eat the phytoplankton, zooplankton, LG 

3 copepods, and isopods. 

4 I have set out attachments out there with 

5 references to the extensive studies that we in 

6 the Water Quality Lab reviewed as well as going 

7 out on our own and observing what was happening 

8 by the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife, 

9 and I think those studies should be resurrected. 

10 They have incredibly thorough research with 

11 diagrams and everything. They present a particle 

12 size that's the same as what they eat, and then 

13 they starve to death. 

14 Natural erosion, by the way, did not 

15 cause the problem, but it was like erosion from 

16 artificial sources that did cause the problem. 

17 When I worked for the Endangered Species 

18 Office, the U.S. Department of the Interior in 

19 1970s, I listed freshwater mussels from 

20 Appalachian coal mining areas. The most 

21 important threat was the fly ash in the streams. 

22 The third paragraph of C-1-6, past and current 
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1 threats in the updated attachment from the EPA 

2 describes the threat from sources such as fly ash 

3 from coal. 

4 If there are any questions, that's fine, 

5 but thank you very much. 

6 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

7 Doug Aus? 

8 MR. AUS: Hi. My name is Doug Aus, and 

9 I'm from Towson, Maryland. 

10 It has been 30 years since laws were 

11 passed to regulate what toxic metals coal plants 

12 can discharge into American waterways. These 

13 laws don't even cover some of the worst 

14 pollutants. Coal plants annually discharge 

15 millions of tons of lead, arsenic, selenium, 

16 boron, and mercury into our waterways. This 

17 pollutes drinking water, kills fish, and hurts 

18 outdoor recreation. Therefore, the Environmental 

19 Protection Agency needs to set higher standards 

20 to force coal companies to clean up America's 

21 rivers, lakes, bays, and other important bodies 

22 of water. 
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1 The EPA has acknowledged that it has not 

2 kept up with industry developments to clean up 

3 the worst pollutants. Ideally, the EPA should 

4 set zero discharge standards and require 

5 intensive treatment of toxic metals and any 

6 remaining waste that comes from these plants. 

7 These proposed power plant water 

8 pollution standards will set national standards 

9 to limit toxic metals and wastewater from all 

10 coal-burning plants. While this rule focuses on 

11 the pretreatment part, the EPA needs to do more 

12 to protect our waterways. 

13 There are three coal-burning power plants 

14 on bodies of waters that feed directly into the 

15 Chesapeake Bay in the Baltimore area. Since my 

16 dad and his brothers like to fish, I have an 

17 interest in seeing that the Chesapeake Bay is 

18 protected for them to fish. 

19 I also notice that the children of one of 

20 my friends who lives near one of these plants 

21 tends to get sick a lot. The pollutants put into 

22 the water by the coal companies make people sick. 
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1 I am currently reading a book titled 

2 "World on the Edge" by Lester Brown. He devotes 

3 a full chapter to water shortages and the adverse 

4 effects that they have on food or our harvests 

5 all across the world. 

6 States such as California, Colorado, and 

7 Florida have seen their irrigated areas shrink as 

8 their aquifers are being depleted. Fast-growing 

9 cities in the Southwest have taken in more 

10 irrigation water. Therefore, the U.S. total 

11 irrigated area has likely peaked. Fast-growing 

12 cities and towns in Colorado, for example, are 

13 buying irrigation water rights from farmers and 

14 ranchers. This means we have to raise water 

15 productivity by protecting water from pollutants 

16 like toxic waste metals from coal-fired power 

17 plants. 

18 Thank you very much. 

19 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

20 Joshua Allen? 

21 MR. ALLEN: Good afternoon. I want to 

22 thank you for allowing public comments regarding 
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1 this issue, and thank you to the Sierra Club for 

2 their tireless efforts on this matter. 

3 This morning, I am currently a school 

4 teacher in Washington, D.C., and I told my 

5 students what I was doing this afternoon, and I 

6 was pretty excited with their enthusiasm for this 

7 issue and keeping the environment clean, and I 

8 asked them what were their thoughts. One student 

9 in particular was very excited. She was jumping 

10 out of her seat, and she said, "We need to keep 

11 the water clean because if we don't, we can get 

12 sick from drinking it, and we can even get 

13 cancer." And for a fourth grader, I was pretty 

14 impressed that she was already that aware of how 

15 important keeping our water clean is. Again, she 

16 and other students expressed their passion for 

17 the environment and keeping our water safe. 

18 So I want to thank you for your proposed 

19 regulations. I only wonder why this has taken so 

20 long to pass -- or hopefully will pass. It seems 

21 so obvious to keep water clean, but politics and 

22 money have a great impact. Water is a basic 
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1 necessity for all humans, yet by contaminating 

2 drinking water, we hurt all levels of society. 

3 Yet, those without the means to purchase bottled 

4 water must decide to use their limited resources 

5 to purchase a basic necessity in order to keep 

6 their family healthy, which impacts their ability 

7 to pay rent, eat healthy, and enjoy other aspects 

8 of life. 

9 Clean water also allows for healthy fish 

10 populations which can be one of our most 

11 sustainable forms of food. 

12 We now have many alternative forms of 

13 energy that contribute to the power grid and 

14 reduce overall waste. The EPA representing the 

15 United States on the global scale must set the 

16 precedent for other countries to follow. This is 

17 our world, which we want to leave for younger 

18 generations. The United States represents such a 

19 small portion of the world population, yet 

20 produces a disproportionate amount of pollution. 

21 However, as developing countries with greater 

22 populations continue to modernize, they will harm 
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1 the planet on a greater scale based on the model 

2 we have given them. They and we as citizens 

3 depend on you to do the right thing and set these 

4 standards for one of our basic human needs. 

5 Thank you. 

6 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

7 Michael Horka? 

8 MR. HORKA: Good afternoon. My name is 

9 Michael Horka. I am a resident of Washington, 

10 D.C., and a Ph.D. student in American studies at 

11 the George Washington University. I am here 

12 today because of my own view that the EPA should 

13 enact the most stringent possible pretreatment 

14 standards for coal waste, but I know that I also 

15 represent other voices who can't be here today, 

16 those affected by coal-based pollution and my 

17 friends and colleagues who share my views on this 

18 issue. 

19 I am also a native Michigander and want 

20 to speak to the relationship between water 

21 pollution and the place that I lived for 30 

22 years. 
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1 The largest source of power in Michigan 

2 comes from coal-fired power plants. They are 

3 located on major waterways, on the shores of the 

4 Great Lakes and the Southeast Michigan watershed, 

5 where I grew up. The largest of these plants are 

6 located in that area, in fact, Southeast 

7 Michigan, along the St. Clair River, the Detroit 

8 River, and Lake Erie. 

9 For years, community members and 

10 activists have been battling industry there, 

11 coal, steel, gypsum, and others, because of the 

12 health impacts on the respiratory health based on 

13 emissions and blowing coal sediment. Asthma has 

14 been rampant often for low-income residents of 

15 Detroit and the downriver neighborhoods, but many 

16 are less aware of the insidious nature of water 

17 pollution and the failure to enact Clean Water 

18 Act legislation to regulate toxic coal waste in 

19 an area that is surrounded by the Great Lakes, 

20 the Rouge River watershed, and a vast array of 

21 lakes that dot our landscape. 

22 This kind of pollution, which requires 
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1 action by the EPA, affects my friends, my 

2 neighbors, my family, and community in Michigan. 

3 And Michigan water is not only for life; 

4 it is for recreation, transportation, and the 

5 flourishing of animals and plants. It is part of 

6 the Michigan imagery. 

7 In recent memory, we recall in Michigan 

8 the way industrial waste has devastated the 

9 Detroit River and Rouge River watershed. Fishing 

10 in Lake Erie, the Detroit River, the St. Clair 

11 River, and beyond has been devastated by mercury 

12 pollution, one of the key components of toxic 

13 coal waste that continues to be allowed to be 

14 leached into our watersheds across the United 

15 States. 

16 Coal waste not only contains mercury, as 

17 we all know, but also carcinogens, and in a 

18 nation with an ongoing cancer epidemic, it seems 

19 rather unconscionable not to take action when we 

20 have the opportunity. This is the opportunity. 

21 My own family has been stricken by 

22 cancer, no doubt in part from the carcinogens 
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1 available for intake in our air and water. I 

2 have lost both grandfathers and a beloved aunt to 

3 cancer. Carcinogens, we know very well, like 

4 arsenic, are being released from coal plants and 

5 making toxic the watersheds they enter. 

6 I also think of my pregnant sister Sarah 

7 and the effects arsenic has on a developing 

8 fetus, and it worries me that this element is so 

9 easily dispersed by coal plants in our country. 

10 The effects of this pollution are already 

11 felt, but will be even more catastrophic without 

12 intervention by the EPA. 

13 If EPA's priority is human health, as it 

14 claims, and I am inclined to believe, it seems a 

15 very grave dereliction of its duty to enable the 

16 continual hazard of toxic coal waste leaching 

17 into our water systems. I urge you to prioritize 

18 health over energy lobby persuasions and alleged 

19 self-regulation. It is essential that the EPA 

20 adopt a zero discharge standard for coal plant 

21 waste. The strictest regulation should be 

22 adopted for pretreatment, without question. 
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1 Thank you. 

2 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

3 Diane Brown? 

4 [No audible response.] 

5 MR. STRASSLER: Ellen McBarnette? 

6 [No audible response.] 

7 MR. STRASSLER: Tom Richards? 

8 MR. RICHARDS: Good afternoon. My name 

9 is Tom Richards. I'm a law student at American 

10 University in Spring Valley, Northwest D.C., and 

11 a member of the school's Environmental Law 

12 Society. I live in Northwest D.C. in the Van 

13 Ness neighborhood. 

14 I, like numerous other residents and 

15 visitors, routinely enjoy the Washington, D.C., 

16 region's outdoor areas, from Rock Creek Park to 

17 the monument and memorials, to sites farther 

18 afield like Harpers Valley or Mount Vernon. The 

19 continued discharge of harmful toxins such as 

20 arsenic, selenium, mercury, and lead from coal 

21 plants into the regions' waters limits our 

22 collective ability to appreciate and enjoy all 
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1 that our Nation's Capital region has to offer. 

2 A power plant sits right across the 

3 Potomac from Anacostia, and it's adjacent to Old 

4 Town Alexandria and only a few miles upriver from 

5 Mount Vernon. Toxic pollutants discharged from 

6 such plants affect the safety and serenity of the 

7 water. Activities such as fishing or swimming 

8 are unwise, while drinking the water is foolish 

9 at best. 

10 The harm presented by unchecked toxic 

11 pollutants extends outside of the District's 

12 borders, as the Potomac and the Rock Creek, the 

13 Anacostia and the Tidal Basin defining waters of 

14 D.C., all form part of the greater watershed of 

15 the Chesapeake Bay, one of the greatest estuaries 

16 in the world. 

17 As the Chesapeake Bay region is the land 

18 of the Colonists, the heart of the Revolution and 

19 the Civil War, and the center of contemporary 

20 American political and civic life, millions of 

21 visitors from across the nation and around the 

22 world visit each year. As long as toxic 
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1 pollutants are limitlessly discharged into the 

2 watershed's waters, the ability of these millions 

3 to enjoy the Chesapeake suffers. 

4 As the governmental steward of the health 

5 of our nation's water and air, EPA can help 

6 ensure that the waterways of this great region 

7 with the community's parks, monuments, and 

8 battlefields that line the shores will be kept 

9 clean and healthy for the enjoyment and safety of 

10 our entire nation. 

11 An EPA standard that limits the amount of 

12 toxins like arsenic, selenium, mercury, and lead 

13 dumped into our water would go far in answering 

14 the public demand for clean, healthy, and safe 

15 water, and satisfy the recreational and hygienic 

16 needs of both residents and visitors. 

17 Thank you. 

18 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

19 Terry McGuire? 

20 MR. McGUIRE: Good afternoon, and thank 

21 you for the opportunity to speak today about the 

22 Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to 
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1 clean up toxic water pollution from our nation's 

2 coal-fired power plants. My name is Terry 

3 McGuire, and I am a public policy advocate with 

4 the Sierra Club here in Washington, D.C. 

5 At the Sierra Club, I work primarily on 

6 issues relating to air pollution, particularly 

7 emissions from coal-fired power plants. So while 

8 we still have a long way to go in clearing 

9 America's air, I did want to start by commending 

10 the EPA for your impressive work these last 4-1/2 

11 or so years. From the mercury and air toxic 

12 standard to the recently updated soot standard, 

13 your efforts are saving lives and making a big 

14 difference for millions of Americans. 

15 So while we are making remarkable 

16 progress on the air front, it's critical that the 

17 EPA hold these same dirty power plants 

18 accountable for the toxic pollution they are 

19 dumping into our country's waterways. A shocking 

20 four out of five of our nation's power plants 

21 have no limits on the amount of heavy metals they 

22 can dump into our streams and rivers. In fact, 
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1 coal plants are the number-one source of toxic 

2 water pollution in the United States. 

3 At this very moment, plants around the 

4 country are dumping deadly and carcinogenic 

5 pollutants into our water, toxins like arsenic, 

6 selenium, boron, cadmium, mercury, and lead. 

7 Every year, millions of tons of this extremely 

8 hazardous sludge are sent untreated into our 

9 lakes, rivers, and streams by corporate polluters 

10 more concerned about profit margins and executive 

11 bonuses than the health of their neighbors and 

12 customers, so we need you to act. 

13 I grew up in Franklin County, Virginia, 

14 just south of Roanoke, and attended college at 

15 Virginia Tech and Blacksburg. While I now live 

16 and work in Washington, D.C., most of my family 

17 is in Southwest Virginia, and I will always 

18 consider that area home. 

19 I was motivated to speak today because I 

20 am concerned about the water quality and the 

21 health of my family in my home state. Currently, 

22 Virginia has 16 active coal plants, and there are 
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1 no limits on the amount of toxic waste they can 

2 dump into neighboring waterways. At least seven 

3 of these plants are known to have discharges 

4 contaminated by heavy metalating coal ash or 

5 smokestack scrubber sludge, and of these, only 

6 four disclose to EPA how much arsenic they are 

7 discharging. 

8 Additionally, eight plants are dumping 

9 their waste into water bodies which have been 

10 formerly designated as having impaired water 

11 quality, including the James and York Rivers. 

12 Memories from my younger years are laced 

13 with time spent on and around the water. I think 

14 of playing in creeks and fishing in ponds near 

15 our house. I think of camping by and swimming in 

16 the James River with my grandparents. I think of 

17 summer afternoons spent jet-skiing and bobbing on 

18 a pontoon boat in Smith Mountain Lake, tubing 

19 down the New River with college friends, hiking 

20 up the mountains of Jefferson National Forest to 

21 see the Cascades Waterfall, and driving along the 

22 Roanoke River, an imperiled body that local and 
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1 state groups have worked for decades to clean up 

2 and restore. 

3 Virginia's waterways from Clinch Valley 

4 to the Chesapeake Bay are a precious natural 

5 resource, and they are part of what make Virginia 

6 special. 

7 Sadly, Virginia, like too many other 

8 states, is being poisoned by irresponsible 

9 corporate polluters. The good news is that you 

10 have the power, and indeed the obligation, to 

11 hold these bad players accountable. Your 

12 proposed Effluent Limitation Guidelines for steam 

13 electric generators would represent the first 

14 time that standards for water pollution from coal 

15 plants have been updated in more than 30 years. 

16 As your agency has recognized, the 

17 current guidelines have not kept pace with 

18 developments in the industry and have failed to 

19 address the worst pollutants in our waterways. 

20 So the time to act is now. 

21 I strongly urge you to expeditiously move 

22 forward, enforce the Clean Water Act, and 
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1 finalize this long-overdue national standard. 

2 Thank you again for the opportunity to 

3 speak today about this important proposal. We 

4 look forward to working with EPA as you move 

5 forward to protect our families from toxic water 

6 pollution. 

7 Thanks. 

8 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. Thank you. 

9 We are going to take another break. We 

10 still have several more people who have asked to 

11 testify. Most of them are here. So we'll take 

12 about a 10-minute break. 

13 Let's see. It is 4:13. So let's say 

14 we'll be back at 4:25. 

15 Thank you. 

16 [Recess taken from 4:13 to 4:34 p.m.] 

17 SESSION E 

18 MR. STRASSLER: We are going to get 

19 started. This is the last stretch. This is the 

20 pretreatment hearing, if you're in the wrong 

21 room, for steam electric. 

22 Okay. We have several more people on our 
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1 list, and we will start with Carletta Hutt. 

2 [No audible response.] 

3 MR. STRASSLER: Not here. I was told she 

4 was here. Okay. 

5 Andre Sauvageot? Please come forward. 

6 MR. SAUVAGEOT: I am Andre Sauvageot, 

7 Colonel, U.S. Army, retired. My wife and I live 

8 in Reston, Virginia, as permanent residents, and 

9 I want to thank the Sierra Club for its strong 

10 advocacy for a clean environment and for 

11 arranging for me the honor of addressing this 

12 hearing today. 

13 So my 27 years of active military service 

14 included 9 years of wartime service in Vietnam, 

15 but I'm out of uniform now, and I am joining with 

16 many other fellow veterans across the country 

17 and, of course, in the Commonwealth to fight a 

18 war that strikes closer to home and, frankly, is 

19 more essential. And it is the war on public 

20 health in the immediate future, and longer term, 

21 it's really an existential threat. 

22 So to fight this other war, I've become a 
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1 partner of the Interstate Traveler Company 

2 headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, because this 

3 company has designed a unique product, with the 

4 potential to help America and the world to solve 

5 our energy problems and environmental problems. 

6 Now, our founder and managing partner, 

7 Justin Sutton, has designed a high-speed magnetic 

8 levitation transport, and it's dubbed "high 

9 rail," to be solar-powered, hydrogen-fueled, and 

10 to transport passengers and freight across the 

11 country from coast to coast at a very high speed. 

12 Clearly, this alone would contribute a lot 

13 towards fulfilling the commendable objectives of 

14 President Obama and the EPA in reducing carbon 

15 emissions, because if you are doing all this with 

16 solar power and hydrogen fuel, clearly it's good 

17 for the environment. 

18 But the focus today, I understand, is 

19 water pollution. So let me share this. High 

20 rail -- remember that term, our kind of short 

21 name -- high rail's ability to generate pure 

22 water from saltwater, rivers, and contaminated 
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1 water along highways can do that, if we ever get 

2 it built. The high rail technology would produce 

3 pure hydrogen, pure water, be a net producer of 

4 electricity and store energy. What's not to 

5 like? 

6 Further, the ability of the Hydrogen 

7 Super Highway, as we dub it, to reduce greenhouse 

8 emissions is unsurpassed. Cities that are now 

9 choked with harmful smog could breathe easier as 

10 the skies begin to clear when existing internal 

11 combustion engines switch over to hydrogen 

12 produced by the rays of the sun. 

13 Further, the ability of the system to 

14 process waste -- think, to process waste -- will 

15 enable a supply of hydroponic-grade agricultural 

16 irrigation on a massive scale, which in itself 

17 could produce edible crops, fuel-grade crops, and 

18 the only problem we have really to overcome yet 

19 is to get the funding to build a physical 

20 prototype. Probably do it in Michigan, but I'd 

21 love to do it in the Commonwealth of Virginia. 

22 We just got to get the funding, and then we will 
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1 start moving towards establishing a form of 

2 public-private partnerships to finance the 

3 country -- to finance the transportation from 

4 coast to coast, paralleling the Eisenhower 

5 Interstate Highway System. 

6 And that's what I wanted to introduce. 

7 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

8 Brendan Cline? 

9 MR. CLINE: Hi. Thank you for providing 

10 this opportunity for the public to comment on the 

11 proposed pretreatment standards. I am a resident 

12 of Washington, D.C., and my family lives in 

13 Massachusetts. I speak today in support of the 

14 regulation. 

15 MR. STRASSLER: Get a little closer to 

16 the mic. 

17 MR. CLINE: Oh, sure. Mm-hmm. 

18 So while nearly four out of five 

19 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. have no 

20 limits on the amount of toxins they're allowed to 

21 discharge into surface water, every one of the 26 

22 coal plants in Virginia, Maryland, and 
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1 Massachusetts operate with no limit. Many of 

2 these plants do not even monitor how much they 

3 discharge, and some discharge into water bodies 

4 that have been designated as having impaired 

5 water quality. 

6 The Proposed Rule helps correct these 

7 issues. Limiting the amount of toxic discharges 

8 will save lives, prevent illnesses, and protect 

9 freshwater ecosystems. The benefit and cost 

10 analysis estimates that the rule will produce 

11 hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of public 

12 health benefits based only on the quantifiable 

13 subset of potential health benefits. These 

14 benefits are large, even without consideration of 

15 significant effects from arsenic, mercury, lead, 

16 and other toxics subject to the ELGs. The rule 

17 will also have a number of secondary health 

18 benefits as well. 

19 By internalizing the externality costs of 

20 the power plants' wastewater, a fraction of 1 

21 percent of electricity generation will switch to 

22 cleaner energy sources. Under Option 3 in the 
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1 plan, this will reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 

2 taking roughly 300,000 cars off the road, as many 

3 as Washington, D.C., or Boston has. 

4 Option 4 would reduce about double that 

5 amount of CO2 emissions, which is equivalent to 

6 all the registered cars in both cities combined. 

7 It should be noted also that the benefit 

8 and cost analysis uses the Interagency Working 

9 Group on Social Cost of Carbon’s 2010 estimates, 

10 which were also updated a month after that 

11 analysis came out. So the new Social Cost of 

12 Carbon estimates are about 60 percent higher than 

13 before, and when this is taken into account, the 

14 total monetized benefits will be about 5 or 10 

15 percent higher. And I think that's worth noting, 

16 if someone hasn't already. 

17 And for these reasons, I support EPA's 

18 choice of Option 3 or 4 for the steam electric 

19 ELG. 

20 Thank you. 

21 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

22 Theresa Pugh? 
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1 MS. PUGH: Thank you very much for 

2 allowing me to speak. I am Theresa Pugh. I am 

3 with the American Public Power Association. It's 

4 an association representing approximately 16 

5 percent of the electric power utilities in the 

6 United States, or about 46 million Americans. 

7 These utilities are in 49 of 50 states, all but 

8 Hawaii. As a matter of fact, they are also in 

9 U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, 

10 and about 700 of our 2,000 members have drinking 

11 water utilities. So water issues matter a lot to 

12 us. 

13 I just wanted, before addressing a couple 

14 of things, make the observation. There's been 

15 perhaps a false impression left by some of the 

16 witnesses that the electric generation sector has 

17 not been regulated for effluent guidelines, when 

18 a person said not since the 19th century have 

19 there been any regulations. Someone else said 

20 there are not effluent guideline requirements or 

21 that we oppose them. At least my organization 

22 does not oppose effluent guideline revisions. We 
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1 fully recognize we were up at the plate after you 

2 all did your Section, I think, 302 reviews 

3 earlier in the decade, and this has not been 

4 opposed by, to my knowledge, the industry, but 

5 the manner in which the regulations would take 

6 place matter to us greatly. 

7 We are a bit disappointed that there was 

8 not a SBREFA review. We would have liked one. 

9 There was a very fine effort initiated by EPA to 

10 extend an invitation for mayors to come in and 

11 meet on unfunded mandates. Unfortunately, the 

12 meeting was never completed. We would have liked 

13 to have seen that meeting with mayors completed. 

14 Mayors, too, want good drinking water, but the 

15 mayors were concerned about the impacts on both 

16 the electric and the water side of the house. 

17 And it would have been far preferable that both 

18 the SBREFA panel and the UMRA panels -- and the 

19 UMRA panel is new to me, but it would have been 

20 preferable that that would have been completed 

21 before the actual proposal of the rule. 

22 We have not yet determined which of the 
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1 eight options or even hybrid of options would be 

2 best, but I do have a couple of recommendations. 

3 APPA would really like to see that the 

4 Final Rule give some ability for regulatory 

5 determinations based on both feasibility, life of 

6 the plant, expected life of the plant, because we 

7 are in a time of tremendous transition. We have 

8 already seen a lot of coal-fired power plants 

9 retire. I think, to be honest, we don't know how 

10 many more will retire or will remain in full 

11 operation for perhaps decades to come, but I 

12 think there needs to be some accommodation to 

13 understand that the useful life at every power 

14 plant is not the same useful life as the power 

15 plant next door. 

16 I think that the physical space is a 

17 critical issue because all of the technologies 

18 that EPA is looking at require physical space. 

19 I was at one power plant that had a ZLD. 

20 The ZLD building took approximately the size of 

21 this room, and it was three stories tall. Not 

22 all power plants have that large of a -- excuse 
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1 me -- not all power plants have that large of a 

2 physical space available to be used. We'd very 

3 much appreciate it if you'd consider that. 

4 Finally, APPA would very much be pleased 

5 to work with the EPA on this rulemaking and 

6 others, and we are very glad that you gave us the 

7 extension of 45 days. 

8 Thank you so much. 

9 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

10 Kristy Bulleit? 

11 MS. BULLEIT: Good afternoon. My name is 

12 Kristy Bulleit, and I appreciate the chance to 

13 speak today on behalf of the Utility Water Act 

14 Group, or UWAG. 

15 UWAG consists of 197 energy companies and 

16 3 national trade associations of energy 

17 companies, and UWAG's members operate the power 

18 plants and other facilities that generate, 

19 transmit, and distribute electricity to 

20 residential, commercial, and institutional 

21 customers nationwide. It is UWAG's members whose 

22 facilities are subject to the existing steam 
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1 electric guidelines as well as to site-specific 

2 and state-specific water quality standards and 

3 that will be subject to any new technology-based 

4 steam electric guidelines that the agency 

5 ultimately finalizes. 

6 The proposed steam electric effluent 

7 guidelines rule would set very stringent 

8 performance standards that would force 

9 technological and operational changes at many 

10 existing coal-based, nuclear, and gas-based 

11 generation facilities, and it is critically 

12 important to the operations of UWAG's member 

13 facilities that the proposal be as technically 

14 accurate as the agency can make it and that it 

15 include achievable compliance standards as well 

16 as appropriate limits and deadlines. 

17 The rule should also -- and this is very 

18 important -- minimize cost to customers and be 

19 consistent with the industry's ongoing 

20 investments to transition to a cleaner generating 

21 fleet with an enhanced electric grid. 

22 I need to emphasize that my remarks today 
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1 are preliminary. We're still in the process of 

2 looking through the over-2,600 documents that the 

3 agency has developed to support this proposal. 

4 We really appreciate the 45-day extension of the 

5 comment deadline that the agency recently 

6 granted, and we think that was an important step 

7 to make sure that everyone in the industry and 

8 outside has an opportunity to review and analyze 

9 the record. 

10 Our comments today do reflect, though, 

11 our -- just some preliminary observations on the 

12 Proposed Rule and its implications for the 

13 industry and our customers. 

14 First and foremost, I want to emphasize 

15 that it's so important that the agency ensure 

16 both reasonable limits and reasonable deadlines, 

17 recognizing the transition already underway in 

18 the utility industry. This rulemaking is 

19 occurring while many power plant operators are in 

20 the process of transitioning to meet new federal 

21 environmental standards of various kinds, 

22 including those under the Clean Air Act. And 
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1 that transition includes extensive and expensive 

2 retrofits, retirement of some units, and fuel 

3 switching from coal to gas-based and renewable 

4 generation. We urge EPA to ensure that the ELG 

5 rule sets reasonable compliance limits and 

6 deadlines and take that ongoing transition into 

7 account. 

8 We look forward to working with EPA to 

9 develop a final rule that is technologically 

10 achievable, cost-effective, environmentally 

11 protective, and that minimizes economic impact 

12 and disruption on the industry and on our 

13 consumers. 

14 For example, because permitting and 

15 constructing new technologies is often -- 

16 demonstrably often a multiyear process that has 

17 to be phased in over time to allow for a reliable 

18 and efficient plant operation, the compliance 

19 deadlines alone have an enormous impact on the 

20 industry. All of these factors have to be 

21 considered when developing ELG rules and an 

22 implementation schedule. 
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1 There are a few specifics that I'd like 

2 to talk about. These relate both to the 

3 pretreatment standards and to the other 

4 standards, which they mimic. 

5 One point that's been made today 

6 repeatedly is that -- has to do with existing 

7 loads as well as existing cost, both of which are 

8 relevant to the establishment of effluent limits. 

9 Based on our review to date, EPA has in some 

10 cases mischaracterized pollutant loadings from 

11 the utility industry. For example, for bottom 

12 ash, EPA is mixing very old data from previous 

13 steam electric guidelines with a very limited 

14 amount of current data, and an accurate 

15 characterization we think requires the agency to 

16 consider more up-to-date and more complete 

17 information. 

18 We also think the agency may have 

19 underestimated some pollutant removal cost per 

20 pound, and our preliminary calculations suggest 

21 that EPA's estimates of removing a toxic-weighted 

22 pound equivalent are significantly underestimated 
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1 for a number of waste streams, including bottom 

2 ash and fly ash. As a result, your cost 

3 effectiveness analysis will probably need to be 

4 revisited, we believe. 

5 It's very important to coordinate this 

6 rule with the CCR rule, which other witnesses 

7 have mentioned. Facilities are going to be 

8 subject to the new ELG requirements and in the 

9 same general time frame a new CCR rule under 

10 RCRA. EPA itself has recognized the importance 

11 of ensuring that the two parallel rulemakings 

12 don't impose inconsistent or duplicative 

13 requirements, and we agree that it makes no sense 

14 for a facility to undertake significant design 

15 and operational changes under ELG rule, only to 

16 have those modifications negated by the CCR rule. 

17 Two last points; one, specifically on 

18 pretreatment standards. EPA's pass-through 

19 analysis, we think is flawed, mostly because EPA 

20 used POTW removal efficiencies from the 1982 

21 study of 50 well-operated POTWs, and since then, 

22 there has been a great increase in the number of 
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1 people served by advanced wastewater treatment, 

2 which has far greater treatment efficiency. 

3 So, for example, EPA used a 66 percent 

4 removal efficiency for arsenic; whereas, the 1998 

5 development document for the Centralized Waste 

6 Treatment Category found that the arsenic removal 

7 efficiency of a well-operated POTW is 91 percent. 

8 It may sound trivial, but it goes to the heart 

9 and soul of what the pretreatment standard should 

10 require. 

11 So I'll close, having gone over my time 

12 by 2 1/2 minutes and probably more by the time 

13 I'm done, by just urging EPA to ensure that the 

14 effluent guidelines rule contains achievable 

15 compliance limits and reasonable deadlines. 

16 We look forward to working with you on an 

17 ongoing basis to achieve that goal. 

18 Over the last 27 years, we have, as you 

19 know, provided lots and lots of data to the 

20 agency with the goal of assuring a technically 

21 accurate and reasonable rule, and that's more 

22 critical than ever as we transition the existing 
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1 fleet on an ongoing basis. 

2 Thanks very much. 

3 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

4 Amy Allen? 

5 [No audible response.] 

6 MR. STRASSLER: Ariel Soloski? 

7 MS. SOLOSKI: Good afternoon, and thank 

8 you for the opportunity to submit comments on 

9 EPA's Proposed Rule to set national discharge 

10 standards for the steam electric generating point 

11 source category. 

12 My name is Ariel Soloski, and I am 

13 submitting these remarks on behalf of Jennifer 

14 Duggan with the Environmental Integrity Project. 

15 Power plants are by far the largest 

16 dischargers of toxic pollution in the U.S., 

17 dumping billions of pounds of pollution into our 

18 rivers, streams, and lakes each year. While EPA 

19 has called this hearing specifically on the 

20 pretreatment part of its proposal, EPA must 

21 listen more broadly, since the vast majority of 

22 power plants don't use public water treatment 
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1 facilities. 

2 I would like to make three points today. 

3 First, without strong federal standards, 

4 permitting agencies routinely ignore the law and 

5 allow power plants to discharge unlimited amounts 

6 of toxic pollution. For the past 30 years, EPA 

7 has failed to review and revise national 

8 discharge standards for coal-fired power plants, 

9 as required by the Clean Water act. 

10 Nearly 70 percent of coal plants that 

11 dump coal ash and scrubber wastewater into our 

12 waters have no limits on arsenic, boron, cadmium, 

13 lead, mercury, and selenium. Only a little over 

14 half of these plants are required to monitor and 

15 report discharges of this pollution. 

16 For the past 30 years, states have 

17 effectively allowed coal plants to use our 

18 rivers, streams, and lakes as their own private 

19 dumping grounds. 

20 Second, the failure to control toxic 

21 pollution from power plants wreaks ecological 

22 havoc in our watersheds and puts downstream 
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1 communities in harm's way. EPA has identified 

2 250 instances where power plants have damaged 

3 ground or surface waters with arsenic, selenium, 

4 and other heavy metals. Tens of thousands of 

5 miles of our rivers have been poisoned, 

6 compromising the health of the environment and 

7 anyone who fishes and swims in these waters. 

8 Third, this is a problem with a solution. 

9 The good news is that EPA has made clear that 

10 affordable wastewater treatment technologies are 

11 available to clean up these dangerous discharges. 

12 Options 5 and 4 in EPA's Proposed Rule 

13 would require the elimination of the majority of 

14 coal plant water pollution using technologies 

15 that are available and cost effective. 

16 The coal industry can easily afford these 

17 controls. EPA estimates that ending toxic 

18 dumping from coal plants would cost less than 1 

19 percent of annual revenue for most coal plant 

20 operators and just pennies a day for ordinary 

21 Americans if the utilities pass some of the 

22 cleanup cost to consumers. 
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1 EPA can no longer ignore the unchecked 

2 dumping of billions of pounds of pollution into 

3 our waters. Americans deserve, and the Clean 

4 Water Act demands, that EPA end decades of toxic 

5 dumping and require the affordable and available 

6 treatment technologies proposed in Option 5 to 

7 eliminate the majority of these dangerous 

8 discharges. 

9 Thank you for the consideration of our 

10 comments. 

11 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

12 Lih Young? 

13 DR. YOUNG: Good afternoon. My name is 

14 Lih Young. I am a Ph.D. economist in -- 

15 MR. STRASSLER: Could you please the 

16 microphone -- speak into the microphone, please? 

17 Yeah. Thank you. 

18 DR. YOUNG: Okay. 

19 My name is Lih Young. I am a Ph.D. 

20 economist by training. I am here to join other 

21 civic groups to support the clean water, clean 

22 air, and other plans that EPA would take to 
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1 reduce significantly harmful pollution or global 

2 warming from power plants and petroleum 

3 refineries, et cetera, to improve government 

4 function, and to protect people, families, and 

5 the communities from such harmful damages. My 

6 reasons are stated below. 

7 First, the harmful pollution affect 

8 people's health, productivity, medical 

9 expenditure, individual, family, and social lives 

10 from both private and social cost benefit point 

11 of view. Power plants and refineries are 

12 producing carbon pollutions which are harmful for 

13 people in communities. Our taxpayers and general 

14 public have to pay that cost. 

15 Further, adverse impacts, unfairness, 

16 irresponsibility, unfair election, and market 

17 mechanism, and unjust influence of corporation 

18 entities or networks cause serious social, 

19 political problems and, thus, cost our society 

20 tremendously. 

21 To help you understand the social 

22 problem, as I have identified and my family has 
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1 experienced. So this attachment, this testimony 

2 will be submitted. 

3 I am urging (indiscernible) -- I have run 

4 for public offices from local to federal since 

5 1994, including U.S. Senate in Maryland State 

6 Comptroller. 

7 Second, social justice is in great 

8 danger, work to be done, promote the fairness, 

9 freedom, justice, peace, humility, productivity, 

10 well-being of general public, resolve, social, 

11 political issues, and balancing the budget, 

12 oppose so-called "fair election act," and public 

13 finance much in small donors from -- do more -- 

14 which do more harm than good, resource benefit, 

15 what I call "beggar." 

16 So something like EPA can have -- provide 

17 leadership, but be careful. We are not just 

18 talking rhetoric, and we are not just talking 

19 about have appropriation or fund and then divert 

20 the resource to benefit a few. That is why now 

21 we have a social problem. 

22 So I urge you to official -- legislators 
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1 to resolve. Really, this system is murder for 

2 all crime injustice system, and complaint issues 

3 are ultimately complaint and finance in 

4 practically every agency and contractors and 

5 prosecutors of injustice network operation and 

6 just practices, their abuse ways rather been 

7 misled, manipulated and inference by them and 

8 benefit them. We ought to improve government 

9 function, resolve complaint issues, protect 

10 people, family, business, and the communities 

11 from harmful damage on health, productivity, 

12 activities, and lives -- I really mean lives and 

13 medical expenditure from private and social point 

14 of view. 

15 So I have submitted a long statement, and 

16 I am sure my time is limited. So I would like 

17 you to read it, close look at this, and I have 

18 attachment of -- six attachments. So, please, 

19 it's very important. We depend on you. 

20 Thank you. 

21 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

22 Earle Mitchell? 
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1 [No audible response.] 

2 MR. STRASSLER: John Brockhouse? 

3 [No audible response.] 

4 MR. STRASSLER: No. 

5 Shilpa Shenvi? 

6 MS. SHENVI: Good afternoon, and thank 

7 you for your time. 

8 In preparation to speak here today, I 

9 tried to research how long a person can survive 

10 without water. The answers vary, but the most 

11 common number that came up was 3 days. These 

12 numbers are, of course, from reported cases. Not 

13 one of us in this room would ever consider the 

14 idea of an experiment to determine the length of 

15 a waterless survival. It would be inhumane. It 

16 would mean knowingly killing people. 

17 Clearly, we all agree that uncontaminated 

18 drinking water is essential to human life, to 

19 human survival, so I applaud the decision to 

20 tighten our water regulations. However, I 

21 strongly urge the EPA to set zero discharge 

22 standards as well as aggressively treat heavy 
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1 metals in wastewater. 

2 Many of the pollutants in our waterways 

3 are heavy metals. Over half of these heavy 

4 metals originate at steam electric power 

5 generating facilities. Despite current 

6 regulations, these toxins make their way into our 

7 drinking water at high enough concentrations to 

8 cause widespread health problems. Arsenic can 

9 cause skin, lung, and liver cancer. Selenium can 

10 cause the nerve damage while uranium can lead to 

11 kidney malfunction. 

12 As with all pollutants, children are 

13 especially vulnerable to the toxins released by 

14 steam electric power generating plants. Children 

15 are much smaller than adults, so they consume 

16 more water per unit of body weight. As a result, 

17 they will have higher concentrations of toxins in 

18 their blood than will adults in the same 

19 environment. 

20 Furthermore, a child's brain and nervous 

21 system are still developing. Damage caused 

22 either in utero or in early childhood results in 
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1 lifelong neurological problems. Mercury and lead 

2 in particular are known to cause birth defects 

3 and lowered IQs in children who either drink 

4 tainted water themselves or whose mothers 

5 unknowingly consumed these contaminants while 

6 pregnant. 

7 Again, I commend the decision to tighten 

8 regulations, but we need to take every step we 

9 can to stop any pollutant from entering our 

10 drinking supply. 

11 So, again, I strongly urge the EPA to set 

12 zero discharge standards and aggressive heavy 

13 metal treatment standards. We know that lifelong 

14 damage and terminal illnesses results from these 

15 toxins. Learning several years from now that our 

16 measures are insufficient would be like running 

17 an inhumane experiment. None of us can opt to 

18 not drink water. No one should risk a lifelong 

19 illness or slow death in the pursuit of something 

20 essential to human life. 

21 Thank you. 

22 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 
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1 Stan Boyd? 

2 MR. BOYD: Good afternoon. I really 

3 appreciate the fact that you are holding this 

4 public hearing so that we can talk about the 

5 options that you've introduced. 

6 I became interested in conservation with 

7 Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," and that 

8 seemed to lead to the founding of EPA in 1970 and 

9 then the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, 

10 which stated as a goal that it would eliminate 

11 all water pollution by 1985. Well, that's quite 

12 an ambitious goal, and we see it certainly wasn't 

13 met. In fact, I seemed to have learned a lot 

14 today that things are far worse than I ever 

15 imagined. 

16 In fact, I don't think most Americans 

17 have even a clue that the EPA is not successfully 

18 regulating the environment to their best ability 

19 and reducing pollution in water, and I was 

20 surprised that 70 to 80 percent of coal plants 

21 have no limits on the amount of pollutants they 

22 put in the water. I think most Americans would 
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1 be shocked by that, even those who have been 

2 active politically, as I have. 

3 But I am happy that we have the data now 

4 that's collected, even if it took 30 years, and 

5 we have the technology to actually move forward 

6 on this, and I want to thank you for proposing 

7 the new rule for cleaning up toxic water 

8 pollution from coal-fired power plants. 

9 I am particularly happy to learn that the 

10 EPA has the authority to protect the water from 

11 toxic coal waste. It's just a matter of moving 

12 forward and doing it. Of course, I know there 

13 are many people who are not -- well, let me first 

14 say I didn't hear any person here today speak out 

15 in opposition to having clean water, and I think 

16 all Americans want clean water, but there are 

17 economic interests, the coal industry 

18 particularly, that would be greatly hurt by some 

19 regulations. And so I just am urging you, please 

20 do what the EPA was set to do, which is protect 

21 our water for the public good and not be too 

22 influenced by arguments that this would be 
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1 economically damaging or we have to delay 

2 further, even though it's taken 30 years to get 

3 to this point. 

4 The American people count on the action 

5 of the EPA. We can't expect much from our 

6 Congress right now, and it is through regulation 

7 that we can really make the most progress. 

8 So I would say please see the power 

9 plants install zero liquid discharge technology 

10 and implement Options 4 and 5 because the weakest 

11 option would only control 468 million pounds of 

12 pollution a year, while the strongest Option 4 

13 and 5 would control 5.3 billion pounds of 

14 pollution per year. 

15 Thank you very much for listening and 

16 taking all this public input today. 

17 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

18 Cindy Olson? 

19 MS. OLSON: I know everyone has said it, 

20 but I thank you very much for taking public 

21 input. It's very important in our process. 

22 Sadly, even though the earth is covered 
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1 in water, much of it has become unusable because 

2 of human pollution due to human activities, 

3 especially from particular industries. Water is 

4 considered polluted when its contamination is at 

5 the point that is unfit for use. 

6 If water is polluted, you can’t drink it, 

7 you can't swim in it, and you can't eat fish out 

8 of it, as well as affecting all the wildlife that 

9 depends on the polluted water. They also become 

10 at risk. 

11 It's also important to understand how 

12 water gets polluted. The toxins that power 

13 plants have been putting into the water system 

14 are incredible in some ways, because they are 

15 such huge polluters. According to your own 

16 statistics, more than half of the toxic 

17 pollutants discharged into surface, our drinking 

18 and our swimming water, are from these plants. 

19 We need to have zero discharge now. I 

20 think 30 years has been long enough. We can't 

21 actually allow these companies to continue 

22 dumping toxins into unlined pools simply because 
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1 it goes into the groundwater, and groundwater 

2 exists between the surface, obviously, and that 

3 actually supposedly stays on an average of 1,400 

4 years. 

5 So, basically, dilution has not been the 

6 solution, even if we're saying let's just put it 

7 in a pond next to the -- you know, it will be 

8 okay. You know, I've been to the Berkeley Pit, 

9 and I don't know. I think they have to shoot 

10 things off of it. 

11 Anyways, the strongest rules that need to 

12 become regulation, simply because there is no 

13 reason not to regulate, and we really need to 

14 save, obviously, our greatest resource, which is 

15 our water. 

16 Today's technology actually are very cost 

17 effective, and they clean the toxins out of the 

18 water quite well. Past regulations actually have 

19 helped American businesses become much more 

20 competitive, and as a member of a small business, 

21 I want to have you look maybe at a different way 

22 of understanding how the economy actually works. 
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1 If we as leaders of the world basically 

2 want our companies to be as credibly competitive, 

3 we need to actually put in regulation so the 

4 actual innovation can come forward. 

5 So I know that there's pressures to say 

6 otherwise, but what I would say is if you 

7 regulate, companies are not going to be affected 

8 in any detrimental way. In fact, we will 

9 continue to have our technology grow, and we will 

10 be able to export that to other parts of the 

11 world that are in actual need of this technology. 

12 So I know that zero discharge policy, you 

13 know the Options 4 and 5 have been discussed, but 

14 I want you to understand that private companies 

15 are going to be innovating, and we will actually 

16 have a competitive advantage. 

17 Thank you very much. 

18 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

19 Brenna Muller, did you -- you wanted to 

20 testify? Different statement? 

21 MS. MULLER: This is my own this time. 

22 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. 
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1 MS. MULLER: Okay, thank you. So my name 

2 is Brenna Muller. 

3 Even though this EPA hearing is 

4 specifically on the pretreatment part of the 

5 proposed water pollution standards, I will speak 

6 more broadly about the importance of the proposed 

7 steam electric effluent guidelines rule. 

8 With the passage of the Clean Water Act 

9 of 1972, Congress set a national goal to ensure 

10 clean water for all Americans; however, we are 

11 long overdue in dealing with toxic water 

12 pollution from power plants. 

13 Coal-fired power plants are the largest 

14 source of toxic water pollution in the United 

15 States, dumping billions of pounds of pollution 

16 into America's rivers, streams, and lakes each 

17 year. These pollutants, including lead and 

18 mercury, can be dangerous to humans and wreak 

19 havoc in our watersheds, even in very small 

20 amounts. 

21 EPA has identified over 250 individual 

22 instances where coal plants have harmed ground or 
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1 surface water. Because many coal plants sit on 

2 recreational lakes and reservoirs, are upstream 

3 of drinking water supplies, those thousands of 

4 miles of poisoned waters have an impact on people 

5 across the country. Coal water pollution raises 

6 cancer rates, makes fish unsafe to eat, and can 

7 inflict lasting health problems on our children. 

8 Power plants should be required to adopt 

9 the best available technology to reduce the most 

10 amount of pollution. The technology exists and 

11 is already in use in some plants. There's no 

12 reason for power plants to continue dumping 

13 arsenic, lead, selenium, mercury, and other toxic 

14 pollutants in our water. 

15 While I applaud EPA's proposal to deal 

16 with this important water pollution problem, only 

17 two of the proposed options, Options 4 and 5, 

18 would begin to fix this problem, and some of the 

19 weakest options proposed are completely 

20 unacceptable. A strong rule would create 

21 hundreds of dollars in benefits every year in the 

22 form of improved health and recreational 
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1 opportunities, not to mention the priceless 

2 benefits of clean and healthy watersheds. 

3 Unless EPA acts, this problem is only 

4 going to get worse, as more power plants install 

5 air pollution control scrubbers that essentially 

6 take toxics out of the air and dump them in our 

7 water. By the agency's own estimate, this toxic 

8 wastewater stream is going to increase by 28 

9 percent over the next 15 years. 

10 There is no reason to tolerate continued 

11 dumping, and the Clean Water Act mandates 

12 cleanup. We can eliminate most, if not all, coal 

13 plant water pollutions for pennies a day. The 

14 strongest of EPA's proposed options will get us 

15 to that future. So I strongly encourage the EPA 

16 to finalize a strong rule to clean up America's 

17 waterways. 

18 Thank you. 

19 MR. STRASSLER: Thank you. 

20 Those are all the speakers who have 

21 registered up front or at the table. Is there 

22 anybody else who we missed or wants to testify? 
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1 [No audible response.] 

2 MR. STRASSLER: Okay. Well, thank you 

3 for coming today. All testimony will be in the 

4 record, available at regulations.gov. It will be 

5 in the record for the Final Rule, and any other 

6 announcements, we will put on our website. 

7 Thank you. 

8 [Whereupon, at 5:15 p.m., the 

9 Pretreatment Public Hearing concluded.] 

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