BLACK HOLE AGAIN IN INDIANA


HEADLINE: WILL OLD KING COAL RUIN OR RULE INDIANA?
By Hank Nuwer

SUBHEAD: Anti-coal environmentalists in Indiana say waste is a terrible thing to mind. But coal mine execs, Hoosier conservation officials and state-paid geologists disagree, citing energy needs, jobs, and profits as a rationale. Given the state’s almost total dependence on coal-fired plants for electricity as demands for power escalate, these natural foes likely will RAKE EACH OTHER OVER THE COALS for years to come.

                                                              

    Last January, although disabled and forced to get around by walker or wheelchair, Don Mottley was outside in frigid cold on a mission.  He’s a stream-and-river hugger and proud of it, a member of several state watchdog groups that scrutinize the activities of coal operators and coal-fired plants. Handed a tip, he was out to inspect a small stream in Gibson County, Ind., near the Somerville Coal Mine.

Also making an inspection was concerned citizen Dixie Wagner. She keeps a skeptical eye on industrial neighbors whose policies, she fears, might hurt her own three acres of land.

Perhaps you regard the fears of activists like Mottley and Wagner as hyper-phobic?

Then consider this.

Last Oct. 11, a poisonous gumbo of nasty, unfiltered chemicals whooshed into collapsed parts of a Kentucky mine near West Virginia. Like the evil spirits in Pandora’s opened box, this flood of 250 million gallons of mushy, filthy water contained coal dust, caustic starch, aluminum sulfate, anhydrous ammonia, lime and various other toxic substances.                                            The spill trashed homes, fish-spawning sites, and landscaped properties in the two states. The destruction along some 100 miles of waterways focused press and public attention on the Martin County Coal Company, a subsidiary of a larger corporation.
The Kentucky environmental catastrophe was even more disastrous than the chemical spill northeast of Indy that killed 100+ tons of fish in the White River in December 1999.  

Angry critics said the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) should have inspected and shut down the offending site long before a catastrophe occurred.

[SOMEONE’S GOT TO DO IT]
Mottley and Walker have environmental rounds to make even without tipsters calling. Forty-two coal mines prop the economy of Indiana from the west-central counties, where the Wabash River begins bending east to Lafayette, to the jagged puzzle piece of land bordering the Ohio River to the south. Like other Midwest states, Indiana hosts a big chunk of Illinois Basin Coal, high in sulfur but used nonetheless after blending with low-sulfur coal or cleaning. This century, many more mines are likely to start up in Indiana as the nation’s natural gas and oil resources wink out faster than coal reserves.

Wagner says this: “My particular interest has been the issue of coal
Combustion waste.”

Mottley? He’s a stickler for hard, empirical evidence. Insists in conversation that one citizen can make a difference.
“If ordinary people do not get involved, there’s little the people that represent them can do,” says Mottley, 49.

His home’s electricity is powered by natural gas. His last bill shot up in one month from $63 to $203. Mottley wants coal to burn as cleanly as the government says it can burn, but he’s not in favor of outright abolition of coal-fired plants lest elderly Hoosiers on a fixed income be unable to pay their bills.

Walker and Mottley were aghast when they arrived downwater from operations near the Somerville Coal Mine. “The water was absolutely black,” says Wagner.

Right on the case was Clay Dayson, a state Department of Natural Resources land reclamation specialist. DNR has inspection powers if a spill threatens people, public or private lands, water and air—or all the above. Dayson wrote a work cessation order and shut the affected operation at the plant right down, although he said the reality wasn’t as bad as the creek’s appearance.
E. Wayne Parke, the senior vice president for surface operations at the Black Beauty Coal Co. (Black Beauty runs the Somerville mine and about a dozen other mining properties in Indiana), says the Gibson County incident was little more than a scare. BBC workers jumped right on the problem when the cessation order was written, he told Indianapolis Monthly. Dayson concurs, calling Parke “very, very helpful.”

“There weren’t any ducks or anything around,” Parke says right off, lest his interviewer suffer media-induced flashbacks of blackened, gasping sea birds following the notorious Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

Parke discloses that a problem occurred, but it was corrected without extensive damage occurring to neighboring lands or wildlife. Crews of workers dispersed over the affected terrain with clean-up equipment like a posse after prison escapees. Dayson says the area was cleaned as well as could be expected, although he wouldn’t call it pristine, either.

The leakage began with a shut-off valve problem, Parke says. On Jan. 13, in the late afternoon, a connection exposed to the frigid air failed. Luckily, the escaping water had a benign, neutral pH. The spill wasn’t pretty, but stopped short of being a mine disaster. Still, such incidents make environmentalists nervous.

“Crews worked through the night to build an earthen dam downstream to contain the material from the runoff,” says Parke, explaining that harmless shale material discolored the creek waters.    
No need for lights, cameras, action, in other words.
Dayson, while he’s grateful that Mottley says he’s going to try to get an environmental award for his dedication, insists that 60 other DNR employees would have given up their weekends to oversee a problem just as he did. “Besides, hero today and scapegoat tomorrow” he half-jokes, knowing that Mottley and fellow environmentalists often criticize DNR’s uneasy alliance with coal operators.

[BLACK HOLE AGAIN IN INDIANA]

Could an ecological disaster happen here at a mine site? Hoosier DNR, federal agencies, environmentalists, and mining execs alike say they’re determined it won’t.

Guarantees? That’s another matter.

In October of 2000, acid from mine drainage in southwest Indiana not only poisoned a small creek, but possibly was linked to the deaths of frogs, mud puppies and fish (as big as 20 inches) that turned belly up on the East Fork of the White River and along the banks of several smaller fishing holes, charges Mottley.

Unlike some other states, Indiana’s main source of energy for electricity production is coal—with natural gas and petroleum bringing up the rear. Environmentally popular renewable energy sources such as biomass gas are little used in the state. Way off in the future, though perhaps inevitable, are clean-air solutions devoid of fossil fuels and low-emission boiler systems at coal-fired plants that turn residue into inert slag rather than coal ash,” says Lawrence Ruth of the U.S. Department of Energy. Prototypes are already around or in development.

State Department of Natural Resources deputy director Paul J. Ehret and environmental activist Jeff Stant hotly disagree on most issues related to coal-powered energy. Friction between the two of them is fueled not only by coal, but a social conflict stoked by their individual values.

Ehret thinks clean-burning coal is the answer to Indiana’s current and future needs.  Stant terms “clean coal” an oxymoron, stresses that all Indiana’s abandoned mines and some that are operating should be termed toxic dumps and regulated more like nuclear and medical wastes. But both say that many Hoosiers in Indianapolis have been apathetic about educating themselves on the coal issue.  There’s no escaping that Indiana’s dependence on coal for energy affects families, jobs, and recreational choices.
Ehret still shakes his head over a woman who approached him recently. She could not understand why consumption of dirty coal was so high in Indiana when a clean source—electricity—was readily available to every consumer. Noting that a recent DNR workshop for the state’s teachers on coal mining failed to prod very many Indianapolis teachers into attending, he wonders aloud if students living outside coal districts have any idea at all of where the power comes from that is powering their computer games and Internet usage. Industry sources say that computers use 13 percent of all U.S. electricity, with the Internet responsible for 8 percent of that.

Imagine that. Chunks of coal powering silicon chips.

[MORALITY PLAY WITHOUT VILLAINS]

Paul Ehret finds ironies and contradictions when he examines the lifestyles of those most bitterly opposed to coal. He  points out that some state activists put Christmas lights on their houses. He also notes a tendency of some Hoosier activists to prefer hydroelectric power to energy supplied by coal-fired plants, wondering aloud if they are ignorant about the woes of dam-locked salmon in the Pacific Northwest. Displaying a photo of him holding trout he caught on vacation, Ehret says that his own love for clean waters and wildlife is genuine.

And consider the opinions of Stant, an activist with a head for memorizing statistics and pollution figures. He observes near-uniform government and citizen disregard for environmental issues linked to air and water pollutants spread by coal-fired plants—an irony seeing how 31 years ago the first Earth Day grabbed so many Baby Boomers by the love beads. Until residents find themselves directly in the path of mine development or a utility announces plans to build a power plant downwind from their homes, too many citizens fail to see a need to “reduce and reuse,” complain activists.

“States like Indiana say there’s no problem with coal waste, and the last thing they want to do is look into it,” says Stant. “They don’t want to do studies. They want to be able to say, `Look, there’s no data.’ It’s their strongest defense. What [refusing to conduct studies] has done is squelch any real digging by reporters because it is too hard to cover.

“It’s basically a sleeping giant that the utility industry insists will never wake up, because there’s no giant, no problem.  There is a horrible environment of coercion here, either from the co-option of scientists who work for regulatory commissions or coercion [for them] to shut up or they don’t get any research money. The more that [educational] institutions have to get their money from private industry, the more that starts to happen. When they don’t want public funding in the universities, this [flawed system] is what you end up with.”

[FUTURE SHOCK = ACTIVISM]

With 180,000 acres of Indiana state and private lands already disturbed by surface mining, and many thousands of acres now under scrutiny for potential blasting, Mottley says the ranks of activists will continue to swell.

Now, however, so few Hoosiers are involved in coal battles full-time, that activists such as Stant, Dixie Wagner, Don Mottley, and John Blair of Valley Watch, Inc., tend to be well known to each other and to DNR officials such as Ehret.  You can count on these hardy types showing up for state-run meetings to debate matters such as whether some types of coal combustion waste (ccw) ought to be declared hazardous substances by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Activists Stant and Blair insist that ccw contaminants like arsenic, boron, lead, dioxin, selenium, sulfates and uranium pose a threat to drinking water (especially ground water and wells), pointing to incidents of leaching in abandoned mines as a real threat to public safety. They bristle over discussions by state officials considering requests from coal mine operators, besieged by hills piled high with combustion wastes, that they be allowed to dump tons of waste such as coal fly ash (a solid made up of minerals and silicate after burning) in strip mines unprotected by liners made of clay or other substances.

But state employee Maria Mastalerz, an Indiana Geological Survey geologist, sedimentologist, and author—interviewed at her neatly appointed office in the Indiana University Geology Building, says these elements appear in such minute amounts as to pose no frenzied need for a call to arms.

Nevertheless, a press release from the Hoosier Environmental Council that declares in boldface: “The Indiana Department of Natural Resources is deliberately misleading the public into believing that the open dumping or more than 90 million tons of coal ash is safe.” Among the greatest disagreement is the issue of “natural attenuation,” that is whether nature itself can in a reasonable period of time disperse the troublesome minerals in fly ash. DNR believes it will, pointing to good fishing in the Green-Sullivan State Forest—a strip mine that recovered mainly on its own; but protests by the Hoosier Environmental Council demonstrate that many activists believe it not. They find the idea of natural attenuation unrealistic, particularly with regard to the dispersal of nasty stuff with a long life like dioxin, a problematic waste associated with the incineration process.

Sen. John Waterman of Indiana asks rhetorically if dumping ccw is all right if it ends up taking 100 years to disperse. “I don’t have that long to wait,” he deadpans.

Giving legitimacy to the claims of environmentalists have been a handful of studies that found higher than normal presence of lead, mercury, arsenic and other metals in fish species found in waters near unreclaimed coal mines. (Some blame was also put on fertilizer runoff attributed to less safe farming practices.) Among these were tests over a number of years in the Patoka River, used by many residents of Jasper and Winslow, Ind., for drinking purposes. Residents throughout Pike County, Ind., were unnerved by such reports, given the high number of abandoned mines there and potential for long-term illnesses of children and adults.
The Hoosier Environmental Council also tracks generating stations it accuses of harboring elevated levels of contaminants. In Indiana, these include the A.B Brown Generating Station (sulfate, chloride, boron, acid leaching) and Universal Ash Disposal Site (arsenic, sulfate, lead, boron).
 
[MEMBER OF THE DIRTY DOZEN]
Familiarity between natural opponents, of course, can breed contempt. And now and again, public meetings attract excitable citizens or lower-level mining execs that get into shouting matches or issue never-carried-out threats to bloody someone’s nose.
In spite of their fiercely held beliefs and attacks on one another’s credibility, the people on both sides tend to be well-mannered, considerate people—the sort you’d want for neighbors. Poker-faced during hearings, Ehret jokes with teachers at a coal education conference, serving as tastetester with mock seriousness during a toothpaste-making session. Stant, in everyone’s face before a legislative vote, talks quietly and respectfully to an elderly neighbor in Irvington who has been inquiring about the death of Jeff’s beloved dog from old age. At Indiana University, state geologists with the IGS talk enthusiastically about the work of their colleagues, eschewing the backbiting sometimes seen in other academic departments.

The impasse over energy policies, however, is real between DNR and environmentalists. An energy war is bitterly being fought on Hoosier soil. Financial stakes are high. Activists feel lives and property are at risk. The state guards revenues from mining and hopes to hold onto some 3,000-industry jobs. Neither side capitulates so much as an ounce of coal dust until mandates from federal agencies force changes or compliance.

The anger expressed by many citizens seems real enough, as are frustrations by state officials who don’t see a handful of activists speaking for the majority of citizens in the state. Activists want to see a tougher state checks-and-balances system with some other regulatory group having routine review power over DNR decisions concerning coal waste disposal and policing of mines.
“I don’t think they’re doing their jobs, seeing how there’s a conflict in responsibilities,” charges activist Lisa Lee of Riley.  “There needs to be somebody else monitoring. They (DNR and mine/power plants) work too closely together, anyway. To me, they are the same entity, even though they are separate entities, because they work so close together.”

To many activists, the fact alone that Indiana has a mere 3.5 percent of public-land holdings is motivation enough for the Indiana DNR to accept mined-out properties for reclamation to stretch its holdings somewhat more. “With reclamation, I don’t see how they can properly monitor what needs to be done,” says Lee. “Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) needs to be in charge, not the DNR. It [DNR] wants acreage and state lands.”

It rankles activists that powerful mining companies could abandon badly run plants that leached acid, created dead creeks and ruined acreage, only to have the state assume responsibility for cleanup. Activist John Gurnitz attacks mining concerns and the DNR for what he sees as poor stewardship of the land: clearcutting trees and selling off the commercial wood, destroying wildlife, altering the surface of the land. “They tell the public they restore the land to good or better condition,” says Gurnitz. “That’s a lie.”
Ehret and reclamation specialists at a Black Beauty mine near Farmersburg, Ind., defend their land restoration in equally strong terms. They point to crop yields on former mine properties reconverted to farmlands that are higher now than before the land was stripped.

Angriest of all have been citizens of towns built atop long-ago abandoned mines such as Cannelburg in Daviess County. Homeowners for many years have complained that their residences crumble atop the unstable earth like blocks of blue cheese. Sinkholes loom in many backyards and streets.

Many concerned Hoosiers would like the DNR to stop accepting moneys paid to it by mines, says Mottley. Rather they prefer the DNR getting its operating budget totally from legislative appropriations so as to avoid even the appearance of being beholding to the industry.

The DNR’s Ehret, however, argues that the division does seek outside intervention in cases where the public might think it is sleeping in a coal bed with the mining industry. From 1989 to 1994, for example, at the DNR’s request, the Office of Surface Mining assumed responsibility for looking into complaints from Hoosier homeowners that blasting at the Ayrshire Mine operated by the Amax Coal Company was cracking walls and garage floors of residents. In a lengthy public document printed in 1994, OSM and consultants from numerous other government-mining agencies blamed soil conditions, a moist, humid climate, and up-and-down seasonal temperatures.

Gurnitz, a Farmersburg landowner and farmer, speaks angrily when talking about the OSM findings. “Those blasts rip your land, rip your house,” he asserts. He cites one house “that stood 30 years and never a crack.” Once blasting commenced, he says over 40 cracks have formed, water seeped into the basement, pictures fell off walls.” Joining him in agreement is John Waterman, a state senator from the 39th District and general contractor, who says the blasts sometimes create “a bullwhip effect” where the tip of the lash causes harsh destruction. “Once, a mile and a half from a mine, a blast blew a storm door clear off,” he says. “They cause dry wells, ruin floors.”

Ehret terms the charges unprovable, although he expresses empathy for those that feel mining has diminished their quality of life. DNR officials at more than one public meeting angered Gurnitz and his neighbors by saying water quality in southwest Indiana generally aren’t all that good to begin with. Gurnitz had complained he’d lost a well. “I have one now that is 325-foot deep and the aquifer is set in a sandstone formation,” he says. “You could sell that water. It’s very soft with no iron, no lead, and near-perfect.” He says that when mines move into an area, too often water gets as acidic as vinegar, because no liners are used to protect the aquifers.

Thus, cries that the OSM investigation was rigged against complaining residents continue to this day. Environmentalists here point to what appears to be a similar alliance between West Virginia’s state conservation unit (Division of Environmental Protection) and the OSM in permitting widespread and removal of mountaintops for coal strip mining in West Virginia (aggravated by the burial of waste in valleys) that seem to blatantly violate federal laws governing strip operations since 1977.

[GETTING ACTIVE]

To get the attention of [the now late] Gov. Frank O’Bannon and DNR officials, says Mottley, his movement needs thousands of singing and chanting citizens to fill the rotunda of the statehouse, as occurred just once for a coal-combustion protest.  “Gov. O’Bannon didn’t come out, but I imagine he was somewhere in the building listening,” says Mottley.

“O’Bannon’s stays silent,” says Sen. John Waterman. “We, the people, don’t exist. When people get labeled as environmentalists, the system overrules them.”

Lisa Lee of Riley echoes his complaint, saying that she, as the daughter of a coal miner, and others felt their identity was different from Jeff Stant or the Hoosier Environmental Council. Her main victory was stopping coal-ash dumping by a mine near the homestead that has been in her husband’s family for many generations.

“They never did dump it,” she says proudly, having written dozens of letters, made hundreds of phone calls, and organized many, many meetings to fight a coal giant.

[Environmental Worries]

Although hardly one of the larger states in population, Indiana comes far too close to rivaling the environmental problems of California and Illinois, complains John Blair.

Blair, who has stock in PSI to attend shareholder meetings to anticipate anti-plant strategies, provides his concerns in a brutal summary. Our state’s air quality is poor. Few creeks have water pure enough for pregnant women to dare eat the fish within them. Existing or planned mines are near sources of drinking water such as wells. Vast stretches of land contain contaminants. Hunters and farmers alike feel squeamish about eating meat from animals that have access to waters in leeching distance of the state’s abandoned mines.

Indiana is one of 12 states that came under attack in 2000 by the watchdog Clean Air Network (CAN), publisher of an annual ozone Smog Watch. As a so-called “Dirty Dozen State,” Indiana draws fire for pollution reduction non-attainment that’s attributed primarily to coal-fired plants along the Ohio River Valley. CAN attacks what it calls excess pollution, not only in cities such as Indianapolis, but in 82 percent of the Indiana counties that monitor ozone.*

Blair, the environmentalist, blames Midwest power plants for the sweeping air pollution that’s dropping over New York State. Sen. Hillary Clinton recently scored the Midwest for coal-burning practices that she says denuded forests and water problems in that states.

But the DNR’s Ehret, while saying there’s no denying coal is a dirty industry, wants opponents of coal to look in their garages at their SUVs for creating their own problems with smog, ozone, and denuded trees.

Indiana is close to Texas in coal consumption, a state with a huge geography and much bigger population, complains Blair. “Coal ash should be monitored like solid waste. It is inherently more dangerous and more polluting than many solid waste landfill materials,” he says.  
 
As evidence that mining is nasty and brutal and shortens lives, critics of mining point to the thousand upon thousands of deaths of miners who escaped injury only to succumb to deadly lung diseases exacerbated or created by dust. According to federal testimony by experts in 2000, some 40,000 ex-miners suffer the eventually fatal effects of black lung and silicosis in spite of government treatment and awareness programs. In Indiana, near Farmersville, retiree Bill Miller says he worries about layers of dust that fall off coal trucks and remain, untreated and uncollected, on his roadside.

“There goes another one,” he shouts during a phone interview. “No tarp on it! It turns to sludge when it’s wet and it’s dusty when it’s not wet.”

The Clean Air Act and subsequent amendments authorized stinging penalties of up to $27,500 per day for every violation of pollution controls. Blair wants Hoosier coal-burning plants that exceed allowable nitrogen-oxide and sulfur-dioxide emissions to pay dearly. Otherwise, he and Stant see today’s toxic waste as tomorrow’s ill children. “We’re creating a nightmare for ourselves,” says Blair. “One estimate is that 60,000 kids have developmental problems because of mercury in the environment,” says Stant.

Unafraid to wiggle accusatory fingers in the face of authority, Blair and Stant contend that Gov. Frank O’Bannon displays antiquated attitudes toward the environment and a career politician’s over-regard for those who run coal-fired power plants. Quick to get out among arts activists with wife Judy to promote Hoosier artists and arts groups, the governor appears reticent about meeting with environmental activists, said several interviewees. He lets aides take the blistering phone calls from those unhappy with mine blasting or fears over potential well tainting, says Lisa Lee.

Stant says, with evident impatience, that O’Bannon’s grandfatherly performance with angry environmentalists has run thin.
He and Blair insist that their own ethical allegiances go to the young, old and unborn facing the dangers of airborne mercury pollution. Among O’Bannon’s sins of commission, the environmentalists cite his decision in 2000 to ally with numerous power-generating utilities in a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, demanding that it rescind its edict to have coal-fired plants reduce their nitrogen oxide levels significantly by May of 2003. Nitrogen oxide most frequently has been blamed by environmentalists for contributing to the emergence of holes in the world’s ozone layer.

O’Bannon’s support to the contrary, most coal-fired plants in Indiana say they’ve moved forward to reduce such emissions.
Blair says coal-fired plants cause up to a third of air pollution. In January this year, the Harvard School of Public Health released a study of nine coal-burning plants in Illinois that researchers said likely were linked to an estimated 280 deaths in 2000. These Illinois plants use higher sulfur coal or blends of coal similar to those burned in Indiana. Researchers blamed emissions such as nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide when compiling the estimated death total. The Harvard Study set tongues of environmentalists a-wagging, wondering if their attorneys someday might haul utility execs into court in a legal repeat of lucrative tobacco awards for wrongful deaths.

Stant, interviewed at his spacious house, contends that O’Bannon’s apparent tolerance for the worst excesses of coal plants make out-of-state utilities salivate.  Here, he says, the state’s too-easily obtained exemptions and too-little enforcement look increasingly good to coal producers in states that have zero tolerance for pollution.

Ehret, in turn, defends the actions taken by the state, and he dismisses some of the more serious allegations against ccw as hyperbolic and based on bad science. He cites uses for limited amounts of coal combustion waste in concrete-like products and other manufacturing products. Mottley says he is a supporter of just such an enterprise starting a plant in southwest Indiana near Yankeetown, but he says that untold mountains of ash remain in the state and pose a clear health danger.

John Roush of the IGS says that he, as a scientist, puts his faith in advanced technology as the eventual solution to coal combustion waste problems. “We all use electricity,” he says, interviewed in his office at IU. “Without it, we all would move to caves.”
For now, few environmentalists are willing to wait. Blair says he himself was worn down after five years spent attending meetings with the DNR, EPA, miscellaneous federal agencies and grass roots organizations in an upward fight to spread awareness. He wants all waste to be set down on separate liners capable of preventing wastewater from seeping into the earth’s aquifers. He says monitoring of these piles with delicate measuring devices is also “a no-brainer.”

Finally, he wants mining companies to pay bonds that cannot be returned for many years, saying that it often takes that long for the ill effects of ccw to become pathological. By that time, he says, citing Indiana’s hundreds of poisoned but abandoned mines, there is no accountability if companies have already gotten back and spent their bonds.

[ACTIONS AT THE FEDERAL LEVEL]

Activism against King Coal is far more alive and kicking in states outside Indiana. A computer-assisted search of newspaper coverage devoted to the environment reveals that a small but vocal number of citizens and action groups nationwide routinely battle coal producers and the operators of coal-fired plants.

By way of example, they block legislation aimed at opening new mines and new plants. They sue to halt companies they believe are violating Environmental Protection Agency limits and guidelines; most objections concern cancer-causing substances that threaten immediate residents and those far away that live in the paths of downwind air-transmitted pollutants. They get out the green vote against legislators they see as hostile to environmental concerns. They work closely with protective governmental agencies that have attorneys, big budgets, and energetic staffers willing to take on giant corporate violators.
    
In addition, the last two years have seen several stringent enforcement actions by the federal government during the last two years of the Clinton administration. Witness, for example, these:
    --In 1999, EPA and Justice sued Southern Indiana Electric & Gas, American Electric Power, FirstEnergy, Illinois Power,  Southern Co., Tampa Electric and Virginia Power (owned by Dominion). The last two companies agreed to settlements recently, but stressed they had done no wrong, and the other defendants also maintain company innocence. According to the trade paper Megawatt Daily in its Dec. 27, 2000 edition, Tampa Electric settled with EPA without admitting guilt and agreed to pay a $3.5 million fine. American Electric Power in December 2000 trumpeted plant improvements it says would cut pollutants significantly as it tries to show it a “good neighbor.”
    --Last Dec. 21, Cinergy settled a suit with the EPA and Justice. Although admitting no wrongdoing to allegations that plants in Indiana and elsewhere violated the Clean Air Act, Cinergy agreed to implement a reduction of emissions such as that could cost the energy giant $1.4 billion. That reduction should cut air pollution from 10 plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio by some 67 percent through 2013, drawing high praise for Cinergy from EPA officials. Most conspicuously, while still getting energy to its one million customers in Indiana and elsewhere, the company’s sulfur dioxide emissions could be lowered by as much as 400,000 tons annually. Annual nitrogen oxide ((NOx) emissions could be cut by 100,000 tons annually, say EPA administrators.
--EPA and Justice filed a suit Dec. 22 against Duke Energy. Lawyers for the government allege that the utility, headquartered in North Carolina, made modifications to coal-fired plants that are illegal under the Clean Air Act unless certain emission controls are implemented, too. Duke’s lawyers contest the charges and say Duke is innocent
 
[The Green Brigade]    
    
 Today, just as large corporate farms have become the moneymakers in the business of agriculture as smaller outfits fail, so too for decades have the largest surface-mining outfits taken the largest share of coal and profits.
What sticks in the craws of activists who had voted for Gore or Nader is that President George W. Bush appointed Steven Chancellor, CEO and president of Black Beauty, to be an energy adviser. Before the election, Chancellor gave $244,750 to the presidential coffers.

 Ehret says he sees no evidence that Chancellor’s appointment will make any noticeable changes in policies toward mining, because laws and improvements have been in place for so long. Blair disagrees, saying that companies such as Black Beauty can only benefit financially from Chancellor’s proximity to the President and his advisers.
As tensions mount, Indiana environmentalists and Gov. O’Bannon’s environmental team seem headed very soon into an OK Corral shootout over what actually constitutes reasonable risk when producing electricity and disposing of waste.
Coal has been a part of Indiana's economy since the 1830s. From that time and to the present day, it has been one of Indiana's most valuable natural resources. But at some point Gurnitz and Waterman argue that the Governor and state employees have a responsibility to put every family’s health above the attempts of big-spending Big Coal to get state permission to use old mines as dumping grounds.

“I’m all for coal, and we need it,” says Sen. Waterman. “It’s a cheap resource. It’s just that safeguards should be put in place. “Our job (as government officials) is not only taking taxes—it’s protecting the future.”





*Clean Air Network cites 1997 to 1999 figures in its report, and thus 2001 figures may differ in future reports.

This piece was published in an edited, longer format by Indianapolis Monthly in 2001 and won third place for Business Reporting in 2002 by the Society of Professional Journalists.