New Sierra Club Report Claims Coal Industry Is “Poisoning Our Water”

• Logan Layden
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Logan Layden is a reporter and managing editor for StateImpact Oklahoma. He is a native of McAlester, Oklahoma and graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Logan spent three years as a state capitol reporter and local host of All Things Considered for NPR member station KGOU in Norman and six years as a reporter with StateImpact from 2011 to 2017. Most recently, he was news director for McAlester Radio before returning to public radio in 2020.

Logan Layden / StateImpact Oklahoma

Oklahoma Gas and Electric's Muskogee Power Plant is on the list of coal plants that discharge waste into waterways.

The Sierra Club, along with a coalition of environmental groups, looked through water permits for nearly 400 coal-fired power plants across the U.S., and found more than half of them allow the discharge of coal ash and wastewater from scrubbers into waterways. Six are in Oklahoma.

In a press release sent out on Tuesday, Oklahoma’s Beyond Coal Campaign says the dumping is happening with impunity.

“Of these six coal plants, most have no requirements to monitor or report discharges of toxic metals to federal authorities,” organizing representative Whitney Pearson says. “Some waterways like the Grand Neosho and Washita Rivers are already impaired but the coal plants that discharge to them have no limits in their permits regulating the amount … that are dumped in the rivers.”

The report says three Oklahoma plants have expired Clean Water Act permits, and even if they had updated permits, the guidelines limiting arsenic, mercury and other metals are more than 30 years old.

As the EPA considers new standards, the environmental groups want the strongest possible response: Guidelines that all but outright ban the toxic releases.