A fine gray powder still clings to your shoes at the site of one of the nation’s worst coal ash spills, but it’s the last remnant of a storage pond now being emptied into a hilltop landfill a few hundred yards away.
Two years from now, Duke Energy’s coal ash site beside the Dan River will be empty and the landfill on the hill will be full and capped off with layers of plastic and dirt. That will be the end of a five-year story that began one cold February day in 2014 when a broken pipe dumped tons of the cloudy waste into the river heading toward Danville.
The Charlotte-based utility received approval in May from state officials to start using the new, lined landfill on the property that was home to the coal-fired Dan River Steam Station, which was demolished after the 39,000-ton spill.
The new landfill is part of the utility’s plan to comply with a state law — triggered by the spill — that requires the Dan River ash ponds to be closed by August 2019.
On Thursday, company officials conducted a media tour of the landfill, which is lined with clay and designed to catch and direct water runoff into a pipe that sends it to Eden for treatment.
Duke Energy billed the tour as a showcase of the utility’s past, present and future. In addition to the landfill, the site contains a natural gas-fired plant that replaced the coal-fired one.
Crews on Thursday were dumping ash excavated from now-dry riverside ponds, 40 tons at a time, into the landfill’s 5.1-acre section. A second, 7.4-acre section is graded and ready to receive coal ash and crews are grading the landfill’s final 11-acre section.
Coal ash is not considered a hazardous substance, but it does contain trace amounts of arsenic and other chemicals that can be harmful in concentrated amounts. It can be used in cement, concrete and other building materials.
After the new law was passed in late 2014, Duke hauled away some ash by rail to a lined landfill in Virginia.
Some of the remaining ash — 88,000 tons — is being sold to a Roanoke cement company.
To read the full story, visit http://www.godanriver.com/news/coal-ash/gray-matters-duke-s-dan-river-landfill-ends-one-coal/article_8288df1c-73f6-11e7-996f-67d0a5cc5270.html.