A North Carolina coal-ash landfill, similar to the one best known at Shady Point in southeast Oklahoma collapsed over the weekend because of rain from Hurricane Florence.
A spokeswoman for Duke energy said about 2,000 cubic yards of ash, or enough to fill 180 dump trucks, were displaced at the closed L.V. Sutton Power Station outside Wilmington. Contaminated runoff likely flowed into the plant’s cooling pond. It’s still not determined whether a low dam that drains the lake was open or if contamination might have flowed into the Cape Fear river.
The coal-fired Sutton plant was retired in 2013 and the company has been excavating millions of tons of ash from old waste pits and removing it to safer lined landfills constructed on the property. The gray ash left behind when coal is burned contains toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, lead and mercury.
Duke has been under intense scrutiny for the handling of its coal ash since a drainage pipe collapsed under a waste pit at an old plant in Eden in 2014, triggering a massive spill that coated 70 miles (110 kilometers) of the Dan River in gray sludge.