Local River Endangered

Following up on the recent news of toxic coal ash seepage into the Middle Fork River here. A national environmental advocacy group has now listed it as one of the top 10 endangered rivers. From today's News-Gazette:

Looming decisions on coal-ash ponds put Middle Fork on group's endangered list
Along with legendary American waterways like the Rio Grande, the Middle Fork River in East Central Illinois is garnering national attention for making a national top 10 list — but not for its natural beauty.

Illinois’ only Wild and Scenic River has been ranked at No. 9 on the list of “America’s Most Endangered Rivers,” the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group American Rivers will announce today.

The “danger” stems from 3 million cubic yards of coal ash — enough to fill the Empire State Building twice — that’s left over from a shuttered coal-fired power plant and sits along the river’s western bank...

Dynegy completed some bank stabilization work in December 2016, plans similar work this year along another section of bank, and says it intends to place the earthen caps over the ponds, leaving the ash in place forever.

But local residents, public officials and environmental organizations have long argued that the waste pits are leaching contaminants into the river, including arsenic, barium, boron, chromium, iron, lead, manganese, nickel and sulfate.

Those contaminants, said Andrew Rehn, water resources engineer with Prairie Rivers, are known to cause birth defects, cancer and neurological damage in humans, and can harm and kill wildlife, especially fish. And the river, as a Dynegy-funded engineering report has shown, is carving into the banks that hold the coal ash — erosion that Dynegy was addressing through its stream bank stabilization work.

But river advocates argue that similar stabilization methods put in place decades ago eventually succumbed to the natural forces of the river and will again.

Full article here. Following up on these posts: More Coal Ash News (3/2/2018) and Coal Ash Cleanup in the News (2/9/2018).