>> today on "earth focus"... coal ash. it's a toxic waste being dumped across the united states. someme people living cle to these dumps have unique health proroblems. is coal ash o blame? we look for answers, coming up, on "earth focus." in pennsylvania, 3 adjoining countnties are the e hot spot oa rare cancer. in juliette, georgia, radioactive water flows from the tap. these problems may seem unrelated, but with a closer look, these two communities share a common denominator--coal ash, and lots of it. the discovery of coal in the

united states dramatically shaped our energy future. today, there is no greater source of power than coal combustion. it's responsible for nearly 40% of our electricity. but burning coal generates waste. it's called coal ash, and every year in the u.s., 130 million tons of it is created. >> it's the largegest industrial waste stream in america. you could fill the boxcars of a freight train that would stretch from new york city to melbourne, australia, with the coal ash that's generated every year in this country. >> the ash contains toxic metals. lead, arsenic, chromium, cadadum, othersrs. and iit evens radioactive substances. >> it's these pollutants, many of them known to cause cancer, that have people worried. and the big question is, where are all these totoxins ending u?

>> there's fly ash and coal dust... we'll go on the front porch and do the same thing. >> you can see as you look up there the fresh ash. it's like an orangish color. when it's windy, it can get into their homes, it can get into their cars, and god forbid they're walking across the street or whatever, it actually gets into their lungs. >> in the united states, there are over 500 0 coal-fired power plants. and until recently, ththe dangers of coal ash have largely been hidden from public view. this is one of the largest

coal-fired power facilities in the country. called plantnt scherer, it's located in juliette, georgia, and is majority owned by georgia power. each year it produces 3 1/2 million kilowatts of electricity. generating that power requires a lot of coal. over 1,200 tons of coal are burned every hour at plant scherer, and in 2010, that resulted in 2,200 tons of coal ash. and it's all dumped into aa 750-acre unlined pond, meaning nothing prevents toxins from entering the groundwater. >> they built this pnt an areaea where there's no public wawater access. everyone w within a 5-me radius and maybe even further, drinking on private well water. >> that includes donna and phil welch. when they built their home n 2001, they thought they were moving into an ideal countryside home. >> and we were so excited about

moving to the country. um, fresh air, you know, kind of john denver-ish generation that we were f from. and we were excxcid aboutut bringing our children to the country. you know, building thehe home of our dreams.s. >> instead, likeke others in juliette, they got sick. >> several years after we moved in, i started developing some numbness in my feet. first in one foot, and thenen it just ket getting worse. and it just really was concerningng. i would lose my balance. then, i had a stomachache fofor 3 weweeks, really, really bad. i had been to the doctor, he drew w blood, and he called e at work a and said, your liver s almost in failure. he said, i've never seen liver enzymes as high as yours s are. >> donna isn't the only one with severe health issues. mark goolsby, who once worked at the plant, doesn't believe it's safe to l live here. >> there's been 12 people on this road alone die with

different kinds of cancer. my mother's probably a mile or less from ththe plant. my mother stays chronically ilil with sinus s infections. there's other famimilies on ththis particular road, they have neurological problems, and all of this is documented through the lolocal doctors. >> there was one article in our macon paper about a lady that lives maybe 2 2 miles fromom he. her husband had passed away, and he had had a rare form of canancer. before he died, shehed both their hair tested, and it came up very high in some heavy metal elements.s. and so she had her water tested. we thought sure that's not our problem, but we e might as well have it tesested. >> donna sent her water here, to the university of georgia's water testing facility. using sophisticated instruments, technicians like jake mower are able to determine what elements are present iin a water sample.

>> donna welch and i have spoken many times. she had a--a very elevated amount of uranium in her well water. she also had radon in her water and radon in her home air. so her family was exposed to quite a bit of environmental toxicity. uranium will break down to radon, radium. they are classified as carcinogens. i think it would be very interesting t to find out exacty what the source of thehe uranium contamination is, largely because her case was a little severe. i think it's a little unusual. >> now donna has no safe well water coming to her home and must rely on bottled water for everyday needs. >> you can imagine how many i go through and just the, u um, you know, not being g able to jt have the simple convenience of running water in your home that's--that's safe. so it's a-- it's a chore.

>> the story isn't much different in one tri-county area of pennsylvania. instead of one coal-fired power plant, there are 6. unlike plant scherer, which burns pure coal, these plants are burning coal waste left over by previous mining. coal waste, also called culm, can now be burned to generate power. but there are some downsides. not only is coal waste less efficient than regular coal, it also has higher concentrations of heavy metals. >> matter doesn't disappear. metals don't just disappear. they canan't. and so when you bn waste coal, those metals, like lead and arsenic and cadmium, are left more concentrated than ever in the waste coal ash. 9- to 10 million tons of coal ash are dumped every year in pennsylvania. and a lot of it is happening right here in schuylkilill county and

surrounding counties. >> john kolbush, a local resident and survivor of leukemia, has coal ash being dumped just minutes from his house. here at the northeastern power company in mcadoo, coal ash is trucked from the plant straight through the heart of town to an old mine site for dumping, bringing toxic coal ash ever closer to people. >> when--when the trucks are leaving and when they're fully loaded, the ashes is blowing out of the vehicles. and when they come through town here, empty, they don't have the tarps on, the ash just blows. if you see some of the houses, the sidings on the houses with the thick aaccumulation n of soot and ash. a year and half ago, we came through there, and it was a

really windy day, it was l likea smog going through itit. none of the ash w was covered a and it's just--it was actually like driving through a fog. and it's just a--it's a crime. there's the one that we just followed down the road. he's dumping and you can see the ash there. this pit was approximately 300 feet deep. it's all filled with ashes. they run probably two dozen trucks continuous all day long, 6 days a week. >> tons of coal ash are dumped legally in unlined pits every year, even though the u.s. environmental protection agency acknowledges coal ash can cause serious health effects. coal ash is also being used in creating

products like roofing material, bricks, and concrete. the epa calls this "beneficial use," and members of the coal industry claim reusing coal ash provides an environmental benefit. >> there are a wide variety of things we can use coal ash for, rather r than throw it awaway. the most prominent uses are, uh, using coal fly ash in concrete. every ton of fly ash we put into concretete is a ton of cement tt doesn't need to be made, and not making that ton of cement has saved over 11 million tons of co2 emissions last year alone. useded properlrly, coal ash is a safe material for beneficial use. the e levels of metals in coal ash are comparable to the levels of metalsls in the didirt and rocks in your backykyard. we believe the best solution to coal ash disposal problems is to quit throwing it away. in parts f f the ununtry, these historic ccoal mines have a tremendous problem with acid mine drainage. you've seen n the ororange-colod

creeks and those kind of things. coal ash can actually be used, uh, to modify the ph in those settings and relieve that acid minene drainage. so that's an example wherere you actually wat tto put the coal ashsh in contat witith the water because it's-- it improves the water qualality by doing that. >> but local people in pennsylvania disagree. >> this is actually the opening from the gilberton mineshaft. they have put 16 millllion tons of fly ash into the beaty mining and the owen gowen site to control acid mine drainage. and this is what's coming out from underneath them. and you can see on the rocks up there in the corner, you can see acid mine drainage. you can see the iron pyrite. right there's the ash, all the way back there. wow.

there's no liner. there's no nothing. it's just poured on the grground. underneath most of the sites, you have mine pools. there's more chemicals in there probablyly than you'u'd have ine average chchemical factotory. ad it's alall leaching into the ground toto whatever mine pool is underneath, to god knows whose water supply where. >> we're talking about a quarter of a million people live here. now, people aren't drinking all that mine e pool water. they're drinking reservoir water that the mine pool helps feed. the water that flows into those reservoirs comes from groundwater and from mine pools and from springs that come out of the sides of mountains. and the danger is if you contaminate too many of those sources, then you have a health thrhreat. >> just as in juliette, georgia, people here are also getting sick. if you type in hazleton, it does come up cancer capital ofof pennsylvania. >> this is ground zero for the polycythemia vera cancer investigation. >> called pv for short,

polycythemia vera is a rare form of blood cancer in most of the u.s. but here, there's a confirmed cluster of pv cases. >> in 2004, we learned that there were 67 diagnosed cases of polycythemia vera, which ultimately led to the--to the confirmation of a c cancer cluster. since then, 130 cases of polycythemia vera have been reported to the pa cancer registry. people w with pv, like debea trently anand merlrle wertman, suffer from an overproduction of red blood cells. >> so the blood gets very thick, and it can cause, you know, blockages to smaller blood vesssels that feed vitaal organs of our body. tissue deathth can ococcur anywhere in the bobody. it canan occur in their braiain, it can occur in their toe, it can occur in their liver. we've seen patients where they've developed infarctions to their feet, where they've had to have t toes amputated. they have infarctioions to their liver. they can have an infarction to their heart, much like a heart attack.

>> the way it works on you, you're so exhausted and tired, you have chronic pain everywhere. i have chronic fatitigue. headaches, terrrribl. it affects your vision. i'll just t wake up and have pas in my legs and my hands and my feet. it's vascular, so it goes through every part, every vein on your body, you're having a lot of pain, every direction. you don'n't know whehere to put yourself. >> for merle, who has been a sports fanatic all his life, pv has really changed his once active lifestyle. >> these are--some of these are pete rose. he's my favorite. steve carlton. he's a... somemetimes i get moody anand miserable, but i don't think i was always that way. they give me a phlebotomy. uh, they stick a 12-gauge needle in your arm and they draw all the blood out of you. usually 26 ounces they take out. when i first got this, it was, uh, i was getting it twice a month, every two weeks.

>> in the 22-square mile polycythemia vera research clususter area, uh, there's a number of environmental assaults. at least 6 known super-fund s sites, 6 waste cocl generators, and over 23 unlined waste coal ash pits, all surrounding our community's public water supplies and private well users. from a scientific perspective, it's known that polycythemia vera is an acquired cancer, meaning that it's likely o of te enenvironment. you're not born with it. so now we're looking at this very complex mystery of the environment and its potential link in causing p. vera. >> the search for answers began here, at the now silent home of betty and lester kester. >> what is happening here is not beautiful. it's not a pretty story. as beautifulul as my parents' life was, and as many wonderful things they had in it,

the p. vera, it really affected their life in a dramatic way. both passed away in 2008. the p. vera took their lives within about 5 years from the time that they were diagnosed with it. >> ground zero for polycythemia vera in the free world, or in the world in general, was betty and lester kester. when betty kester died, she had decided to dodonate her body to science for the investigation. >> her body tissues eventually found their way here to dr. ronald hoffman's lab in mt. sinai hospital in new york city. he has spent nearly 40 years studyining pv. >> there were too many patients with polycythemia vevera in tha- in that area a than one could account for. whether the environment or toxins in the environmnment lead to an incread risk of polycythemia vera is unknown. that's really an area of researcrch analsoso

speculation. the problem is that there are multiple toxic compounds that are in the ground and also in the air in this area, and to prove a one-to-one relationship is going to be very, very tough. in this area, there were a lot of super-fundnd sites and coal mines. so, you know, they weren't here, they weren't there. they were here. and that was the concern. anand that's the concern in my mind to this s day. it's a question mark. i don't have the answer to this. i'm not a statistician, but intuitively it would seem to me more than chance that--that this would occur. >> while science continues to gather evidence, some people believe that politics and profit are outweighing the need to protect public health. >> whether it's a democratic

administration or a republican administration, , coal talks. >> government agencicies, in my opopinion, have more bebeen apto represesent thbebest ieresests f the polluters. they seem to have rights more so than what people do. >> georgia power, i think, is very effective in influencing, if not cocontrollining, what ges voted on. they get what they want. i'm trying to figure out if they ever don't get what they want. >> there's no monitoring systems, there's no liner systems. there's a whole litany of things that just are absent, uh, from how we conduct our environmental business. >> in pennsylvania, two agencies, the state department of environmental protection and the federal agency for toxic substances and disease registry are obligated to protect public health. but they have both drawn criticism for not adequately addressing the contamination problem.m. >> the monitoring is overseen by the dedepartment of envivironmental protection.

we have one site where a public water supply has been contaminatated with arsenic. the epa's toxic release inventory indicates that high levels of arsenic was found in much of the ash that was dumped at this site. all right? so, you know, simply from the standpoint of the waste stream, the quality of the waste stream and what has happened to the public water supply, indicates an adequate study should have bebeen done to determine if thee is a connection between the disposal site and the well. this never did occurur. the public have been simply brushed off and told, don't worry, trust us. you are adequately protected. but once again, this is being done without any adequate data to give to the public. and consequently the public is saying, should we trust the pepeople that are supposed to protect us? >> for the last 20 years, these federal and state agencies, the same ones that have been investigating this problem, have

been promoting g this process of dumping the coal ashsh without y safeguards. for them to now, uh, admit that they think that the coal a ash is causing these cancerers would be to admit that they y caused this whwhole probm in the first place. >> while families wait for answers, toxic ash continues to pile up. back in georgia, people aren't just frustrated about poor regulation, they're claiming that georgia power is trying to hide the problem. georgia power will tell you t te 750-acre e lined popond poses no thrhreat to local r residents. but behind this good-neighbor disgsguise, some company actions suggest that they know t there s a probobm. in the e last dececa, georgia power bought several homes from residents with particularly poor health. >> my aunt, she was bought out last july. she had been out here since 1976. and her concretee driveway starting turnining bla.

her brick started to turning. she would go out in the yard and have severe nosebleeds. then she developed breast cancer. when mymy aunt's hohouss purchased, they hired a contractor to come in. theyy filled the well, they filled the septic tank, tore her house down, tore up the concrete driveway, planted pine trees, like there's nothin' ever beeeen there. put up a fencnce and posd signs. but we fefeel kind of like david going up against goliath, you know. it's, uh, to me, to buy out one person on this road that complained about it, go 5 miles down the road, buy out another family, but yet leave people close to the plant that's in harm's way, i say, uh, to have to breathe in this coal dust and this flyly ash, they're trying o hide s something. and i thinkk georgia power has known all along that there's been a problem.m. >> mark isn't the only one who shares that opinion. local lawyer brian adams, who grew up near the plant, now represents over 100 juliette residents who are suing the

plant for environmental contamination. >> there have been deaths that we attribute that are related to the toxins that are coming from the plantnt. linkining everything together is certainly one of the scientific issues that we're working on, but we-- we k know that there were bad things, bad contaminants that are coming from m the plant atat are getting to the people in the community that are causing health problems. we do have liver cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, all that we are afraid d is attributed to the contaminations. i think as people realize that maybe georgia popower has known that sosome of this stuff is not good and not good f for the aa, and they never said anything, instead encouraged pepeople to e in that area, , that's where the anger really y starts to g get , because, again, they feel like they've been lied to. the thing is, georgia power does do someme good things for the community. t they help people in the community, they give back, they give to good causes. a lot of peoplele in that communinity, theyey do work the. but it's s in part to cover u up these callous and cruel things that they k know they've done.

they've k know this stuff is goa cause problems,s, and it appears that they don't really care. a lot of our claims are based on some common law claims that say, look, you can't do something and harm your neighbor. and that's what they're doing. they're harmining their neieighbor. and that is a violation of ththe law. >> as litigation in georgia slowly plays out, coal ash dumps across the u. conontinue toto be regulated a at the state level, resulting in a patchwork of standards. many states, like georgia a and pennsylvania, exet coal ash from hazardous wastste regulation. at the federal levevel, debate over coalal ash regulalation has dragged on n fr decades. and despite recent coal ash spills in north carolina, coal ash has yet to receive federal regulation. >> garbage disposal and trash is probably more regulated than coal ash is. without any question, we need a national regulation to

establish a bar that every state hahas to meet. and this iis how we'e'rere going to protect the pupublic. >> the government has been sued to demand t that ththeyo somethg about this. the problem is that the power cocompanies have known since the e seventies and probay longer than that t that this col ash is such a massive, huge amount of waste that they don't know what to do with. they have fought for years and years and years to make sure that the regulations don't make it difficult for them to get rid of this stuff. >> the message for the communities are you havave to defend yourself and know thahat your governmement that you are financing is not adequately defending your health, safety, and welfarare, nor your rights o clean air, clean land, and clean water. >> the people who live around coal ash dump sites believe they are being shrugged off as collateral damage, by both corporate intnterests and sslow-movingng government agenc. more than anyone, they know what's at stake. >> i've lived 55 years. and i know that it's a tough

economy and people have to make tough decisions. um, i do think thatat power andnd money and grd is s a big--i-is a big papart o. >> i do believe that we need energy. i do believe that we-- i'm not against coal. t the thig that i would like to see is, um, not shutting the company down or anything like that. i just do not want these contaminants seeping into the underground water. >> if we could jujust let people hahave clean water andnd clean air to breathe. and just get back to the bubusiness s of living and nott worried about dyin >> burning coal to generate power isn't going away anytime soon. but there is a changing climate in the energy sector. >> the way we produce power in this country isis changing, andt will continue to change. at the end of the day, , i think we're all realizing that t you cannot make a coal plant as safe as you can make other energy

prododuction.. >> and while we rely heavily on coal now, that does not excuse the coal industry from its obligation to operate safely. that, too, is a cost of doing business. ;

[applause] nalini nadkarni: thanks. we bioneers hover at an epic moment of environmental destruction and environmental healing. we've come to this amazing conference in san raphael to seek truth, truth that will lead to the visions and actions that we need for that healing. i believe that that truth may be found in trees. trees actually represent many truths. as a scientist, trees are known as a perennial woody plant having a main trunk and a distinct crown. to o a poet, a tree literally