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Coal Ash: The Hidden Story
A four-month investigation by the Center for Public Integrity reveals a growing environmental disaster and a decades-long history of government inaction
WASHINGTON
The
dangers of coal ash were largely hidden from public view until
December, when a dam holding a billion gallons of the waste collapsed
in Eastern Tennessee. But what happened there represents just a small
slice of the potential threat from coal ash, according to a new Center
for Public Integrity report, Coal Ash: The Hidden Story.
Across
the country - at ponds, landfills, and pits where coal ash gets dumped
- a slow seepage of metals in the ash has poisoned water supplies,
damaged ecosystems, and jeopardized citizens' health. Contamination
cases have surfaced in states as diverse as Maryland, New Mexico,
Indiana, Virginia, and Montana. An interactive map on the project web
site is searchable by zip code and shows the location of 446 landfills and disposal ponds, and the quantity of coal ash produced nearby, enabling users to identify coal ash sites near their communities.
Coal Ash: The Hidden Story features
an extensive review and analysis of public documents obtained through
Freedom of Information requests and archived agency documents;
incorporates the perspectives of industry representatives,
policymakers, environmental experts, and advocates; and includes video
documenting the environmental and public health impact of the Tennessee
coal ash disaster.
Coal
ash is the solid waste generated by the combustion of coal at more than
500 power plants nationwide. These plants generate approximately 130
million tons of coal ash each year, 43 percent of which is recycled
into other materials, such as concrete, roofing tiles, and structural
fill. The remaining 70 million tons, however, is dumped into 194
landfills and 161 ponds in 47 states, according to the latest data
available from the Department of Energy. Estimates from the
Environmental Protection Agency peg the number of coal-ash sites even
higher, at 600, with an unknown number of sites where coal ash is
dumped in mines. Moreover, the
hazards of improper storage and disposal of coal ash on public health
has been widely documented by the EPA. A July 2007 EPA investigation
identified 63 coal ash landfills and ponds in 23 states where this
toxic sludge is blamed for contaminating groundwater and the local
ecology. Boron, arsenic, lead, and mercury are only a few of the 21
ingredients in the chemical cocktail that is coal ash, according to a
2006 EPA commissioned study by the National Academy of Sciences.
"There
is no more vivid example of the dangers posed by unregulated coal ash
than the collapsed dam and resulting toxic deluge that struck Eastern
Tennessee in December 2008," said Center for Public Integrity Executive
Director Bill Buzenberg. "The Center for Public Integrity's
investigation shows there are hundreds of such dumpsites across the
country - more than 160 of coal ash ponds just like the one that
collapsed in Tennessee. This danger is well known to the EPA. Our
report sheds new light on why the EPA has been so ineffective in its
attempt to regulate toxic coal ash."
Despite
copious evidence of coal ash's adverse impacts on public health and the
environment, this hazardous and plentiful byproduct of burning coal is
essentially unregulated at the federal level. Oversight is left mostly
to the states. The Center's investigation reveals that arguments over
federal oversight have flared for 28 years, most prominently in a
furious interagency battle back in 2000. The back-and-forth back then
tells a little-understood story about the raw politics and hard-edged
cost-and-benefit analyses that often determined the outcome of federal
environmental policy. And that story still resonates today, as
lawmakers debate federal regulation again in the wake of the spill in
Tennessee.
Coal Ash: The Hidden Story is
generously supported by a grant from the Deer Creek Foundation and is
part of an ongoing investigative series on "clean coal" and climate
change policy issues. In addition, organizational support for the
Center is provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford
Foundation, the JEHT Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Park
Foundation, the Popplestone Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
and many other generous institutional and individual donors.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy. We are committed to transparent and comprehensive reporting both in the United States and around the world.
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The agency demanded that all parties protect civilians and reiterated the secretary-general's call "to end the fighting and engage in diplomatic negotiations."
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Since the United States and Israel launched an unprovoked war on Iran at the end of February, more than 1,100 youth have been killed or injured in related violence across the Middle East, the United Nations Children's Fund said Wednesday, calling for a swift diplomatic resolution.
"The situation is becoming catastrophic for millions of children across the region," UNICEF said in a statement, noting that at least 200 children are reportedly dead in Iran, 91 in Lebanon, four in Israel, and one in Kuwait. "These numbers will likely climb as the violence intensifies and spreads."
Most of the kids killed in Iran died in what mounting evidence suggests was a US attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab on February 28. That attack killed an estimated 175 people, mostly students ages 7-12, part of an overall death toll that the Iranian government has said exceeds 1,300.
Responding to the school bombing, Gordon Brown, a former UK prime minister who's now the UN special envoy for global education, argued in a Guardian opinion piece Thursday that "the world will now need stronger mechanisms to ensure accountability," such as a body complementing the International Criminal Court but specifically for children, "focusing its attention on the bombing of schools, abductions of pupils, and militias that enslave boys and girls."
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Across Iran, several United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites have also been damaged by the US-Israeli war, which experts worldwide argue violates both the US Constitution and UN Charter.
The UN Security Council, which is currently led by President Donald Trump's administration, on Wednesday adopted a resolution condemning Iran's retaliatory attacks on Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan—nations that host US military bases—without even mentioning the US-Israeli bombing campaign.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres last Friday demanded a return to negotiations. Trump, who abandoned a previous Iranian nuclear deal during his first term, ditched recent talks with Iran in favor of bombing the country with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has used war on Iran to again close crossings into the Gaza Strip, or as critics have put it, reinstate a "starvation policy" in the Palestinian territory devastated by Israel's 29-month genocidal assault.
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A Wednesday letter signed by every member of the US Senate Democratic Caucus but Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)—who previously helped Republicans block a war powers resolution intended to halt Trump's assault on Iran—called for a probe of the Minab school attack and sounded the alarm about Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's rhetoric that "only serves to endanger civilians."
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The International Energy Agency said Thursday that the US-Israeli war on Iran and its reverberating impacts across the region have sparked "the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market," with flows of crude and other fossil fuel products through the Strait of Hormuz plummeting and Gulf nations slashing production as they run out of storage space.
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The IEA's report came a day after the agency's 32 member nations—including the US—agreed unanimously to release a total of 400 million barrels of oil from their emergency reserves to "address disruptions in oil markets stemming from the war in the Middle East."
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The IEA assessment on Thursday came as oil prices surged again as Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran's new supreme leader, vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. An estimated 20% of the world's oil passes through the route each year.
Earlier on Thursday, Iraq—which has among the largest confirmed reserves of crude oil in the world—suspended all of its oil terminal operations after two vessels were attacked off the nation's coast. NPR reported that Iran "took responsibility for attacking one of the tankers, which it said was owned by the US."
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Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said Wednesay that "the potential for vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm arising from strikes targeting energy infrastructure, including uncontrolled deadly fires, major disruptions to essential services, environmental damage, and severe long-term health risks for millions, means there is a substantial risk such attacks would violate international humanitarian law and in some cases could amount to war crimes."
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As the Trump administration spends an estimated $1 billion per day in taxpayer money bombing targets across Iran that have reportedly included an elementary school and healthcare facilities, Gallup released a survey Thursday that found one-third of Americans reported making financial trade-offs in order to pay for medical expenses last year.
The West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America polled nearly 20,000 US adults between June and August 2025 and found that roughly one-third of them—equivalent to about 82 million people in the richest country in the world—were forced cut back on at least one expense in order to afford healthcare.
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Sixty-two percent of people without healthcare coverage were forced to make trade-offs, and 55% of people with household incomes lower than $24,000 per year as well as 47% of people earning $24,000 to $48,000 avoided expenses.
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