On the south coast of Puerto Rico , a five - floor mountain of coal ash tree once posture in the town of Guayama . It’scontaminatedthe environ drinking water with thing like atomic number 5 , lithium , and sulfate — all serious to human health above sure level . Now , all that ash tree , a by-product of coal product , is being embark to a county outside Orlando , Florida , where many Hurricane Maria survivors now live . And people are infelicitous , to say the least .
Puerto Ricooutlawedthe dumping of coal ash back in 2017 , but the Applied Energy Systems Puerto Rico ( AES ) coal plant continues to produce this dissipation . Now the ash must be export . In April , the Osceola County Board of Commissionersagreedto start taking it and tally it to a local landfill owned by Waste Connections , a transnational fellowship with sites across the U.S. and Canada . Since then , the county has received some 44,000 net ton , according to ClickOrlando.com , with another 100,000 tons expected . While the county is getting devote $ 2 per short ton , the commissioners are now trying to reverse their determination , per a local ABC station , sending a letter Monday to Waste Connections asking them to voluntarily vote out the contract , which does n’t pop off until the last of the year .
The commissioner are responding to a public outcry over this determination , which was done without any public input , according to Univision . All this fuss is over the potential health impacts from the ember ash . After all , Florida figure hurricanes too , and resident are disturbed about how one could spread the landfill ’s contamination around . The landfill is line , which helps preclude the toxins from reaching the groundwater beneath , but hurricanes still beat a real threat in terms of spreading waste across the control surface .
Not the Puerto Rican coal ash mountain, but this is what coal ash looks like.Photo: AP
“ My fear is hurricane time of year , ” said Douglas Lowe , a occupant who subsist near the landfill , to the Orlando Sentinel . “ I ’m afraid if we have another hurricane hit Central Florida we would have this ash disperse across the local area . ”
In North Carolina , it waswidely reportedthat coal ash spilled into local waterways after Hurricane Florence last year . In Puerto Rico , long before this transport into Florida began , the ash tree pile was leaching level of atomic number 24 , a carcinogen , that exceeded up to 9,000 times the satisfactory limit by the Environmental Protection Agency , accord to a 2012 EPA report . An analysis last yearshowedthat well-nigh all coal industrial plant in the res publica were contaminating groundwater thanks to poor regulation of coal ash tree ponds .
Some Puerto Ricans may have think they were allow for that level of environmental wastefulness behind , but it followed them here to the mainland . Osceola County saw2,700 Puerto Rican studentsenroll in its schools for the 2017 - 2018 schooltime year after the hurricane terminate their families So long as ember yield exists , so will this ash — and it ’s got ta go somewhere .
Earther reached out to Waste Connections and AES for commentary . We ’ll update if we hear back .
Water pollution
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