The mayor of a small Shelby County town has become an unlikely central voice in a statewide debate over how Alabama Power should handle decades of coal ash stored at its plants.
Wilsonville Mayor Lee McCarty has spent the past couple of years publicly criticizing the utility’s plan to de-water and “cap in place” roughly 23 million tons of coal ash at its E.C. Gaston Plant on the Coosa River. Wilsonville, home to about 2,000 people, sits near the plant, and McCarty argues the ash pond directly abuts the river and lies close to residents.
“Plant Barry sits in an awful location for an ash pond, but Wilsonville is not much better,” McCarty said. “The ash pond here directly abuts the Coosa River, and in some ways it’s even worse than Barry’s because we’ve got people living much closer to the plant itself.”
The same dispute surrounds Plant Barry in Mobile County, where Alabama Power proposes to cap in place about 21 million tons of ash in an unlined pond. Monitoring at both sites has detected arsenic leaching into groundwater. Several Alabama Power plants received $250,000 fines from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in 2018, the first day new federal rules required utilities to disclose groundwater monitoring results.
Both ADEM and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency permit closing the ponds in place. McCarty, however, contends the material “will pollute in perpetuity if it’s not moved.” Environmentalists point out that the only Alabama Power pond fully capped in place so far is still leaking arsenic and radium into groundwater and drew a $250,000 ADEM fine in May.
Alabama Power says its closure plans “go above and beyond” state and federal requirements. At Gaston, the company proposes treating and removing pond water, building a 330-yard buffer between the ash and the river, and adding a redundant dike system. The utility maintains that excavating the ash would be far more costly, take years, and create major logistical challenges on state roadways.
McCarty has worked to educate residents and local leaders, including bringing attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center to town hall meetings. Along with Mobile Baykeeper’s local efforts, he has pushed public bodies to adopt symbolic resolutions urging excavation to off-site landfills. At his urging, the Shelby County Mayors’ Association passed such a proclamation earlier this year, and he helped advance a resolution at the Alabama League of Municipalities encouraging ADEM to adopt rules requiring removal of ash ponds adjacent to waterways.
McCarty acknowledges pushback from some constituents who question the effort, noting Alabama Power and the Gaston plant are major local employers. “I’ve never voted for a Democrat for president in my life,” he said, “but I also know facts, and I know that this groundwater is contaminated and this coal ash is poisonous and potentially disastrous to my constituents’ health, safety and welfare. It has absolutely got to be moved.”