The history of coal ash

When Hurricane María made landfall in Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, it destroyed the island’s power grid, rendering the AES plant in Guayama, the island’s sole coal-burning power plant, inoperable for five days.

Though the Puerto Rican Board of Environmental Quality ordered AES to cover its ash piles before the hurricane, it did not. The largest ash piles, in Guayama and Peñuelas,lost meters of ash in the storm, and ashes floated free all over the island, turning the air gray and contaminating the groundwater with heavy metals and radioactivity, according to the newspaper El Nuevo Día and a study for AES released earlier this year. AES could face fines of up to $75,000 for failing to cover the ash, according to an article from September, but there has been little update since.

While the storm brought new attention to the coal ash here, the movement against it is much older. AES used to send its coal ash to Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic — they brought 57,000 tons of ash there between 2003 and 2004 — until residents of the municipality Arroyo Barril filed a lawsuit to stop it in 2009, citing concerns about miscarriages and birth defects, according to the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. AES stopped depositing ash in the Dominican Republic, and now primarily deposits it in Puerto Rico; however, an April 11 article from the newspaper La Perla states AES is shipping an undisclosed tonnage of ashes to Jacksonville, Florida.

The Puerto Rican legislature approved a new law last July that prohibits the disposal of coal ash on the island. Coal plant operators would have 180 days from the production to remove the ash — which could be done by converting it to cement, concrete or another commercially beneficial use.

But many say the new law is ineffectual. AES does not consider its coal combustion residuals to be coal ash. It’s a mix of ash and water they call Agremax that can be used in construction. This classification has resulted in the continued storage of thousands of tons of coal ash on the island.

The Environmental Protection Agency also issued new rules for coal ash disposal in December 2014 that called for the closure of impoundments and landfills that don’t comply with engineering and structural standards. The new rule classified coal ash as non-hazardous industrial solid waste, and leave the enforcement largely up to states and local governments.

For Puerto Rican activists, the storm has reinvigorated concerns about how coal ash will be handled on the island going forward — as well as the pressure on the government to find a solution.

Yanina Moreno and Campamento

Yanina Moreno stands at the fence outside the AES plant in Guayama with her camera, documenting the change in the ash pile adjacent to the plant. She came here with her family after the hurricane, she said, and she saw the pile significantly shrink after the winds of the hurricane blew ash across Puerto Rico.

On a Sunday in March, she and two activists from the Comunidad Guayamesa Unidos por tu Salud take pictures from the public road outside the plant, discussing the issues the ash has caused them. Their conversation pauses as a security van pulls up alongside them and slowly passes the group. Its driver radios for backup, and moments later two employees in AES jumpsuits arrive to confront the activists.

The three say they aren’t doing anything illegal, but an argument ensues. Moreno records it all on her phone. This has happened every time she has come to take photos and videos of the plant. She says she believes AES keeps track of the people who approach their property, and pays special attention to the protesters.

Moreno is the spokesperson of Campamento Contra Cenizas de Carbón in Peñuelas, where the local landfill has also been receiving ash from the AES plant. The Peñuelas Valley Landfill was cited by Puerto Rican news organization Metro in August as containing 12 thousand tons of coal ash transported from the AES plant in Guayama.

The Peñuelas Valley Landfill has held coal ash since 2015, Moreno said, and she has been protesting it for just as long.

Hurricane Maria only increased the group’s concerns of coal ash contamination. In the summer of 2017, 709 new truckloads of ash were brought to Peñuelas, according to Metro. The Peñuelas community didn’t know about the new deposits, Moreno said — but figured it out when they saw trucks driving to the landfill with ash flying behind them. Residents began to notice a persistent, fine layer of black dust coating their floors, furniture and yards.

“The cleaning was so continuous,” Moreno said. “You would see glass tables with this layer of dust.”

They worry the ash was spread further during the hurricane.

Over the past five decades, Peñuelas has also been home to petrochemical and petroleum plants and incinerators, said Moreno, so pollution isn’t new here. The influx of coal ash was the most recent and possibly the most dangerous.

“We are in a zone that has been highly contaminated,” ” she said.

Six of her neighbors died of cancer and respiratory illnesses in a span of just three weeks last summer, she said. Moreno and other protesters suspect the ash is making people sick in a town that has the third-highest rate of cancer on the island, according to the Cancer Register of Puerto Rico.

Moreno said the government refuses to acknowledge the community’s health problems as consequences of the ash, and has not yet conducted the health studies in the area that her group has demanded.

“Our worry is to not keep paying the consequences, to not keep bringing other industries, other contaminants that aggravate the situation,” she said. “Because then our community will disappear.”

Moreno wants the dumping in her community to end, but she doesn’t stop there.

“Our final goal is that the plant closes down operations in Puerto Rico,” she said.

Instead of relying on coal, Puerto Rico should look to other sources of energy, she said. Campamento Contra Cenizas de Carbón advocates for a future of renewable energy for Puerto Rico.

“As a tropical island, we have all the tools, all the opportunities, all the alternatives to develop these projects,” she said.

Though regular activities for the group have waned after the hurricane, Campamento Contra Cenizas de Carbón has been a vocal presence in the fight against coal ash across Puerto Rico. The group has maintained a camp on the Road #2 exit into Peñuelas, coordinated with other protest groups and attended events to raise awareness of the dangers of coal ash — and they’re not going to give up.

“You keep the fight because you want these people to stay alive, (and) because you want to give these children, these youths, a better future than the one we have now,” she said.

Carmelo García and ACASE

Carmelo García, a member of ACASE who lives less than five miles from the EC Waste landfill in Humacao, believes ACASE’s activism and constant protesting have helped prevent new ash from being dumped there for nearly a year. Hurricane María drastically changed the landscape for the movement.

García has not had electricity in the six months since María, and does not expect to have it for another two. He and his wife run a generator for three hours every morning and evening to sustain their home. Despite the limits on his lifestyle, García still protests coal ash pollution in Humacao and is an active member of ACASE.

He said he started protesting coal ash pollution five years ago, after he noticed his grandmother’s asthma worsening after trucks carrying the ash started passing through his hometown of Maunabo. His scientific and chemical background — he has a doctorate in chemistry and teaches it at the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao — led him to investigate why his grandmother was getting sicker when everything else in her life was constant, and his research led him to evidence that the ashes were affecting her lungs.

In his search for answers, he came across the coal ash protest movement in Peñuelas and got in contact with the group there and with Moreno. The Peñuelas group welcomed him to the cause, happy to have someone on the team with a scientific background to educate others on the toxicity of the ash, especially as the government was claiming it was safe.

The more research he did, the more concerned he became.

“As soon as I sat down and read some of the pages, I said, ‘Oh my god, this is a criminal thing they are doing. This is a time bomb,” he said. “The only option was to join the movement and to help them.”

García said he has spent the last five years working to communicate the dangers of coal ash to populations affected by the landfills and the transport of coal ash.

“Here at stake is the very life of the people living not only in Guayama, Peñuelas and Humacao,” he said. “Here at stake is the life of the people living on the island, because this is not a big island.”

García said the landfills are not equipped to contain the ash in the event of Puerto Rico’s frequent hurricanes.

“The ashes in the company, the ashes in Peñuelas and the ashes in Humacao, they are all around the island,” he said.

While the storm slowed coal-burning on the island for months, he worries the drive to dump will resume.

“We know (that) as soon as the grid is up, they are planning to start burning like hell, and we will start getting not only the ashes they produce, but the ashes they already had,” he said. “And we are talking here, thousands and thousands of tons of ashes.”

García said it is hard to get people to care about the long-term effects coal ash has on human health, since the links between coal ash exposure and illness are not always straightforward or immediate.

“The real problem is that, and I told them … none of you are going to get sick because of the ashes, but your sons and your grandsons, they will. And you won’t be here to explain to them why you did nothing to stop them.”

Press conference

Under a tent in front of the Capitol in San Juan in the early afternoon of March 15, protesters and journalists mingle among pictures of the Guayama landfill at one of the first coal ash protest events since the storm. There’s a giant banner highlighting the communities in Puerto Rico that have been affected by the transport or deposit of ash, with the words “CONTAMINATED WITH ASH.”

Protest groups from across southeast Puerto Rico are present, including Campamento Contra Cenizas de Carbón and ACASE. The air thrums with a sense of urgency. A few days before, news had broken about the presence of chemicals and radioactive materials in groundwater near AES’s plant in Guayama, evidence that the coal ash was leaching these chemicals into the environment.

Speaking on behalf of ACASE, Boyle reminded the crowd of the numerous studies conducted on coal ash that demonstrated health hazards, and claimed AES and EC Waste never had permission to store and dump their ashes in Puerto Rico.

Miriam Gallardo Gonzalez of the Frente Afirmación Sureste (FAST), a group based in Guayama, gave an emotional speech about miscarriages and animals born with defects in her community — both caused by the ash, she said.

“The problem of the ashes is real,” she said.

The groups had penned a letter with a list of demands and planned to deliver it to the Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz outlining their list of demands.

“We are demanding, among other things, first that the Department of Health and the Board of Environmental Quality intervene immediately in the contamination,” said Víctor Alvarado, the spokesperson for the Comité Diálogo Ambiental de Salinas, an environmental advocacy group from Salinas, a town along the path the ash trucks took from Guayama to Peñuelas.

The protesters want the Board of Environmental Quality to classify coal ash as a hazardous waste, change the way the ash is tested and perform tests for radioactivity on the ash. The biggest request, however, was simple: They want the coal plant shut down for good.

After the conference, the activists huddled in a light drizzle outside entrance to the Senate. Some of the activists began to get antsy, with one yelling at a security guard that it’s the people who pay the legislator’s salaries. Another group member subdued him, and after about 15 minutes, a small group of activists were allowed in to deliver their letter to the senate president.

Schatz was not there to receive the letter that day, but this isn’t the end of the fight for the activists.