North Carolina: Where the Government Has Already Weakened Environmental Protections

The Trump administration has not been shy about its skepticism of programs designed to protect the environment. Donald Trump has said that environmental regulations are “out of control,” he has proposed slashing the budget and staffing levels at the Environmental Protection Agency, and he has appointed as head of that agency Scott Pruitt, who has spent a career repeatedly backing business over regulators. Last month, Trump signed an executive order aimed at reversing a signature Obama-era climate policy, the Clean Power Plan.

In North Carolina, the state government has taken a similar approach to its own environmental regulatory agency over the past few years. I went there to see how the state’s regulatory rollback is playing out so far.

My trip brought me to the home of Amy Brown, who lives with her husband and two sons in a small single-story home in Belmont, not far from Charlotte. Inside, bottled water is stacked in corners and against the walls. Her boys, ages 11 and 4, use the bottled water to brush their teeth. Brown uses it to make them oatmeal in the morning and spaghetti at night. That’s because the Browns’ well water contains elevated levels of a carcinogen called hexavalent chromium and another potentially dangerous compound called vanadium. In 2015, the state advised the family and their neighbors not to drink the water or cook with it.

The Browns live a few hundred yards from a coal-fired power plant, the Allen Steam Station, and it is this plant, according to some environmentalists and homeowners, that is polluting the local well water. Duke Energy, which runs that power plant and 13 others in the state (seven of which, including Allen, still burn coal), disagrees.

Burning coal creates a residual material called coal ash, which some environmentalists say contains dangerous levels of heavy metals; Duke Energy contests the allegation that coal ash is hazardous. Duke stores its coal ash in pits near plants where it still burns coal and those where it formerly burned it. At many Duke Energy sites, including Allen, the coal ash is mixed with water and stored in unlined pits—essentially ponds—where, environmentalists say, the mixture seeps into the groundwater. Area wells then act like straws, they say, pulling up the polluted water into households like the Browns’.

But whether it’s the coal ash that is polluting the drinking water is a matter of dispute. Duke Energy says that coal ash is not what’s responsible for the contamination, and it points to an October 2016 study from Duke University that concluded that, though the coal-ash ponds are potentially polluting groundwater near the pits, the hexavalent chromium that is contaminating the well water is naturally occurring.

North Carolina regulators have embraced Duke Energy’s version of events, environmentalists say, and have slowed down efforts to get the company to address pollution problems near coal-ash sites.  Cleanup was further set back, they say, after Republicans gained control of the North Carolina legislature in 2010 and then practically came to a halt when Pat McCrory, who had worked for Duke Energy for 28 years, won the race for governor in 2012.

In an effort to become more business-friendly, the state favored industry over environmental organizations, critics say. The McCrory administration was “very quick to cater to whatever special interest would come forward with an idea to roll something back; they were enthusiastic about it,” Chuck McGrady, a moderate Republican state legislator who favored environmental protections, told me.

Over the last five years, the state’s GOP leadership consistently cut resources from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (renamed the Department of Environmental Quality in 2015). Former department staffers said the cuts made it extremely difficult to carry out their jobs. And however the drinking water was contaminated, the state confused residents like Brown about its safety, playing down the health risks and pushing back against directives from health officials that instructed families not to drink their tap water.

Even after a massive coal-ash spill from a Duke Energy plant polluted 70 miles of the Dan River in North Carolina in 2014, the state was wishy-washy on coal-ash cleanup, ultimately passing a bill that allowed the company to leave many of its coal-ash sites in place as long as the company made repairs to the basins and provided a supply of clean drinking water to households located near coal-ash sites.

And so, Brown and her family still live on bottled water, she still hustles her husband