Residents plead for tougher fly ash rules
By SUSAN HYLTON -World Staff Writer-2/28/2010
BOKOSHE — Oklahoma asserts it already does a good job of managing coal combustion waste under existing laws, but residents who live near a fly ash disposal site are pleading for the EPA to adopt tougher standards they believe are needed to protect their health.
“There is a lot of respiratory illness and cancer,” said Bokoshe resident Susan Holmes in a conference call last year to the Office of Management and Budget, which conducts the regulatory review.
“There are approximately 15 households within two miles to the north and east of the dump and 14 of them have cancer.”
The Bokoshe residents’ main complaints are the dust that billows from the site and water pollution, both of which have been documented in violations issued to Making Money Having Fun’s Thumbs Up Ranch ash disposal site near Bokoshe.
Records show the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality cited the company in May 2009 for violating air quality laws in its seven years of operation.
The DEQ memo states that the company failed to submit an emission inventory, failed to apply for a construction permit, failed to apply for an operating permit, failed to obtain a construction permit and failed to take reasonable precautions to minimize pollution.
Trucking companies transport fly ash from the nearby AES Shady Point coal-fired plant to the company’s land where it is dumped into an old strip-mining pit.
“MMHF is not taking reasonable precautions to minimize pollution, the water truck was not in operation when the inspectors arrived at the site, and when in operation, the water truck was not watering the driveway to the truck unloading area enough to control the dust,” the DEQ memo states.
Ken Jackson, one of the owners, said that as a result of the air violations, the company installed an enclosure to reduce dust.
“We had to do something,” he said. Read entire article.