By Lynn Thorp, National Campaigns Director
This morning I met Patricia Schuba from the Labadie Environmental Organization in Missouri. Patricia came to Washington, DC today not to see the monuments and museums but to make sure the Clean Water Act is put to work to protect her home, her family and her neighbors. Patricia came to Washington to speak at a press event, to testify at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hearing and to
attend a rally. Patricia is speaking out and she can't do it on her own. You can join Patricia and thousands of other Americans by submitting a comment
here.
All of these events are about EPA's
proposed controls on toxic water pollution from our nation's power plants. That's right. Power plants. We know a great deal about air pollution from the plants that burn fossil fuels to provide electricity, but it turns out that power plants are the largest point source of water pollution in our country - more than 50% of all the toxic water pollution in our water comes from power plants. This is especially true of plants that burn coal, and the limits which the federal Clean Water Act requires for this type of industrial pollution have not been updated in over 30 years.
Meanwhile, there is a proposal for a 400-acre 1000-foot-tall (seriously) coal ash dump in the Labadie Bottomlands, where Patricia lives. And it's right in the middle of the 100-year floodplain of the Missouri River. As bad an idea as this dump is in the first place, Patricia and her neighbors are here to make sure that the Clean Water Act's protections are fully in place, and as strong as possible, for these types of dumps, which are the source of much of the water pollution coming out of coal plants. Patricia spoke from a podium with a picture of her niece, because young children are particularly susceptible to the heavy metals and other poisons that contaminate the waste water associated with coal-burning power plants.
Clean Water Action is working to make sure this unfinished business of the Clean Water Act gets done.
Everyone's voice is needed to stand up to powerful special interests who seem to be okay with spilling arsenic, cadmium and selenium into our rivers, lakes and streams - and even our drinking water - even though we know how to stop this pollution. Please
join us in telling EPA and the White House that we can and must do everything we can to clean up toxic water pollution from power plants.
