BWL sees red, wants yellow

Lansing’s Board of Water and Light is seeing red over a media report. And, no, it’s not one in the little ol’ LSJ. The target is the venerable New York Times.

At issue is the state of BWL’s old coal-ash pit on Lake Lansing Road.

In Wednesday’s edition, the Times published a story on coal ash and the environmental hazards it can present. Attached to the report on the Web site is a graphic with a red dot exactly where Lansing would be. The red dot indicates an “ash waste site with contaminated water, possible risk to humans.” It is one of 20 such sites nationwide on the graphic.

BWL spokesman Mark Nixon (disclosure: my former boss) says the dot does indeed reflect the location of BWL’s old ash pit. However, the utility says the dot is the wrong color — there is not a risk to humans.

“It should be a yellow dot (ash site with contaminated water), not a red dot,” Nixon wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. “Why? Because BWL drinking water comes from a deep aquifer called the Saginaw Aquifer. The coal ash has not reached that. There’s what is called a surface aquifer, and some of the ash has interacted with that. However, it’s not drinking water. Could water in the surface aquifer some day drift into the deep aquifer? Yes, and that’s why we built the slurry wall, to prevent the ashy surface aquifer water from reaching the Saginaw Aquifer.”

The slurry wall Nixon mentions was begun last spring at a cost of almost $5 million as a defense against leaching from the old ash pit,

BWL’s coal ash now goes to a vendor to be mixed with concrete or is sent to landfills designed to handle it.

One wonders what will be Nixon’s more difficult task — negotiating the NYT bureaucracy to get a correction or aiding a public relations campaign to convince BWL ratepayers that any rate increases this year are justifiable?

Comments

[whatdayathink]

I will feel like a BWL rate increase is justifiable when they knock Peter Lark's wage back down to his beginning salary/benefit package and NOT UNTIL then.

[JRS]

How about the BWL concentrate on fixing street lights in the city.
For starters nearly every one from
the intersection of Cedar St. and
Saginaw up to Pennsylvania Ave. is
burned out on both sides of the street. Forget about your pride
hurt by some newspaper article in an out of town paper and
focus on taking care of the
people here.

[brynb2]

“It should be a yellow dot (ash site with contaminated water), not a red dot,” Nixon wrote in an e-mail Wednesday. “Why? Because BWL drinking water comes from a deep aquifer called the Saginaw Aquifer. The coal ash has not reached that."

Key here is "BWL drinking water". What about people who use wells? Not everyone in and around Lansing have BWL water. Aquifers closest to the surface (or, a surface aquifer) are more likely to be tapped into for private wells and irrigation. Sounds to me like that goes beyond mere "contaminated water" and into "contaminated water, possible risk to humans".

Somehow, BWL would like us to think that the place where they store their waste will only affect those inside Lansing. It is out further into the country, where not all are using city water. And how far reaching is that contamination? Just 2 miles from Lansing? Or 20 miles, or 100 miles?

Trying to pretend their coal ash site is pretty and shiny and absolutely safe won't make anyone believe you anymore. When a big corporation with a lot to lose tells me "Don't you worry your pretty little head", I'm MORE likely to be suspicious.