Chatham Citizens Against Coal Ash Dump : Endurance prevails

Photo from Chatham News-Record

    By Judy Hogan

January 6, 2021 a coal ash victory, at last! In 2014, I didn’t want to be an activist any more. It took too much time, and I’d been fighting environmental issues in Moncure since the summer before I moved here. It was a low-level nuclear dump then, and I wanted the house I’d found and could afford, so I said I’d buy the house and join the fight. I’ve been fighting ever since 1998. Somehow I thought we’d win, but I had no reason to believe that, and it didn’t happen fast.

Then we won in the Superior Court with Judge Fox, but the Court of Appeals sent us back to the first court, and she, who had ruled against us in 2016, ruled for us in 2020. It took a year for Charah to admit that they would not contest her judgment, and papers were signed to mean we had won. As early as 2015, our own Board of Commissioners had made a deal with Duke for receiving 19 million dollars for taking 12 million tons of coal ash. Meantime, some of our activists –Terica Luxton, Johnsie Tipton, and John Cross --had all died of cancer. The groundwater became polluted. The coal ash was being put down where the land was known to have dikes and other irregularities such that it was impossible to monitor the groundwater accurately. The site was wrong, but it took years to win in court.

 

BREDL Chapters EnvironmentaLEE and Chatham Citizens Against Coal Ash, Duke intern Kristina McKean and BREDL’s Therese Vick outside the courtroom (“mine reclamations” case)  August 6, 2019

 

Dr Andrew George (UNC) presenting well-test results at Chatham Citizens Against Coal Ash Dump meeting June 7, 2019

We will be blogging individual articles from The League Line, our quarterly newsletter

Link to Winter 2021 League Line: https://www.bredl.org/theleagueline/Winter2021.pdf

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