THE ONE-MINUTE ACTIVIST

November 2009

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Administrator Lisa Jackson
US Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington D.C. 20460

Dear Ms. Jackson,

Thank you for calling for additional environmental review of the 79 mountaintop removal mining permits pending before the EPA.
These projects would severely degrade water quality, harm aquatic resources and threaten communities throughout Appalachia.

I urge you to give these communities a permanent reprieve and continue to base your decision on sound science rather than industry pressure by completely rejecting all 79 of these projects once your analysis is complete.
I also urge the EPA to protect water supplies for communities near coal combustion waste disposal facilities by regulating coal combustion waste (coal ash) as a hazardous waste.

Absent federally enforceable regulations, states have allowed the dumping of coal ash in poorly constructed disposal facilities that lack adequate safeguards to prevent the contamination of water sources with arsenic, heavy metals and other pollutants.
Certain types of coal ash disposal sites pose a cancer risk nearly 1,000 times the acceptable level, and the EPA has also identified sites in 24 states where coal ash disposal has caused environmental damage.

I urge you to establish federally enforceable rules regulating coal combustion waste as a hazardous waste, requiring effective pollution controls and monitoring systems at all landfills that receive coal combustion waste, and prohibiting the disposal of this waste in surface impoundments.

Thanks to the Natural Resources Defense Council