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In the tiny town of Cayuga, Indiana, a coal-fired power station poisoned the nearby Wabash River for over 40 years, not through the fumes billowing out of its smokestack but the heavy metals leaching out of its unlined ponds holding coal ash, a serious pollutant that has been linked to cancer, reproductive harm, heart disease and brain damage.

Due to Environmental Protection Agency regulations set by the Obama administration in 2015, and by the Biden administration in 2024, the coal ash disposal site at the Cayuga station was closed, and the ash removed.

Yet across Indiana several other ash disposal sites remain operational, including F.B. Culley and Rockport on the Ohio River as well as Gibson and Merom near the Wabash. Most were scheduled to close or shift away from burning coal under the Biden-era rules that shut down Cayuga. But the Trump administration’s plan to keep old coal plants from closing and limit the reach of Clean Air restrictions to encourage new coal-fired plants to be built are compelling power companies to reconsider.

The president’s allegiance to coal-fired electricity and its potential effect on coal ash cleanups represent a towering reversal of federal policy on managing one of the country’s most serious water pollution challenges.

About 10 percent of the more than 45 billion tons of coal burned in the United States since 1970, most of it for electricity, ends up as coal ash, one of the nation’s largest waste streams. Billions of tons of ash have been scrubbed from air, flushed from the bottom of furnaces and washed and dried from pollution control equipment. The waste, an estimated 2 billion tons, has been spread, piled and poured into more than 1,400 big dump sites across the nation and used as fill to build roads, reclaim mines and construct subdivisions and golf courses.

With coal declining as a fuel for electricity, so is the amount of ash, which fell to 70 million tons in 2024, down from a peak of more than 130 million tons in 2008, according to the American Coal Ash Association. In recent years, about half has been directed to “beneficial uses,” including the making of concrete and wall board. 

Largely due to heavy lobbying in Washington, coal and utility industry executives — and their allies in Congress — held off for nearly half a century the government’s effort to issue rules for safely handling and disposing of the ash waste stream. Left to their own devices, utilities produced a national health and environmental menace in plain view.

Coal ash is composed of tiny particles, boiler slag and various sludges that are not inert. Easily airborne and mobilized in water, the tiny ash particles by themselves can lodge in lungs and organs and wreak physiological havoc. But there is more. Within those particles is a periodic table of heavy metals and toxic substances well-known by science to endanger human health, such as arsenic, beryllium, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury and selenium.

A Huge Pile of Ash Nationwide

The “potential” risks have been assessed for decades by the utility industry and federal agencies. The U.S. Geological Survey, for instance, documented groundwater contaminated by coal ash as long ago as the 1970s. A 2007 EPA study found that six million Americans face elevated risks of cancer from being exposed to just the arsenic in coal ash that is leaching into groundwater.

In 2015, after weighing the evidence it had, the Obama White House and the EPA broke through political impediments and finally established the first federal rules to close particularly menacing dumps and dispose of ash in modern, lined landfills. They ended dangerous management practices, such as allowing utilities to use contaminated wastewater to deposit hundreds of millions of pounds of ash into leaky impoundments along rivers and lakes.

The Biden administration continued the fight against coal ash, finalizing a rule in April 2024 that extends cleanup requirements for coal ash disposal sites, including those at inactive power plants, to prevent groundwater contamination. 

Trump Wants to Slow Ash Disposal

President Trump’s opposition to the government’s effort to clean up coal ash piles is well-recognized. During his first term the president proposed extending the deadline for utilities to cleaning up their ash piles. Now, as part of his second term plan to revitalize the coal-fired sector, the EPA announced on March 12 that it “will work with state partners to place implementation of the coal ash regulations more fully into state hands.” The agency’s proposal to make it a state responsibility for coal ash cleanup, the EPA said, will allow governments to customize disposal programs to their specific needs without endangering the environment or human health.

What’s happening in response in Indiana is a microcosm of what could occur in other states where large coal-ash piles are located. On the same day as the EPA announcement, Indiana Governor Mike Braun signed an executive order ensuring that his state’s environmental policies, including those on coal ash disposal, would be no more stringent than mandated by national standards established in 2015 by the Obama administration. It is unclear what will happen if those federal regulations are rolled back, but historical precedent gives reason for concern.

“The states had the option of regulating coal ash disposal for all the years prior to 2015, and what we got was abysmal,” said Indra Frank, a coal ash specialist working for the Hoosier Environmental Council. “Most coal ash was disposed of in the floodplain in leaking, unlined pits that contaminated the groundwater.”

In the past, the wet disposal of coal ash in surface impoundments, or ponds, was considered the most efficient and environmentally friendly method. According to Abel Russ, Senior Attorney of the Environmental Integrity Project, engineers thought that toxins would settle to the bottom and leave clean water on top to be discharged or evaporated.

“That’s now known to be primitive and not very effective at treating coal ash,” said Russ.

The cocktail of heavy metals found in coal ash, which includes lead and arsenic, has been linked to cancer, reproductive harm, heart disease and brain damage. In unlined ponds and landfills, these pollutants are able to leach into groundwater or overflow into nearby bodies of water. Despite the dangers they pose, most disposal sites in Indiana are unlined, and efforts to remove the ash or clean groundwater are slow to nonexistent.

State Management in Question

Frank fears that the EPA’s new attitude toward coal ash may incentivize states like Indiana to deregulate as much as possible in hopes of attracting energy investment in a manner reminiscent of the environmental “race to the bottom” of the postwar period that led to the Clean Water Act in 1972. Even though it is unlikely that the federal government will abolish coal ash regulations entirely, there are steps it can take to render them ineffective.

“One possibility is that [the EPA] just continues to leave the existing rule on the books, but relaxes it so much that we are essentially in the pre-2015 condition,” said Frank.

In 2023, the EPA published a report that found widespread noncompliance with its coal ash guidelines and moved to strengthen enforcement, prompting the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to draft a new coal ash disposal program to conform with the 2015 rule. Because the proposal is still under review, however, the EPA’s most recent announcement could cause the department to reconsider.

In the meantime, the HEC is working to lobby the IDEM as well as inform the public about the true cost of improperly stored coal ash. Frank explained that while businesses save money on cleanup and disposal, Indiana residents will be the ones paying the price when the ash inevitably contaminates groundwater or spills into waterways.

As a last resort, the HEC can sue the state government for violating federal rules for coal ash disposal, as it is doing against the Indiana Office of Administrative Law Proceedings for allowing a power plant southwest of Indianapolis to discharge untreated wastewater into an adjacent river. This strategy, however, hinges on the existence of robust regulations from the EPA, the fate of which are becoming increasingly uncertain.

“It’s mostly up in the air right now,” said Frank. “What happens at the federal level will determine what happens in Indiana.”

Indiana Abides by Existing Rules

At present, Indiana is still adhering to pre-Trump federal guidelines. Duke Energy, which provides electricity to nearly a third of Indiana’s population, is working to close ash ponds across the state using environmentally friendly methods approved by the IDEM. According to a company spokesperson, in areas containing former basins, Duke Energy monitors the groundwater for 30 years and reports results to the state government, taking corrective measures when necessary.

Even though the EPA’s regulations are still in effect, Russ is concerned that the Trump administration may soon take concrete steps to undermine them.

“At this point, one of the things I’m worried about is that the federal government is going to weaken the federal regulations, and then the states that have approved programs are going to follow suit and weaken theirs so that they match where the EPA is,” said Russ.

When reached for comment, the IDEM did not reveal any new plans in light of the EPA’s announcement, only that it was continuing to seek approval for its existing coal ash disposal plans.

Featured Image: Calaveras Power Station is situated on the Calaveras Lake near San Antonio, Texas. A 2019 report from the Environmental Integrity Project notes that 100 percent of Texas’s coal-fired power plants for which data are available, including the Calaveras facility, have unsafe levels of arsenic, cobalt, lithium and other pollutants seeping into the groundwater. The Calaveras coal-fired component is scheduled to close by 2028 as part of the city’s transition to natural gas. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue