PUERTO RICO COAL POWER -- SIGNATURE -- FELICIANO/GREEN, AIRS
4/28
IVETTE
FELICIANO: The city of Guayama
sits near Puerto Rico’s southeast coast. Half its population of more than
twenty thousand lives below the poverty line. Like most of Puerto Rico, the
city was hit hard by Hurricane Maria last fall. It’s still trying to recover.
But the people here have
problems beyond poverty and storm damage.
ALBERTO
COLON: The next house, the man
died of cancer...
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Alberto
Colon is a retired maintenance worker in Miramar, one of the city’s poorer
neighborhoods. He suffers from sinusitis and has developed an abscess on his
chest.
Down the street from his
house, a truck pulls away from a home where it has delivered medical supplies.
Colon says, that’s a common sight here.
ALBERTO
COLON: People complain about
diseases like asthma, cancer. It’s normal for people to have cancer. Before a
certain point, if a person here got cancer you would say: "My God, this
person has cancer!" Today, you see them as just one more person.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Colon
believes he knows the source of his neighborhood’s suffering. Miramar sits
downwind from Puerto Rico’s only coal-burning power plant—and a 120 foot-high
mound of an industrial product the plant generates by burning coal. It’s called
Agremax.
Agremax consists mostly
of coal ash. Residents here say the wind carries ash residue from the mound
into their community.
Alberto colon’s wife,
Margarita Perez, says their home’s surfaces are covered in a thin layer of ash
residue.
MARGARITA
PEREZ: This right here? I just
cleaned it. Look!
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Her
sister, Natividad Perez Burgos—who also lives in the neighborhood—was diagnosed
with cancer in both her lungs and her liver five years ago. And she
suffers from skin lesions on her torso.
NATIVIDAD
PEREZ BURGOS: It’s
not easy, to be told that you have cancer. You think you’re going to die, that
cancer means death. I’m fighting harder now because I’m not the only one who’s
been hurt in my community.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: According
to a recent survey by the University of Puerto Rico’s School of Public Health,
almost one in ten people in the community have been diagnosed with cancer. One
in four have a respiratory disease. And more than one half have heart disease.
ELIAS
SOSTRE: We handle the operation
of the plant. We are in direct contact with the pro-- with the coal combustion
products on a daily basis. I have been working in the plant for 16 years, as
have many of my co-workers. And-- we-- we are-- we are healthy.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Elias
Sostre is operations manager at the coal plant, which is owned by AES, an
energy company based in Virginia. Since it began operations in 2002, the plant
has supplied nearly twenty percent of Puerto Rico’s electricity.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: And
according to an audit by the Puerto Rican government, the AES plant saved the
island more than 500 million dollars in its first five years alone. Sostre says
it’s also a model of environmental efficiency.
ELIAS
SOSTRE: We got here the best
available technology to produce power, and to do so with the lowest emissions.
At the time that we went online, we set the standard for the lowest emissions.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: For
more than a decade, the number of Guayama cancer cases hovered at about 100 per
year. But within a year of the plant’s 2002 opening, the number of cases rose
by nearly 50%. The most recent figures show that new cancer cases have stayed
near that level, spiking even higher in 2013.
From the start, the
company was producing Agremax from coal ash.
Coal ash has trace
amounts of heavy metals including arsenic, chromium, and mercury--substances
that can become hazardous if there is enough present.
According to AES, the
plant produces 220-thousand tons of coal ash a year.
But in the company’s
original contract with Puerto Rico’s electric authority, the ash could not be
stored on the island, unless it had a beneficial commercial use--which it did.
The plant mixed coal ash
with water to create Agremax, that concrete-like material that sits outside the
plant. AES marketed Agremax for use in Puerto Rican roads and construction,
among other things.
According to the EPA,
over two million tons of the material was used in thirty-three sites on the
island between 2004 and 2012.
Dr. Gerson Jimenez
Castañón is the medical director for Menonita medical center, the
only hospital in Puerto Rico’s southeast region. He says he began to see a
higher influx of patients two to three years after the coal-burning plant began
operating and making Agremax.
DR.
GERSON JIMÉNEZ: We
were seeing patients coming in with more respiratory problems—and not just
respiratory problems, but each time it was more serious.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Did
you immediately connect that change to the plant, was that something that you
assumed was happening?
DR.
GERSON JIMÉNEZ: Yes,
yes, I did make the connection. As I saw it, only one new thing had come here.
Many of the other plants had already closed and that was the only new one.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: But
despite the anecdotal evidence, there’s no proven link between coal ash and
Guayama’s health problems. And the U.S. government has done no definitive study
regarding coal ash’s potential effects on human health.
A 2014 Environmental
Protection Agency ruling regulated coal ash as non-hazardous solid waste. But
environmental groups decried the ruling. The New York Times called it “a
victory for electric utility companies and the coal industry.”
Just a year before, a
University of Illinois study linked coal ash to increases in asthma and lung
cancer. Another, published in 2014 by the advocacy groups Earthjustice and
Physicians for Social Justice, linked the material to increases in heart and
respiratory diseases, cancer, and stroke.
By that time AES had
stopped marketing Agremax. But it does still convert coal ash into Agremax in
order to legally dispose of it in approved landfills on the island.
Alberto Colon says you
can still see coal dust from Agremax where it was used as a filler on dirt
roads.
ALBERTO
COLON: Right now we have the
roads here that are filled in with it so much that once they become dry, you
can see the ash moving freely on the surface, blowing around. That same ash is
going from the road into the air and it will eventually go to the water where
it will contaminate the aquifer.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Local
fear of contamination from the coal ash has become so widespread that
protesters have gathered along the roads when the material is shipped from the
plant. The government has employed police in riot gear to protect the trucks
transporting Agremax.
Dr. Luis Bonilla Soto,
an environmental researcher from the University of Puerto Rico School of Public
Health, says protesters’ fears may be justified. He says that Agremax could
contaminate ground water at sites where it was used--especially after an event
like Hurricane Maria.
DR.
LUIS BONILLA SOTO: María was the strongest hurricane to hit the island, it brought
intense rains. In a few weeks fifteen inches of rain fell and, obviously, all
those heavy metals that are in the ash are soluble in water. The rain gets into
the ash, and it leaches through the subsoil and pollutes the aquifer.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: As
evidence, Bonilla points to a 2012 EPA-commissioned analysis of Agremax by
Vanderbilt University. It found that, when exposed to water, Agremax has the
potential to leach substances such as arsenic, boron, chloride, and chromium at
over a hundred times the levels the EPA considers acceptable for drinking
water.
In a statement to
NewsHour Weekend, the EPA said the study “did not assess the health effects of
Agremax” itself, and “the only conclusion that should be drawn from the
sampling analysis report is that contaminants can leach from this material at
these levels under certain conditions.”
Elias Sostre, the coal
plant operations manager, says the EPA report has been used by environmental
and health advocates to stoke unjustified fears.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Tania
Vazquez Rivera agrees. She heads Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board.
Vazquez says the EQB has offered to hold events to discuss Agremax with the public.
TANIA
VAZQUEZ RIVERA: We
actually told the people, "We can go to a scientific forum with scientific
data and explain it." We don't want more incorrect information over there
creatin'—creating panic to people that already—if you have somebody that's sick
in your house and somebody tells you to-- who to blame, you know, you g—really
gonna be passionate about it.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Vazquez
points out that Guayama had been an industrial center for decades before AES
arrived. She says that any number of substances from former and current plants
and factories could play a role in the health problems facing people there.
She notes that just a
mile and a half away from Alberto Colon’s neighborhood of Miramar are two
pharmaceutical plants and a superfund site that has been operating since 1999.
Vazquez also says that
AES consistently sends her agency measurements of coal ash components and that
up to now, they’ve always stayed within the EQB’s safety standards.
TANIA
VAZQUEZ RIVERA: They
never were out of range. So they were complying with it all the time.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Those
tests haven’t convinced, Dr. Gerson Jimenez. He says he has petitioned the
Puerto Rican government to do a study on the effects of coal ash from the AES
plant, but to no avail.
DR.
GERSON JIMÉNEZ: I
have participated in at least eight or nine public hearings of the Puerto Rican
legislature. I’ve written to them and others about the problem and risk that
this plant represents. I even asked on several occasions that the Department of
Health or the government do a scientific study on the higher incidences of
these cases and they have not done anything despite all the information that we
have provided them with about the problems this causes.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: New
findings have added fuel to the debate over coal ash. Last month AES released
its most recent groundwater monitoring report. It showed that between September
12th and October 4th of last year, levels of arsenic, chromium, and
even two radioactive isotopes had increased dramatically in groundwater near
the coal plant’s large mound of Agremax.
That increase took place
around the time Hurricane Maria hit the island. The Environmental Quality Board
had ordered AES to cover the Agremax pile before the storm, but the company did
not comply. The board later fined AES. The company is contesting the fine.
ELIAS
SOSTRE: This is a
concrete-like—product. It was—it was not necessary to co—to cover the pile. And
the fact is that after a category—a category five hurricane coming by island,
the pile was in the same shape, way and form before and after the hurricane. So
our—our position was validated.
IVETTE
FELICIANO: Puerto
Rico’s Environmental Quality Board has ordered AES to send it more information
on its latest groundwater readings, and the company says it has complied. The
EQB is now reviewing that information.
Meanwhile, back in the
Miramar neighborhood in Guayama, locals gather to discuss their concerns about
the coal ash--and their neighborhood’s future.
NATIVIDAD
PEREZ BURGOS: I
think about my grandchildren and I think about the suffering that these people
have gone through. They need to do something. Investigate, check the
environment. Because now it is our people but tomorrow it could be theirs
because we are on the same island. It does not just affect Guayama, it affects
all of Puerto Rico.
###
|
TIMECODE |
LOWER
THIRD |
1 |
3:02 |
ELIAS SOSTRE AES PUERTO RICO |
2 |
6:25 |
ALBERTO COLON DEL VALLE MIRAMAR RESIDENT |
3 |
6:41 |
JULY 2017 LA CALLE DE CERCA |
4 |
8:38 |
TANIA VÁZQUEZ RIVERA ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY BOARD |
5 |
9:52 |
DR. GERSON JIMÉNEZ CASTAÑÓN MENONITA HOSPITAL |