Groups encourage residents to speak
By Steve Herring
Published in News on February 29, 2016 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/STEVE HERRING
Nick Wood of NC Warn told local residents attending a Thursday night coal ash meeting to speak up and share their stories to apply political pressure on the state and Duke Energy to clean up coal ash sites.
NC Warn and Down East Coal Ash Coalition officials Thursday night, Feb. 25, encouraged local residents not to be intimidated into silence, but rather to speak up and share their stories about how coal ash has affected their lives.
Doing so will apply the political pressure needed to prod the state and Duke Energy to properly clean up the mess, they said.
They also invited the public to a Monday, March 7, strategy session to prepare for a state public hearing to be held at 6 p.m. on Thursday, March 10, at Wayne Community College.
The March 7 planning session will start at 6:30 p.m. at Antioch Presbyterian Church, 2306 Old Smithfield Road.
The hearings are being held across the state concerning how Duke Energy's 14 different coal ash sites are going to be classified in terms of a cleanup schedule, Nick Wood of NC Warn told the some 25 people attending the Thursday night meeting at St. Mark Church of Christ.
Coal ash is what remains after coal is burned to generate electricity and can contain toxic heavy metals and other health-threatening substances, he said.
State regulators have said they will consider Duke's science and the input gathered at the public hearings to determine the final rankings. The final rankings will determine both the closure clean-up process and a closure deadline.
This is the first and only opportunity for direct public input on the fate of Duke's North Carolina coal ash basins, Wood said.
"These hearings are an opportunity for the communities to speak to those who are supposed to be regulating this and about the concerns they have," Wood said. "There will be technical experts as well.
"But what is really important is the community, both folks living right next to the dump, and also people in the broader Wayne County community attending."
Investigative journalist Rhiannon Fionn showed four short films she made in which people in various communities talk about the impact coal ash has had on them.
Several Wayne County residents expressed a lack of confidence in the governor and others in Raleigh doing anything about the issue because they are "embedded" with the power company.
One added that is the case across the country including with the EPA.
Wayne County Commissioners John Bell and Ed Cromartie suggested that local water districts be brought into the discussions as well.
They also told the group that the county has spoken with officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to study coal ash and water quality in the county.
Ms. Fionn said coal ash is being considered a civil rights issue since, more often than not, it is dumped in areas where people of color and low income live.
It is possible that the federal Civil Rights Commission that advises the president and Congress is going to communities in the films, she said.
Ms. Fionn said she would be happy to help anyone in the audience contact the commission.
"Do not underestimate your power is what I am saying," said Bobby Jones of the Down East Coal Ash Coalition. "Speak up. I think that is the message of the night. That is what we are trying to do here."
Wood said he has a law degree, but is not currently a practicing attorney.
"I often joke that the job of a community organizer is to help take stuff that is really, really complicated and break it down so that we can start to understand what is going on," he said. "The job of a lawyer oftentimes is to make something so complicated you've got to hire one of them to deal with it.
"We have a legal system that is very much written by the Duke Energies of the world."
That is one of the more "dastardly" ways the legal system makes it more difficult to deal with issues, he said.
"That is where the organizing comes in and why it is so important for these stories to be told because it really matters," he said. "Law is more political than anything else. Anybody who says a judge is objective is full of it. It is political. The people's voices who are directly impacted, that matters.
"I think we will see that people speaking out and telling their stories will bring pressure and attention to it in a way that they (state) have to deal with people. It is ultimately about coming to the truth."
Wood said he thinks that is what people are asking Duke -- to be transparent and let them know what is going on.
Ms. Fionn said she had spoken with lawyers on the national level who had admitted that it was not the lawsuits leading to some of the progress they are making.
"It is the people," Ms. Fionn said. "It is the people kicking up sand. The gentlemen, Booker T. Gibson from Uniontown (Ala.) you saw in my film, that is what he says. He says, 'I am just kicking up sand, and I am not going to stop kicking up sand until they fix it.'
"The lawyers are admitting it is the people power. It is the people on Twitter. The people on Facebook. The people at these meetings. I tell you, the government is hearing from the other side. Let them hear from you, too. It is your First Amendment right."
Duke Energy sent a threatening letter to some women who were tweeting about coal ash, she said.
"They took it to their lawyer and brought it to me and said, 'What should we do?'" Ms. Fionn said. "I said, 'It is your First Amendment right to talk about what is going on on Twitter. So I said, 'What I would do, I would Tweet twice as much.'
"Just because they send a threatening letter doesn't mean you should stop what you are doing."
It also means recruiting friends and get them to tweet twice as much, Wood said.
Jones said if someone has received a letter from Duke telling them not to drink their water because of coal ash pollution that they should not be relegated to just receiving bottled water from Duke.
People need water to bathe in and to prepare food, he said.
Duke should take ownership of the problem, Jones said.
"Whoever is responsible for this needs to make sure these people get some water," he said. "Run some pipes, get a water hose or whatever. These are citizens, too, and they need more than a box of bottled water.
"I think it is ridiculous that they have had to endure this long. We need to make sure that Duke Energy not only pays for a few bottles of water, they need to make sure you get a real source of water. If we don't get any action on that, we are going to have to take some other action ourselves."