ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Next door to North Keys Community Park in Brandywine, MD, sits a 140-acre landfill where millions of tons of coal ash have been dumped since 1970. Toxic chemicals in the ash have seeped into the groundwater beneath the site and at one time ran off into a nearby creek.
Kamita Gray, leader of a neighborhood coalition in southern Prince George’s County where the park is located, can’t understand why such hazards are tolerated so close to the majority-Black community’s only park, where children play and families picnic and fish.
“They came and put a Little League baseball field right next to the mound of coal ash,” she said.
The power company that owns the landfill agreed under state legal pressure a dozen years ago to stop the seepage. Measures have been taken to control it, but groundwater contaminant levels beneath the landfill remain unsafe — and in some cases are still rising, according to Maryland Department of the Environment records.
The amount of coal being burned to produce power in the U.S. has sharply declined over the last two decades as utilities switch to natural gas or renewable energy. But in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, as in many other parts of the country, the ash remains.
Using public records and remote sensing, researchers commissioned by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources have compiled an inventory of coal ash piles and storage pits left behind across the six-state Bay watershed since the 1950s. Though the list is far from complete, they have tallied nearly 100 locations, ranging individually from five acres to hundreds. In all, they hold an estimated 200 million tons of ash.
Some of them are monitored and managed, particularly those impoundments and landfills next to power plants. Others have been nearly forgotten beneath shopping centers, athletic fields and even homes. Many have never been checked for leaks because, until lately, it wasn’t required. And some still aren’t subject to any oversight.
“Maryland has been burning coal to produce power going back to the early 1900s,” said Jason Litten, who spearheaded the inventory project as co-director of Frostburg State University’s Western Maryland Regional GIS Center. At the time, he said, “They didn’t seem to have much concern about where the ash was dumped.”
Coal ash contains toxic chemicals and metals such as arsenic, a known carcinogen, and neurotoxins like lead and mercury, which pose health risks for people, fish and wildlife. The light powdery particles known as fly ash, which comprise the bulk of the residue from burning coal, can readily leach from unlined storage lagoons and pits into groundwater. Over time, the toxic plume spreads and can seep into streams and rivers.
That’s why DNR’s power plant research division, which has been tracking coal ash disposal sites in Maryland for decades, decided a few years ago to update the inventory and expand the search beyond the state. Richard Ortt, DNR’s resource assessment director, called it “a major concern for the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.”
While the inventory doesn’t identify any new sites known to be fouling Bay tributaries, Ortt said, it does list numerous sites with groundwater contamination, which ultimately could make its way into streams and rivers.
“They’re more like ticking time bombs,” he said of all the listed sites. “If we don’t address them, we know there will be groundwater contamination.” And some of that, he noted, will be in or next to low income areas or minority communities like Brandywine, raising environmental justice concerns.” In the meantime, he said, the locations need to be recorded to alert future purchasers and developers of the risks of disturbing contaminated soils.
You can find the inventory, which is not published elsewhere, here via the Bay Journal website.
Disasters spur regulation
Coal ash leapt into national consciousness as an environmental threat in 2008 when a dike holding back more than 5 million cubic yards of it in an impoundment pond failed in Tennessee. The flood knocked homes off foundations, spilling black sludge across 300 acres and into two rivers. Another widely publicized spill occurred in 2014 when a drainage pipe beneath an impoundment in North Carolina released nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River along the Virginia border.
The following year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized the first nationwide limits on safe disposal of coal ash from power plants. The rule sought to prevent more failures of coal ash impoundments or lagoons, and it required monitoring and remediation. Utilities subsequently reported unsafe levels of toxic substances in groundwater beneath 91% of the ponds that were checked.
Even before EPA acted, Maryland adopted its own regulations in 2008 on coal ash disposal. The state moved after arsenic, cadmium and other toxics associated with fly ash were discovered in residential wells near an unlined former gravel pit in Gambrills. There, Constellation Energy dumped millions of tons of ash from Baltimore area power plants over a 12-year period.
Constellation paid a $1 million fine to the state and reached a $45 million out-of-court settlement with area residents. As part of it, the company agreed to pay for public water hookups to more than 80 homes.
The EPA’s initial coal ash regulation, however, exempted about half of all known disposal sites, including those closed before it took effect in 2015. In May 2024, the agency moved to close that loophole with a new rule requiring monitoring and cleanup of inactive surface impoundments at shuttered power plants and other historical coal ash disposal areas.
That rule, which took effect in November 2024, requires owners and operators of those previously unregulated coal ash dumps to report them to regulators by May 2025 and begin monitoring them for groundwater contamination.
Gaps remain
But there are still gaps. The EPA’s coal ash rules don’t cover piles left by factories and other facilities that burned coal solely to power their own machinery, according to an agency official. The EPA’s press office allowed the Bay Journal to interview the official only if he was not named.
An even bigger concern, environmental advocates say, is that the federal rules don’t go far enough in addressing risks from the widespread use of coal ash as fill material to build highways, industrial parks, golf courses and more. Earthjustice, citing figures from the American Coal Association, estimates that 180 million tons of ash have been used as “structural fill” since 1980.
“I hope state regulators are willing to take a look at the many unmonitored sites in this [DNR inventory],” said Lisa Evans, senior counsel at Earthjustice, “including areas of structural fills, off-site landfills and mine fills.”
“To date,” she added, “state regulators have largely failed to fill the void where federal regulations do not apply…. At the very least, information concerning the past disposal of toxic waste at these sites must be made public and available in a state database.”
Nearly 70 of the ash disposal sites in the DNR inventory — which is still in draft form and not officially released — are located in Maryland. Other deposits are listed in Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia and Delaware. The numbers identified outside Maryland are almost certainly undercounts because the DNR contractors had less information about other states.
Maryland
More than a third of the sites listed in Maryland are in Allegany and Garrett counties, where coal ash has been deposited to fill in old mine pits. A like number, though, are in Baltimore and its suburbs, associated with current and former power plants.
DNR’s Ortt told state lawmakers in 2024 that only one in three of the Maryland sites, or about 23, had been monitored for toxins in groundwater. Nine, or more than one-third of those that had been checked, had significant contamination, according to the inventory.
DNR, which has been tracking coal ash for years to encourage its safe reuse in making cement and other building products, has shared its inventory with the Maryland Department of the Environment, which oversees the disposal of “coal combustion residuals,” or ash.
“There are some sites on there that we weren’t aware of,” said Edward Dexter, who retired in December 2024 as head of solid waste management at MDE.
Along with taking legal action over the ash-contaminated wells in Gambrills, MDE also filed a lawsuit in 2010 against the owner of the Brandywine ash landfill, alleging it was leaching pollutants into groundwater and Mattaponi Creek, a Patuxent River tributary. Only a small, newer portion of the 139 acres used to bury ash there is lined to prevent contaminants from seeping into groundwater. The state subsequently sued over similar pollution from two other ash landfills owned by the same company in the Potomac River watershed.
In 2013, the landfills’ owner, Texas-based GenOn, agreed in a federal consent decree to pay a $1.9 million penalty and stop ground and surface water pollution at all three sites.
Twelve years later, groundwater beneath Brandywine still contains unsafe levels of arsenic, mercury and four other pollutants, according to MDE, and levels of a few contaminants have increased since the company submitted its cleanup plan. A 2019 report on coal ash pollution by the Environmental Integrity Project rated the Brandywine landfill as one of the 10 most contaminated sites in the nation.
GenOn did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Virginia
Concerns about coal ash soared in Virginia in the late 2010s when environmental groups alleged that unlined pits at three Dominion power plants were leaking contaminants into the Potomac, James and Elizabeth rivers.
In 2019, the state passed legislation requiring Dominion to recycle 25% of the ash stored at four of its plants and safely dispose of the rest in a lined landfill by 2032, or by 2039 if the plants switch from coal to natural gas. Dominion spokesperson Jeremy Slayton said those efforts are underway and scheduled to be complete by 2034.
In response to the EPA’s 2024 rule, Slayton said Dominion is planning to perform initial evaluations of any coal ash storage sites not previously regulated.
Half of the 10 Virginia ash disposal sites listed in the DNR inventory are owned by Dominion. Three others have been regulated for years under state rules governing solid waste landfills, according to Irina Calos, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
Two other ash disposal sites are at former power plants. They are not among the sites listed on the DEQ website and are now likely subject to the EPA’s 2024 rule.
Litten, the inventory’s lead researcher, said he stumbled on a decades-old ash deposit that illustrates how tough it can be to track them down.
LiDAR, which uses lasers to conduct remote sensing of the Earth’s surface, spotted indentations in a forested area near Front Royal, VA, that indicated a coal ash impoundment. Litten scoured old news archives to find that Potomac Edison of Virginia had built a 35-megawatt coal-fired plant across the river from the site in 1949. The now-demolished plant converted to burning oil in 1973 and ceased operations a decade later.
The company still owns the land, which actually has three ash disposal sites, said Will Boye, a spokesperson for FirstEnergy, which acquired Potomac Edison. Boye said the company plans to do testing and determine what it must do to comply with the rules.
Pennsylvania
In Pennsylvania, the DNR inventory lists eight coal ash disposal sites along the Susquehanna River and its tributaries (plus one that is outside the Bay watershed).
Two of the sites, Brunner Island and Montour, have unlined ponds and have documented groundwater or surface water contamination — or both — while a third just downriver from Wilkes-Barre has “potentially polluted ground & surface water at levels dangerous to human health,” according to the inventory.
The Brunner Island power plant just south of Harrisburg has been particularly controversial. Four environmental groups sued the plant’s owner, Talen Energy, which settled in 2019 by signing a federal consent decree pledging to close and excavate one of its active but leaking ash landfills by 2031 and address leaks elsewhere onsite. The company is in compliance with the decree’s terms, spokeswoman Taryne Williams said. Talen also agreed to pay a $1 million fine to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
In December 2024, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a notice of intent to sue Talen, accusing the company of failing to conduct required monitoring and remediation of groundwater pollution beneath one of Brunner Island’s coal ash ponds. A Talen spokesperson said the group’s notice “contains significant legal and factual errors and omits key information.”
The Pennsylvania DEP has regulated the transport, storage and disposal of coal ash as a “residual waste” since 1992, according to DEP press secretary Neil Shader.
With federal rules issued since then, the state and the EPA currently share oversight of ash disposal sites, he said, adding that the state requirements “are considered among the most robust in the nation.” He did not provide specifics about sites said to be polluting groundwater or surface water.
Ash fill worries
Many of the sites listed in the DNR inventory are not next to power plants but rather places where ash was used as fill material. In Maryland, MDE has authorized ash to be dumped in old coal mine pits as a way of preventing acidic runoff into nearby streams.
Ash from the Warrior Run power plant in Cumberland, which shut down in 2024 after 25 years, was high in alkalinity because coal was burned there with limestone. That quality helps neutralize acidic drainage from the many old underground mines in the region, which historically rendered streams and rivers there toxic for many fish.
But unlike regulated ash disposal landfills, there are no liners beneath the mine sites to keep contaminants in the ash from seeping into streams. State rules require testing of nearby waterways, though, and the quantities of ash used at most sites reportedly were relatively small.
Construction has also taken place on top of decades-old ash disposal sites. In Baltimore, unknown amounts of ash from since-demolished power plants were deposited in the 1950s and 1960s along the Patapsco River in or beside two predominantly Black neighborhoods. Houses were built over part of a 250-acre disposal site in Cherry Hill, and a 12-acre Westport disposal site is now being redeveloped as waterfront housing.
Earthjustice’s Lisa Evans said she was troubled to read in the inventory about places where homes had been built over coal ash deposits. She noted that the EPA in 2023 raised concerns about health risks from exposure to arsenic and radium in so-called structural fills.
“What I think communities like that should do if they were built on top of coal ash,” Evans said, “is determine if gamma radiation from the ash can cause a problem.”
Recycling solution?
While the EPA rules mandate monitoring and remediation of contamination, they do not necessarily require removal of the ash. The rules allow “closure” of old, unlined landfills by capping them to prevent rain from seeping down through the ash into groundwater. But environmental advocates contend it a temporary remedy at best.
“We want [to] get it away from water where it can be mobilized, get into drinking water sources and kill fish,” said Betsy Nicholas, vice president of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network.
But “the best possible use of it,” Nicholas added, “is to get it into something like bricks and concrete so it can’t be mobilized.”
Federal and state regulators have permitted and even encouraged “beneficial use” of coal ash in making cement and other building products, where the contaminants are essentially trapped in the material and can’t get into air or water. Nationwide, more than half the ash still produced is thus recycled, according to the American Coal Association.
Across the Bay watershed, about 2 million tons of ash are recycled annually, according to DNR’s Ortt. Much of that goes to Union Bridge, MD, where a plant owned by Heidelberg Materials uses recycled coal ash to make cement.
Recycling coal ash that way also benefits the climate, releasing about 10% less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than when other raw materials are used to make ordinary Portland cement, according to Jeff Sieg, North American spokesperson for the Germany-based company.
“This plant was built around the use of fly ash,” said Union Bridge plant manager Walter Smith. His facility has been getting coal ash from Pennsylvania’s Brunner Island plant as well as from GenOn’s Westland ash landfill on the Potomac in Montgomery County, MD. That is one of the three sites where GenOn is under a consent decree to stop contamination.
“Why aren’t we using [more of] this stuff to build our bridges and communities?” asked Potomac Riverkeeper Dean Naujoks. “We have these giant coal ash landfills leaking, [and] they need to be cleaned up. To me, it’s a win-win.”
Trump rollback?
Despite complaints about the EPA’s latest coal ash rule, environmental advocates worry it may not be enforced.
During the first Trump administration, the EPA delayed deadlines for complying with the 2015 rule, which had been finalized at the end of the Obama administration. The Trump administration then proposed changes to the rule that environmentalists contended would significantly weaken it. The Biden administration dropped those and instead developed the 2024 rule. But an industry lawsuit challenging the latest rule is pending, and some coal state members of Congress tried without success in 2024 to hold it up.
“You think that you’ve solved the problem … shown that the waste needs to be cleaned up,” said Earthjustice’s Evans. “But then it’s subject to the political whims of whoever is in office.”
One Maryland lawmaker wants to provide a stopgap in her state if the EPA does pull back on coal ash regulations. Del. Mary Lehman, a Prince George’s County Democrat, has introduced a bill that would require MDE to adopt state regulations that mirror the current federal rules.
“We think there’s a good chance that the new EPA will try to roll back a lot of regulations, including this one,” she said in an online briefing days before the Maryland General Assembly convened on Jan. 8. “We don’t feel like we have any time to lose.”
Kamita Gray, the Brandywine neighborhood coalition leader, would agree. “We need to figure it out,” she said. “You have people’s health at risk.”