EPA will check Puerto Rico air and water for contamination

After years of complaints from Puerto Rican officers about air and water air pollution, the Environmental Safety Company introduced final week it might check for contamination within the southern a part of the island.

The exams could be the primary carried out by the EPA on Puerto Rico’s  southern coast.

Group leaders within the metropolis of Guayama, positioned on the Caribbean shoreline, had requested federal help to analyze the groundwater close to a coal ash burial website run by a neighborhood energy plant, in response to the Related Press. In response, the EPA mentioned it might make investments $100,000 in two pilot initiatives that might pattern air and ingesting water wells close to the positioning and likewise check for contaminants. 

Environmental advocates have additionally expressed concern that historic flooding attributable to Hurricane Fiona in September has exacerbated groundwater contamination on the USA territory. 

In Puerto Rico, as in different components of the U.S. and its territories, communities which have historically been underserved have suffered probably the most from environmental hazards and harm from more and more highly effective and damaging storms. 

Coal combustion residue, or coal ash, is primarily produced by the burning of coal and is likely one of the largest sorts of industrial waste produced within the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Greater than 100 million tons of it’s generated every year and is disposed of by utilities in open-air storage pits and landfills. These coal ash disposal websites are sometimes unlined, which means there isn’t a mesh or different protecting materials to forestall the leaking of their poisonous chemical compounds into native ingesting water wells, streams, lakes, and rivers.  

A report launched final week from Earthjustice, an environmental regulation group, discovered that 91 % of U.S. coal vegetation contaminate groundwater with excessive ranges of arsenic and different chemical compounds. These contaminants have been confirmed to trigger a number of sorts of most cancers and impede mind growth in kids. 

EPA officers mentioned that though the positioning in Guayama the place the coal ash was buried by the native energy plant was lined, they’ve but to find out the standard of the liner. The Related Press additionally reported that the EPA had previously issued air and coal combustion residue regulation violation notices to the corporate that runs the plant.

The EPA can even examine whether or not Hurricane Fiona broken landfills in Puerto Rico when it made landfall in September. Most of the island’s landfills are overcapacity, attributable to a mix of poor funding in upkeep and the proliferation of particles from earlier pure disasters. Fiona brought on the whole lot of Puerto Rico to lose energy for days, left over one-third of its inhabitants with out ingesting water, and brought on main harm to Guayama and the neighboring metropolis of Salinas. The storm struck virtually precisely 5 years after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, from which the native infrastructure and economic system remains to be reeling.