Oak Creek - State environment regulators gave We Energies a pass in 2008 - exempting it from certain rules so that construction work could be done atop coal ash landfills on a bluff on the Lake Michigan shoreline at the utility's Oak Creek Power Plant, officials said Tuesday.
Department of Natural Resources officials determined in 2008 that construction activities on an ash-filled ravine and other small landfills south of the utility's two plants on the property would not increase the risk of the ash or other contaminants getting into the lake, said Frank Schultz, the department's waste supervisor in Milwaukee. We Energies is building an air quality control facility for the older power plant at the site.
State environmental and utility regulators at the time decided that the construction activity would not significantly damage the environment, so no impact studies were needed.
Work progressed until Monday, when a wide section of the bluff, including part of an ash-filled ravine, collapsed, sending a destructive cascade of mud down the slope and into the lake. No one is certain of the extent of the environmental damage, DNR officials said.
The ravine was filled in the 1950s.
The Public Service Commission's 2008 decision approving the project said the agency determined the $900 million pollution control project at the original Oak Creek coal plant was not a project that required either a detailed environmental impact statement or a less exhaustive environmental assessment.
An environmental study could have explored the potential impact of building a storm-water retention pond so close to an ash-filled lake bluff, said Jennifer Feyerherm of the Sierra Club in Madison.
"The whole point of one of these assessments is to identify things that could go wrong and try to mitigate them or decide if that risk is too big," she said.
"Any large construction project poses risks to the environment, especially a large construction project that is next to a national treasure that supplies drinking water to millions," Feyerherm said.
...."The ash has been in that ravine for 50 years," the DNR's Schultz said. The top of the bluff had not been unstable in the past.
"Something changed on the site," he said.
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