Last month the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet released a draft general permit for waste water from coal mines. The current general permit covers about 2,000 mines across the state. While this new draft is generally an improvement over the current permit, it still has several major shortcomings, and a few areas where it has actually gotten worse.

Please take a few minutes to email DOWPublicNotice@ky.gov, with the subject line “Comments on KYGE4000 and KYGW4000”, and let them know we need stronger permits for coal mines. Comments are due TUESDAY, JULY 1, 2014, so act now!

Talking Points

Here are some of the main problems we have identified with the permit, that you can mention in your comments:

• Kentucky should use individual rather than general permits for coal mining. A general permit does not account for individual stream conditions and it doesn’t allow citizens to comment on permits in streams they care about.
• The general permit should exclude all discharges into impaired streams. Under the proposed draft only impaired streams with a TMDL (total maximum daily load) developed for pollutants from coal mining are excluded. Kentucky has not developed any TMDL’s for coal mining pollutants, so this exclusion is meaningless. Also, discharges into tributaries of impaired streams should be excluded as well.
• The permit should include limits on conductivity. The vast majority of streams in eastern Kentucky don’t support healthy aquatic life, and conductivity is one of the leading causes, yet this permit contains no limits for it. Kentucky is planning on using biological monitoring instead, but that won’t work for existing mines where there is no baseline data to compare it to.
• The permit should have stronger selenium limits. This permit uses Kentucky’s newly weakened selenium standards, which are currently being challenged in court. At the very least Kentucky should agree to adopt any changes to the selenium standard that may come out of that court case.
• The permit should include limits on more pollutants. States use a “reasonable potential analysis” (RPA) to determine what pollutants need to be included in a permit. Despite the fact that we request the RPA for this permit almost a month ago, Kentucky has failed to make it public. The Clean Water Act states that general permits should include requirements for every pollutant present at any facility that the permit will cover. There are a number of serious pollutants commonly found at coal mines that should be included but aren’t, and without this RPA we don’t know why. These include aluminum, arsenic lead, chromium and many more.
• The permit is too easy for polluters to get around. At a minimum, companies are only required to submit a single water sample from a “representative outfall.” The state uses this one sample to determine which pollutants will be included in an individual permit. As it is written now, it may be possible for a company to get out of monitoring for selenium by submitting a single sample from a “representative outfall” that does not contain selenium.
• The permit should not be used in high quality streams and drinking water sources. Compared to the current general permit, this draft can be used to pollute more of the state’s most pristine streams. This draft removes the exclusion for Exceptional Waters, and narrows the exclusion of Outstanding State Resource Waters. It also allows discharges into streams within 5 miles upstream of drinking water intakes, which used to require an individual permit.