Drifting in the channels of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, it’s easy to imagine that you are in some deeply isolated wilderness, far from the motors of man. Even when the city of Mobile, Ala., is visible in the distance.
This teeming oasis of biodiversity — 300 square miles of rivers, bogs, forests, swamps, marshes and open water — is known in Alabama as “America’s Amazon.” It hums with birdsong and busy insects and gently lapping water. I was last out on this delta in 2018, and what I remember most is the peace of a world that feels untouched by human hands, unharmed by human commerce.
As with all the wild places we have left, however, this breathtaking delta is far from unspoiled. The nine rivers that feed it carry all the usual pollutants we carelessly pour into our rivers, whether directly or through rainwater runoff: silt, microplastics, pesticides, industrial and agricultural waste, and more. Like all river deltas, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta acts as a kind of natural filter, but there are only so many contaminants a delta can absorb and still survive.
And as the environmental journalist and filmmaker Ben Raines writes in his magnificent book, “Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System,” the state of Alabama “wreaks greater harm on our wild places than any other state.”
The greatest upriver threat to the Mobile-Tensaw Delta is the coal-fired James M. Barry Electric Generating Plant, some 25 miles north of Mobile. Since 1965, the Alabama Power Company has been storing coal ash there in storage ponds built in the crook of a switchback bend in the Mobile River.
Coal ash — known in the industry as coal combustion residuals, or C.C.R. — is the waste that results when coal is burned to produce energy. It contains arsenic, cadmium, mercury, selenium and other heavy metals that pose known health risks to wildlife and humans alike. When coal-ash ponds fail, the results are catastrophic. A 2008 spill in Kingston, Tenn., remains one of the worst environmental disasters in the U.S.
As I wrote in 2022, Alabama Power has dumped nearly 22 million tons of coal ash into the storage ponds at the Barry plant. The ponds are open to the elements and surrounded on three sides by water, separated from the river by only an earthen dam. As the extreme weather of climate change fuels ever stronger hurricanes, the ponds are increasingly vulnerable to storm surge and flooding. If the dam is breached, that toxic sludge would pour into the Mobile River. Already the ponds are leaking heavy metals into the groundwater.
There are at least 44 ash ponds in Alabama, according to the Alabama Rivers Alliance. But this environmental time bomb is not unique to the state. There are coal-ash containment pits and ponds all over the country, and the vast majority are leaking. At the 265 sites known to be leaching toxins into the groundwater, officials at only half of them agree that cleanup is necessary.
Other utilities, including some in the red-state South, are already in the process of removing hundreds of millions of tons of coal ash currently stored in proximity to waterways, either burying it in dry, lined landfills or recycling it into concrete. But Alabama Power’s plan for the Barry plant has long been to drain the water from the pond and cap the ash in place — effectively burying it on the banks of the Mobile River.
Last May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a new rule that would hold utilities more accountable for coal ash pollution. In August, the agency put Alabama Power on notice that its plan fails to meet minimal federal requirements for the safe storage of coal ash, but the agency still hasn’t issued a final denial of the plan.
Separately, in September 2022, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit against Alabama Power on behalf of Mobile Baykeeper, an environmental nonprofit that works to protect the waters and wetlands of coastal Alabama. A year later, a magistrate judge allowed the suit to move forward.
But last month, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush reversed the earlier court’s decision, dismissing the case because the cap on the Barry ponds won’t be completed until at least August 2030. Only at a later date “much sooner to closure project completion,” the judge said, would judicial review be warranted.
The ruling was a blow for Mobile Baykeeper. As Lee Hedgepeth reported for Inside Climate News, the nonprofit is weighing all options for further legal action against Alabama Power.
But embedded in the federal judge’s ruling was news that may hold a glimmer of hope for the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and the entire Alabama coast: Alabama Power was entering into settlement negotiations with the E.P.A.
On Jan. 25, Alabama Power announced a partnership with Eco Material Technologies to build a coal-ash recycling facility that will dig up “almost all” of the toxic slurry at the Barry ponds for use in making concrete. “We won’t know exactly until we get in there,” Eco Materials Technology chief executive Grant Quasha told AL.com, “but our goal would be to use over 90 percent of the material, and our technology allows us to do that.”
Mobile Baykeeper and the S.E.L.C. greeted the news with cautious optimism. “This is a major shift in the company’s position, and we should all be encouraged by the prospect of less coal ash threatening the delta,” Barry Brock, director of S.E.LC.’s Alabama office, said in a statement. Mobile Baykeeper responded in kind: “This move could be a game-changer in protecting the rich biodiversity of America’s Amazon and safeguarding the health of those living, working, and playing downstream.”
Where the irreplaceable Mobile-Tensaw Delta is concerned, I’ll take any good news I can get, and I don’t mean that ironically. But the fact that this plan counts as extremely good news is one measure of how bad the coal-ash situation in Alabama really is, and how important the stakes really are.
As both Mobile Baykeeper and the S.E.L.C. have noted, caution is warranted here. Alabama Power’s recycling plan leaves open the question of how much coal ash would remain in unlined, leaking, weather-vulnerable ponds only provisionally contained on the Mobile River. And pending a final decision by the E.P.A., the utility still intends to cap the Barry ponds in place. As Mr. Brock put it, “the extent of the cleanup remains to be seen.”