MOSCOW, October 8 (RIA Novosti) - Residents in Dukesville in the US state of North Carolina have accused Duke Energy of failing to conduct drinking water tests that would possibly find deadly contaminants caused by the company's Buck Steam Station, Aljazeera reported Wednesday.
"There is no trust. We're deadlocked on account they won't go along with what we feel like needs to be done because they know we're going to find those chemicals in there," Al Jazeera quoted Dukesville resident JoAnn Thomas as saying.
According to residents of Dukesville, the carcinogen hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium-6, was found in the community's drinking water nine months ago, causing people to suffer a number of ailments, including cancers and birth defects. They believe the contaminants are coming from a local coal ash pond run by Duke Energy, reported to be the largest electric power holding company in the United States.
"We have cancer, birth defects all up and down our road in our community," Dukesville resident Sherry Gobble told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, Duke Energy denied contaminating the local drinking water, saying there are no harmful chemical elements in the water.
"The vast majority of groundwater exceedances at Buck have been for iron and manganese, which are common in North Carolina soils and pose no health risk to drinking water. We have seen no indication in our monitoring that there are off-site groundwater impacts or any reason for concern for neighboring drinking water wells," Scott Sutton, spokesman for Duke Energy, was quoted by Al Jazeera as claiming.
However, the environmental agency Waterkeeper Alliance conducted tests whose results raised serious concerns and increased the opposition to Duke Energy's unwillingness to re-conduct tests.
"They denied any possibility that there could be a problem here, which I think on its face is a pretty unreasonable position to take," Staff attorney for the Waterkeeper Alliance Pete Harrison was quoted by Al Jazeera as contending.
It is believed both by people and by activists in Dukesville that Duke Energy's opposition to water testing can be put down to a recent law in North Carolina to control coal ash, which gave clean-up priority to only four of the state's 14 coal ash sites, leaving Buck Steam Station without investigation. The cleanup of the station could take 15 years.
