Iconic North Carolina college town struggles to redevelop toxic coal ash piles

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — There are no dog parks. There is no golf. There is no soccer. There is no football.

There are no daycare centers, apartments or houses.

There is no community garden unless it is on raised beds.

On the contaminated 10-acre site in Chapel Hill containing 46,000 tons of coal ash, the list of prohibited uses is nearly as long as the permitted uses: offices, stores, municipal services, walking paths, transit and parking.

As the city of Chapel Hill prepares to redevelop the land at 828 Martin Luther King Boulevard, adjacent to the popular Borin Creek Greenway and less than two miles from the University of North Carolina campus, some local residents and environmental lawyers are criticizing the draft cleanup plan for failing to adequately protect residents from arsenic, cobalt and other toxic metals that were detected on the greenway in 2013.

The site is surrounded by homes, one of which is about 40 feet away. The Bolin River, which flows near the base of the ash mound, is 12 miles upstream from Jordan Lake, the source of drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people in central North Carolina.

In state-level brownfield agreements, potential developers agree to comply with DEE requirements to clean up contaminated land to a level suitable for reuse. In return, DEE agrees to limit the potential developer's environmental liability, making it easier to secure financing for the project. Those responsible for the original contamination remain financially and legally responsible.

Redeveloping the site will require removing some of the ash, grading what remains, then covering it with two feet of soil and eventually paving it over.

“Simply burying the ash under a layer of soil does nothing to clean up the contamination or address the risks to the environment or public health,” said Perrin de Jongh, Southeast regional attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Independent sampling conducted by Duke University scientists two years ago found high levels of arsenic and radium, which are linked to cancer and other serious diseases, along with 18 other toxic metals mixed in the soil and ash.

Although a contractor hired by the town did not test for radium, it found levels of the toxic metal in both shallow and deeper soils on the site far above legal limits for residential use. Groundwater beneath the coal ash pile is also contaminated, but tests suggest the smoke has not migrated off the site. All of the apartments and homes near the pile receive public water.

Like many communities across the U.S., officials in Chapel Hill are facing the consequences of the nation's reliance on fossil fuels, a source that will magnify the effects of climate change and cost trillions of dollars each year, if they can be calculated at all.

Meanwhile, local costs to clean up the old, contaminated site could run into the tens of millions of dollars. Town spokesman Alex Carrasquillo said the town has spent $900,000 on contamination remediation, including testing, partial excavation and engineering, since 2013, when officials in the popular college town discovered ash on the property in preparation for a sale.

It would cost more than another $11 million to remove all of the coal ash from the Chapel Hill site, and another $4 million to cover the ash and build a retaining wall, according to town figures — 2 to 7 percent of the town's 2024-25 budget.

Those figures are preliminary and don't include the cost of demolishing the Chapel Hill Police Department headquarters, which was built on coal ash. Town officials told Inside Climate News that the cost “depends on the specific plans for the site and will be determined only after staff, council and the community have considered options within the terms of the Brownfield Final Agreement.”

DEQ is accepting public comment on Chapel Hill's proposed brownfield agreement until July 30. (Relevant documents and instructions on how to submit comments can be found here ).

Millions of tons of ash are produced each year, and plant owners must dispose of it by either hauling it away to landfills, storing it dry on-site, or burying it in structures. The National Coal Ash Association estimates that a total of 180 million tons of coal ash has been used in landfill projects across the United States since 1980, including in parking lots, airport runways, under apartment buildings, firing range bunkers, and farm fields.

The Chapel Hill ash originated from the University of North Carolina's steam plant between the 1950s and 1970s. Tons of ash were legally dumped in a pit at 828 Martin Luther King Boulevard to be mixed with construction and household waste for use as landfill soil.

UNC's steam plant burns coal as well as natural gas, producing about 10,000 tons of combustion byproducts annually, and “due to emissions reduction efforts, only one-third of that is coal ash,” according to a university spokesperson.

The material will then be shipped to Virginia, where it will be used as structural fill to reclaim land at the city's landfill, “providing a stable foundation for potential future redevelopment,” the university said.

Chapel Hill city officials purchased the site, known locally as 828th, in 1980 to build the town's police station. The land is one of at least 79 landfills in the state that contain nearly 9 million tons of coal ash, a figure that's probably an undercount: DEQ only records sites with more than 10,000 cubic yards of ash, and because the agency didn't start tracking sites until 1994, there are countless sites that aren't recorded.

Extreme weather events can expose coal ash in a variety of ways. Over time, heat and rain can cause pavement to crack, as has happened in two commercial parking lots in Mooresville.

Flooding can also destabilize steep ash slopes, causing the ash to wash into surface waters and groundwater. According to data from the state of North Carolina, roughly half of the state's known structural landfills, including 828 sites, are within a quarter mile of a 100- or 500-year floodplain, meaning the annual chance of flooding ranges from 1 percent to 0.2 percent. But as climate change intensifies storms, many areas that rarely flooded in the past are now subject to flooding.

Coal ash is notoriously unstable and “prone to sinkholes and collapses,” said Nick Torrey, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center who represents Friends of Bollin Creek. “Leaving the unstable coal ash in place is just too dangerous for Chapel Hill.”

If Chapel Hill officials choose to leave the ash and contaminated soil in place rather than remove it, the land would have to be covered with at least two feet of clean soil, according to a proposed brownfield agreement between the town and state environmental regulators. It could also build a retaining wall to stop the ash from sliding down the steep slope onto the greenway or into the Boline River. Groundwater use would be prohibited. The zoning restrictions would be permanent.

The town could potentially reuse the land in a limited way by removing the ash piles, grading them and covering them. Some of the ash piles are home to small forests, and state officials have recommended that these be left in place to prevent the ash trees from escaping.

This has happened a few times already: Ash from the mound has flowed along the greenway over the past decade, and in 2016 soil samples from publicly accessible areas showed levels of metals including arsenic, cobalt and selenium that exceeded health standards.

In Chapel Hill, officials hired contractors in 2020 to excavate 1,000 tons of soil that had become unstable on a steep slope. Earlier this year, more ash had piled up at the bottom of the levee, next to the silt fence and near the greenway. That ash, too, has been removed. A chain-link fence has been installed outside the silt fence.

State records show a small sinkhole already exists on the property, next to the Chapel Hill Police Department parking lot, and contractors have filled it with rocks and covered it with soil.

“This is not a responsible or safe approach,” Tory said. “The town's current agreement and plans to cover the coal ash with soil demonstrate that the safety of our residents and the natural environment will not be ensured.”