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All it took was a leak in a stormwater pipe. Over the course of one week in February 2014, nearly 40,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated wastewater poured from a retired Duke Energy power plant into the Dan River in Eden, North Carolina. Toxic gray sludge coated the riverbanks for miles, and carcinogenic heavy metals contaminated the drinking water for the thousands of North Carolinians and Virginians downstream. It was the third-largest coal ash spill in U.S. history.

Following the Duke Energy disaster, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Barack Obama finalized long-sought federal rules for disposing of coal ash, a byproduct of incineration at coal-fired power plants. Coal ash is often stored in landfills and engineered ponds; when the dump sites are unlined, toxins have been known to seep into nearby groundwater and pollute the drinking water supply. The 2015 rule aimed to prevent the contamination of groundwater and surface water by establishing technical guidelines for power plants’ coal ash disposal. Advocates said at the time that the guidelines were inadequate, only covering about half of known dump sites due to a loophole that exempted inactive facilities. Still, President Donald Trump’s first administration did little to enforce those bare minimum rules. During Joe Biden’s presidency, the EPA took a more hands-on approach, and the administration finalized a rule last year expanding the 2015 regulations to cover all coal ash landfills. Utility companies were required to report coal ash contamination in groundwater to the EPA by February 2026, install groundwater monitoring systems by May 2028, and begin drafting remediation plans if contamination was found.

These actions would have been the first........

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