“We were all stunned,” she said. “Years do make a difference when you’re thinking about the movement of contaminated groundwater. This will allow more contaminants to get into groundwater, it will make it hard, possibly impossible, to remediate. We know these sites; we know how contaminated these sites are; we know contamination is moving in the groundwater.”
A serious risk to a Great Lake
Almost a century ago, on the shores of Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana, the utility NIPSCO mixed coal ash from its Michigan City coal plant with sand and sod to help fill in the space behind steel retaining walls. On the other side of those now-corroding steel walls is the lake, which provides drinking water for the region and is a hub of both human recreation and aquatic life.
Environmental leaders have serious concerns that waves will pound away at the decaying wall, further weakening it, to the point that tons of toxic coal ash will spew into the lake. Coal ash contains heavy metals and other contaminants known to cause cancer and other serious health problems, as the EPA notes.
The Michigan City coal plant is among more than 300 sites covered by the updated rules, according to Earthjustice’s analysis, meaning NIPSCO should be required to file a CCRMU facilities report by February 2026 and then groundwater monitoring results and cleanup plans. Any delay in the reporting deadlines means a delay in the site being remediated — and extends the risk of coal ash contaminating the lake and possibly the groundwater too, environmental leaders say.
“Having the delay in some of those requirements is pretty devastating to hear,” said Ben Inskeep, program director of the Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana consumer protection group. “These are coal ash waste dumps that have been there for decades. For all this time, they are just leaching really nasty things into our water supplies, putting us in grave danger of a catastrophic failure of the coal ash, all that coal ash getting into our waterways or drinking water supplies.”
NIPSCO is in the process of repairing one of the steel seawalls adjacent to a creek that empties into Lake Michigan by the Michigan City plant, but local leaders say that is less a solution and more a sign of the risks.
“The utilities have had a long time to figure out what kind of coal ash they have on their properties, what damage has been done, what remedies are possible,” Inskeep said. “Further delay is certainly harmful to communities who have been forced to endure living next to these toxic sites for so long.”
Legacy pond problem
Owners of legacy coal ash ponds were required in November 2024 to file inspection documents for their sites. Those documents show serious groundwater, lake, and river contamination concerns from sites in Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia, among other states, according to Earthjustice’s analysis.
The Widows Creek plant on the Tennessee River in Alabama may be the “dirtiest” site subject to the updated rules, according to Earthjustice. The plant was retired shortly before the 2015 rules took effect, meaning that it was not regulated until the update last year. Also unregulated until the 2024 update was the Morrow Lake plant in Michigan, whose location puts coal ash in direct contact with a recreational lake, according to its recently filed inspection reports.
Also troubling, advocates say, is that multiple companies known to have legacy ponds on-site did not file any reports by the November deadline or within an allowed six-month extension period. An EPA website compiling reports includes 46 sites filed under the legacy rule, out of at least 84 sites known to have legacy ash, according to Earthjustice’s analysis.
“It’s unfortunately not surprising, considering the industry’s general noncompliance,” said Mychal Ozaeta, Earthjustice’s clean energy program senior attorney. “It’s nothing new. We’re going to continue to monitor it, utilize our internal resources, work closely with our partners to track it just so the public is aware of various sites across the country failing to make publicly available this critical information and comply with requirements.”
The EPA press release about the deadline extensions also refers back to “March 12, 2025, the greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in the history of the U.S., [when] EPA committed to taking swift action on coal ash, including state permit program reviews and updates to the coal ash regulations.”
It’s a reference to another move the EPA is making to further undercut federal coal ash rules: Giving states, including those with lax records on the environment, the power to enforce their own coal ash rules.
On July 10, the EPA had issued another announcement that could weaken the legacy coal ash rules. It essentially said an earlier memo from the EPA — aimed at defining “free liquids” causing contamination concerns in coal ash repositories — should be ignored.
“It’s pretty nefarious,” said Evans. “This is all just the start of the Trump administration’s attempted unraveling of coal ash protections.”
