"Coal-Ash Pollution at Three Maryland Landfills To Be Cleaned Up"

"The operator of three coal-fired power plants in Maryland has agreed to pay a total of $2.2 million in penalties and fix long-standing pollution problems at the landfills in Southern Maryland and Montgomery County where it disposes of the ash from those plants, according to court documents."



"In a proposed consent decree filed recently in U.S. District Court, subsidiaries of GenOn Energy, a Houston power company, agreed to settle lawsuits by Maryland and environmental groups alleging that the company's Brandywine, Faulkner and Westland coal-ash landfills have been polluting groundwater and nearby streams. GenOn, which merged last month with NRG Energy, based in Princeton, N.J., pledged to pay $1.9 million and to investigate and clean up the contamination caused by its disposal facilities.

The company also agreed recently to settle another lawsuit brought by the Maryland Department of the Environment accusing it of allowing ash from its Brandywine landfill in Prince George's County to wash into a tributary of the Patuxent River. In that consent decree filed in Prince George's Circuit Court, GenOn agreed to pay $300,000 and to beef up runoff pollution controls at the site."

Timothy B. Wheeler reports for the Baltimore Sun January 13, 2013.
 

Source: Baltimore Sun, 01/14/2013