The Environmental Integrity Project, the Patuxent Riverkeeper, Environment Maryland and the Chesapeake Climate Action Network announced that they will sue the Atlanta-based Mirant company to install pollution-control equipment at its Chalk Point power plant in Prince George’s County.The Chalk Point plant was a focus of an investigation by The Baltimore Sun of Maryland’s failure to penalize companies for repeated violations at the state’s seven oldest and largest coal-fired power plants.
“We are filing the lawsuit because the state hasn’t acted,” said Schaeffer, former director of enforcement for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “The soot discharged from this plant does all kinds of bad things for public health, including cause heart attacks, asthma, bronchitis and premature deaths.”
The environmental organizations said they conducted their own review of Chalk Point’s records and found 14,062 violations at the plant, including violations of opacity limits, which are restrictions on the darkness of smoke allowed to escape from the plant’s stacks. The groups also said they discovered releases of toxic metals into the air - 15,471 pounds of nickel and 8,882 pounds of vanadium, which the groups say can cause lung cancer, sore throats and other illnesses.
A Harvard School of Public Health researcher, Jonathan Levy, estimated in 2002 that the pollution from Chalk Point causes 110 deaths and 4,000 asthma attacks a year. Since then, the total amount of air pollution coming from Chalk Point has risen 26 percent, according to state records.